Announcing: Our Online Learning Platform Upcase is Now Free!

If you’re not familiar, Upcase is our online learning platform. While mentoring client teams, we found that there was plenty of content available targeted at folks new to web development, but not much focused on the intermediate and advanced developers looking to take their skills up another notch. With Upcase we built that content.

For six years we’ve shared our thinking, workflows, and approach to building web apps via Upcase. We’ve been able to help thousands of developers level up their skills through workshops, videos, flash cards, and coding exercises. Until now, Upcase required a subscription fee, but as of today, everything on Upcase is completely free 🎉.

But… why?

We’ve loved building Upcase, both as a business and as a way to share what we’ve learned with the community. But while we’d love to keep investing in Upcase and producing tons of new content, we’ve been moving in a different direction—back to our roots, in fact, as we focus on our core consulting business.

So what to do with this learning platform we’ve poured our hearts and souls into? We ultimately decided the best option was to open Upcase up to the world and share all of the content, no subscription needed. As they say, if you truly love something, set it free.

Teaching and mentoring is core to our mission and a big part of what keeps us happy in our work here at thoughtbot. It feels right to make Upcase free and allow folks to share and reference it however they’d like.

Where to Start

Upcase has a ton of content, so if you’re looking for a good place to start, try any of these full-length courses that provide guided lessons on key topics:

Ruby on Rails

• Intermediate Ruby on Rails
• Advanced ActiveRecord Querying

Testing

• Fundamentals of TDD
• Test Driven Rails

Workflow

• Onramp to Vim
• Mastering Git
• Tmux

Weekly Iteration

In addition to the longer courses, Upcase features a large collection of stand-alone videos that dig deep into specific topics. For a few recommendations:

• thoughtbot’s Approach to Ruby
• Refactoring, Extraction, and Naming
• Testing in Isolation
• Stubs, Mocks, Spies, and Fakes
• Mutation in Ruby
• Testing Interaction with 3rd-party APIs
• Ruby Science: Extract Method
• Optimizing SQL Queries in Postgres
• Elixir & Phoenix in Production
• RSpec Best Practices
• Computer Science: Why Bother?

We’re extremely proud of what we’ve built with Upcase, and we’re excited to be able to share it with even more people. So, what are you waiting for?