Holly Freebies Batman!!!

The internet is a wonderful thing.  It is true that lately it has had a lot of bad news and negativity and you can find the same story with multiple facts, most contradicting each other.   But when it comes to software development, there is so much free stuff out there!  These freebies can make our developer lives so much easier.

 

Here is just a small list of the free available developer related resources that are available for us.  This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list, just the resources I like to use.  I am sure you have your own set of resource you like to use.

 After reviewing this list, you should be excited and have multiple project and research ideas.  I have broken the resources into dev related areas.

           Learning Resources

         These are free resources that can help you learn development.  It includes, web, .net and other languages.

a.       YouTube – There is a wealth of information available. You just need to find a presenter that you can relate to.  Here is a list of the channels I subscribe to: favorites:

a.       .Net

                                                                                                   i.      IAmTimCorey – C#

                                                                                                 ii.      .Net Foundation - .Net in general

                                                                                               iii.      Code Foundry – C#

                                                                                                iv.      AK Academy – Blazor

b.       Web

                                                                                                   i.      Travery Media

                                                                                                 ii.      Design Course

c.       General Development

                                                                                                   i.      Scott Hanselman

b.       Microsoft Learn

a.       They cover more than just Microsoft.  They cover more than just Microsoft technologies.  They have cover AI, data analytics and DevOps.  They recently added Learn TV for video content.

c.       Google Developers Training

a.       Covers Web and Android training

             UX/UI

You can google free web resources and spend weeks going over the results.  Here one resource I find helpful

a.       Design-resources-for-developers – This is a list of over 200 sites that cover all aspects of UX /UI.  This is just the table of contents:

·        UI Graphics

·        Fonts

·        Colors

·        Icons

·        Favicons

·        Icon Fonts

·        Stock Photos

·        Stock Videos

·        Stock Music & Sound Effects

·        Vectors & Clipart

·        Product & Image Mockups

·        HTML & CSS Templates

·        CSS Frameworks

·        CSS Animations

·        Javascript Animations

·        UI Components & Kits

·        React UI Libraries

·        Vue UI Libraries

·        Angular UI Libraries

·        Svelte UI Libraries

·        Design Systems & Style Guides

·        Online Design Tools

·        Downloadable Design Software

·        Design Inspiration

·        Image Compression

·        Others

 

3.       Web Sites / Apps

Most of these sites provide web site / application templates.  The are professional done and free.

a.       HTML5 Up

                                                               i.      Pure CSS/HTML

                                                             ii.      Cool sites

b.       Start Bootstrap

                                                               i.      Coming soon pages

                                                             ii.      Admin sites

c.       Templated.co

                                                               i.      Pure HTML/CSS

d.       Free HTML5

                                                               i.      As free, but mixes in paid as well

e.       Zero Theme

                                                               i.      Mixed free and paid

g.       Style Shout

                                                               i.      Nice coming soon pages

h.       HTMLxCSS3

                                                               i.      Nice site

i.         Athemes

                                                               i.      22 Admin themes

j.         Theme Wagon

                                                               i.      E-Commerce sites

4.       Developer Environments

a.       Visual Studio – Community Edition

b.       Visual Studio for the Mac

c.       Visual Code

d.       Brackets

e.    GitHub

e.       Blue++

f.        Syncfusion

                                                               i.      They have a community free license.  If you meet the requirements, which you should if you do side projects, of ALL their products, web, mobile, desktop and file conversions.

5.       Services

a.       Public APIs – This is a very big list of free public APIs.  These are great to use when you are building or learning a new front-end and need an established back end.  Here is the list of categories of the APIs available:

·   Animals

·   Anime

·   Anti-Malware

·   Art & Design

·   Books

·   Business

·   Calendar

·   Cloud Storage & File Sharing

·   Continuous Integration

·   Cryptocurrency

·   Currency Exchange

·   Data Validation

·   Development

·   Dictionaries

·   Documents & Productivity

·   Environment

·   Events

·   Finance

·   Food & Drink

·   Fraud Prevention

·   Games & Comics

·   Geocoding

·   Government

·   Health

·   Jobs

·   Machine Learning

·   Music

·   News

·   Open Data

·   Open Source Projects

·   Patent

·   Personality

·   Photography

·   Science & Math

·   Security

·   Shopping

·   Social

·   Sports & Fitness

·   Test Data

·   Text Analysis

·   Tracking

·   Transportation

·   URL Shorteners

·   Vehicle

·   Video

·   Weather

b.       Free for Developers – This is a very cohesive list of open source or paid services that have a free tier for developers.

·   Major Cloud Providers' Always-Free Limits

·   Analytics, Events and Statistics

·   APIs, Data and ML

·   Artifact Repos

·   BaaS

·   CDN and Protection

·   CI and CD

·   CMS

·   Code Quality

·   Code Search and Browsing

·   Crash and Exception Handling

·   Data Visualization on Maps

·   DBaaS

·   Design and UI

·   Dev Blogging Sites

·   DNS

·   Docker Related

·   Email

·   Font

·   Forms

·   IaaS

·   IDE and Code Editing

·   International Mobile Number Verification API and SDK

·   Issue Tracking and Project Management

·   Log Management

·   Management Systems

·   Messaging and Streaming

·   Miscellaneous

·   Monitoring

·   Other Free Resources

·   PaaS

·   Package Build System

·   Payment and Billing Integration

·   Screenshot APIs

·   Search

·   Security and PKI

·   Source Code Repos

·   Storage and Media Processing

·   STUN, WebRTC, Web Socket Servers and Other Routers

·   Testing

·   Tools for Teams and Collaboration

·   Translation Management

·   Vagrant Related

·   Visitor Session Recording

·   Web Hosting

·   Commenting Platforms

 

6.       Deployments

a.       Azure – You must be careful with Azure.  When you sing up you get $200 of free credit, but you must put in a credit card.  But they do offer over 20 free services or free up to a limit.  These include things like the smallest App Service, DevOps, File storage and bandwidth.

b.       Netlify- They offer free static web site hosting.  You can even use a custom domain with them.

 c. GitHub Pages - hangs off your actual code repro.  You can have a custom domain.

Well that is my small list of the free resources I like to use.  Again, it is not all inclusive, but there is a lot of stuff here.  It is exciting to review the list and think of stuff I can build 😊.

Happy coding!!