software Archives - Fran Prieto

Many times, when you purchase a course on that platform, (specially software related ones), you could find they are quite old and outdated to the point you could spend more time fixing deprecated methods, fixing errors… than actually doing the course. Must say that fixing errors is sometimes a good way to learn, but usually we expect that the authors update them more often.

Unfortunately that is not always the case, and worse, those authors sometimes update the title of the course to reflect the current year or one framework’s / programming language´s latest version in an attempt to hide the outdated concepts and get more sales.

Now it seems it is not possible to see when a course was created, just the last update.

But there is a way to find when it was actually created using the Udemy API. We can use our preferred api platform to perform the request. I use Postman.

We must make a request to the following endpoint:

https://www.udemy.com/api-2.0/courses/COURSE_ID/?fields[course]=title,url,created

We need just to change COURSE_ID with the actual id of the course. How can we find it?

Go to the course´s main page, right click and select View page source (you can open it with CTRL + U ). Once you are there, use CTRL + F and look for the attribute called data-clp-course-id, where you will find the course id.

Once you change COURSE_ID with the id you are have been provided, perform the request and if everything goes fine you will get a response with a field called “created”, where you can see the course creation date.

Hope it helps.

This little program called Free File Sync is a very useful tool when you have to back up your files or sync then between your home device (laptop…) and an external one like a USB.

You can configure it many ways. The Way I do to ensure my work is up to date on external devices is setting sync this way:

Sorry for the spanish.

All you have to do is click the green gear and customize it. Assuming “left” would be for example a folder on your laptop and right, a folder on your USB device, that would mean, from left to right:

First green arrow means “is the element exists only on the left sid, then add it to the right”
Second arrow means “element exists on both sides but version on the left side is more recent, then update the element on the right side”
Third orange thunder means “when there is a conflict, leave it unresolved” (dont´t know what exactly means, but I guess is better let it so than corrupting a file on any of the side, and it always worked for me).
Grey hyphen of 4th position means “if the element exists on both sides but the right element is more recent, then do nothing”.
And the byn means “if the element exists only on the right side, remove it from right side”. It makes sure then that if I delete a file on my laptop, it would be also deleted on my USB.

Remember you can check what each action does depending on each case (listed on the upper row) and adapt it to your own preferences.