This site began as a collection of guides, written as I needed them. My goal today is something else entirely: that each of its paths is worth a real professional training course. That is the work filling my weeks, and the reason I am publishing little that is new at the moment.
What separates a guide from a course
A good guide answers one precise question. You arrive from a search, you find the command, you leave. That is useful, and it will always be this site's front door.
A course is something else. It takes you from point A to point B in an order that holds up. It makes you practise, not just read. It checks that you understood. And at the end, it gives you something to prove you can do the work.
A pile of guides, however good, does not make a course. What is missing is progression, practice, assessment and proof. That is exactly what I am adding, path by path.
The bar I am aiming for
The standard I set myself is easy to state: that a path on this site could replace a paid course, the kind billed at several thousand euros in a classroom.
That means very concrete things. Each lesson must teach an identifiable skill, not skim a topic. Each exercise must genuinely run on your machine, not be a theoretical list of steps. Each quiz must cover what the lesson actually teaches. And each level must end with a test that measures, without hints.
It is a level of rigour I did not have when writing the first guides, and that is why they all have to be reworked.
What that demands, in practice
I finished the full rework of the GitLab CI/CD course this week, and it gives a fair picture of the job.
Around twenty of its pages told the reader to "go and do this exercise" with a link to a repository. In practice nobody did them: nothing genuinely connected the exercise to the lesson. Each one is now attached to the page that teaches it, and all of them were replayed to check they still work.
Every level of the path now has its final test, graded on the real state of the system rather than on the commands typed. And the quizzes were reworked so they assess what is taught, no more and no less.
The rule that changes everything: never assess what you have not taught
The most telling fault I found fits in one sentence. A lesson claimed to teach how to deploy an application, and kept referring to a script whose contents were explained nowhere in the course.
The end-of-level test, meanwhile, did check that deployment. So we were grading a skill never taught. A conscientious learner failed without understanding why, and a lucky one passed without having learned anything.
That is exactly the kind of flaw a professional course cannot afford. The page now explains that script in full, and it was actually executed before being published.
A word on English, since you are reading this
The English version is a long way behind the French one, and I am not going to pretend the gap will close quickly. It is worth explaining why.
Translation follows French rather than running alongside it, deliberately. Translating a page that is still being reworked means paying for that correction twice, once in each language. So a page is translated once it is stable, not before.
In practice, an English page may be shorter or a little behind its French counterpart. If you hit one that is clearly out of step, the Report a problem button is the fastest way to tell me, and it works just as well in English.
Why it takes so long
Because none of it can be handed to a tool. Attaching an exercise to a lesson means re-reading the lesson and replaying the exercise. Checking that a quiz matches its content means re-reading both. And when a fix touches a page, the whole page has to be re-read, not just the changed passage, or the corrected paragraph ends up contradicting something three hundred lines further down.
It is slow, and that is deliberate. A course declared professional without being checked line by line is not one.
How you can help
The best signal comes from you. Every page carries a Report a problem button that opens a pre-filled ticket. A lesson that loses you, an exercise that will not run, a sequence that does not follow: those are precisely the faults no automated check can see.
Key points
- The goal is not more guides, but that every path is worth a professional course.
- What separates the two: progression, practice, assessment and proof.
- The GitLab CI/CD course has just cleared that bar: exercises attached to lessons and replayed, one test per level, quizzes aligned.
- A course must never assess a skill it does not teach.
- English translation follows French deliberately, and therefore slowly.
Where to look
- The GitLab CI/CD course, just reworked from end to end.
- How the exercises work, and how to run them yourself.
- The course catalogue, to see where each path stands.