// the find
gitdagray/mern_stack_course
Course companion repo for a 13-chapter YouTube series building a MERN stack note-taking app with JWT auth, Redux Toolkit, and role-based access control. Each lesson folder is a self-contained snapshot of the codebase at that point in the series. Aimed at developers who have basic React and Node familiarity and want to see how a real-ish MERN app gets assembled.
The lesson-per-folder structure is genuinely useful — you can diff any two chapters to see exactly what changed and why, which is better than most course repos that just drop finished code. Auth coverage is solid for a tutorial: refresh tokens, httpOnly cookies, rate limiting on the login route, and role-based route protection all make it in. RTK Query is used properly with normalized cache entities and optimistic UI patterns, not bolted on as an afterthought. UserStories.md files per lesson give each chapter a concrete goal rather than just 'add more stuff'.
The repo duplicates the entire codebase 13 times — no shared packages, no monorepo tooling — so if you find a bug in the middleware you have to trace through every lesson folder manually. It's frozen at Create React App, which has been unmaintained since 2023; anyone following this today will immediately hit peer dependency warnings and a stale toolchain. The app itself (a note-taking CRUD with two user roles) is too thin to generalize from — things like pagination, file uploads, real-time updates, or any kind of search aren't touched. No tests anywhere, which teaches the wrong habits.