// the take
A YouTube-tutorial companion repo for a free MERN-stack bootcamp: each folder is a snapshot of a sports-event web app (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) at a given episode, building up auth, CRUD, file uploads, and websocket notifications from scratch. It's for beginners who want a narrated, build-along project rather than a library to adopt.
The episode-by-episode folder structure means you can diff two consecutive episodes to see exactly what changed in a lesson, which beats squashed tutorial commits for actually learning. The curriculum goes past basic CRUD into things beginners usually skip: JWT auth, bcrypt hashing, S3 image uploads, and Socket.io-based approve/reject notifications. Pairing code with free YouTube episodes gives narrated context the README alone can't.
Last pushed April 2023 with no activity since; the README documents a manual socket.io version fix instead of it being resolved in code, which is a sign nothing here will self-heal as dependencies move. Every episode carries its own package.json and lockfile, so cloning the repo pulls down dozens of near-duplicate node_modules trees. There are no tests anywhere, which is fine for a tutorial but means it's not something to fork into a real project. The auth approach (sessions, then JWT) and the Heroku deployment instructions are already out of step with how this would be built or shipped today.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →