// the find
john-smilga/node-express-course
Course companion repo for a Udemy Node/Express course by John Smilga. Each numbered folder is a self-contained project — task manager, store API, JWT auth, jobs API — with starter and final versions side by side. It's for people working through the course, not a library or tool you'd actually deploy.
The starter/final split per project is genuinely useful for a course format — you can diff them to see exactly what changed without hunting through git history. The progression is sensible: raw Node HTTP → Express basics → MongoDB CRUD → JWT auth → full CRUD API with user scoping. The jobs API includes a swagger.yaml, which most course repos skip entirely. The jobster variant adds a React frontend with Redux Toolkit, so you get a full stack example in one repo.
This is course material, not a reference codebase — the code is written to be readable in a video, not maintainable in production. No tests anywhere across six projects. The JWT implementation in 05-JWT-Basics stores tokens in localStorage (browser-app.js), which is the standard course shortcut that then gets cargo-culted into real apps. Last commit was August 2024; the course was built on older Express 4 patterns and none of the projects have been updated for Express 5 or current Node LTS conventions.