JetBrains Academy – April Digest

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JetBrains Academy – April Digest

May 1, 2026

Hey!

April brought many good reasons to open your IDE.

Learn about a new DeepLearning.AI collab on spec-driven development, a beginner-friendly full-stack chat app course, a Kotlin certificate you can add to your LinkedIn profile, and fresh research on which AI coding tools developers actually use at work.

Learning highlights

Build Your First 3D Game With AI

Take our short course and build a 3D browser game in WebStorm using an AI coding agent. Join Tode the Frog as he battles waves of enemies to defend his home! You can finish it with Coursera’s seven-day free trial. Leave a review, send the screenshot to education@jetbrains.com, and get one free month of JetBrains AI Pro (10 AI Credits).

Start for free

Spec-Driven Development With Coding Agents

Move beyond vibe coding! This short course by DeepLearning.AI, created in partnership with JetBrains, shows how to use clear specs, iterative workflows, and agent skills to build software with more control.

Enroll for free

Kotlin Professional Certificate

This new certification path by JetBrains and LinkedIn Learning takes you from Kotlin essentials to multiplatform development with Ktor and Compose. Finish all four courses, pass the final exam, and add the certificate straight to your LinkedIn profile.

Start learning

100-Day Python Challenge in Your IDE

Angela Yu’s bestselling Python bootcamp is now available as an in-IDE course on JetBrains Academy. One hundred days, one hundred projects, including web scraping, APIs, GUIs, data science, and more. It’s free, self-paced, and designed to fit around your life.

Take the course

Full-Stack JavaScript: Build a Real-Time Chat App

Build a real-time chat app from scratch and see how modern web apps come together. You’ll start with a backend in Node.js and Express, then add a React frontend, and finish with a project that’s strong enough for your portfolio.

Start building

Watch and learn

Spec-driven Development in Practice / Paul Everitt

Agentic coding is fast, but can you still call the code yours? Paul Everitt builds a FastAPI app with Claude Code, the Astral toolchain, and spec-driven workflows while keeping a human in the loop from planning to validation.

Watch now

Build an AI Agent With PyCharm

Curious about AI agents, but not sure where to start? This video shows how to build a language-learning agent in PyCharm, from core agent logic to tool use with MCP and local models via Ollama.

Watch now

Build Your First TensorFlow Model in Python

Looking to try ML in your Python projects? TensorFlow is one of the most widely used libraries for building machine-learning models – and this short tutorial is the easiest way to learn how. You’ll train your first model on a fashion image dataset and see how small changes affect its performance.

Watch now

Research spotlight

Which AI Coding Tools Do Developers Actually Use at Work?

Trying every new AI coding tool, but not sure which are here to stay? We surveyed more than 10,000 developers to see which ones they actually reach for at work. The results show a clear shift from general-purpose chat toward specialized tools built for development.

Read the research

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[](http://blog.jetbrains.com/education/2026/05/01/jetbrains-academy-april-2026/#)

1. Learning highlights 1. Build Your First 3D Game With AI 2. Spec-Driven Development With Coding Agents 3. Kotlin Professional Certificate 4. 100-Day Python Challenge in Your IDE 5. Full-Stack JavaScript: Build a Real-Time Chat App

2. Watch and learn 1. Spec-driven Development in Practice / Paul Everitt 2. Build an AI Agent With PyCharm 3. Build Your First TensorFlow Model in Python

3. Research spotlight 1. Which AI Coding Tools Do Developers Actually Use at Work?

Discover more