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About the Class
This course is a non-residential bootcamp that gives you, a self-starting, passionate, computer-literate person, the opportunity to begin a career in front-end web development. We will provide tools, resources, and instruction necessary to build technical skill, career readiness, and comfort with the industry's common conventions; you bring yourself, your time, your willingness to learn, and your dedication to the program. At course completion, you will have an industry mentor, a front-end web development portfolio, and an internship with a local company.
This wiki is a living document that will grow according to the needs of the class.
The curriculum should enumerate everything you need to teach yourself the technical skills involved in being an entry-level front-end web developer.
At this point, however, in-class talks and other material presented during lab time is not yet populated. These things will be refined and posted here only after they are given and embroidered by the class. Thus, it is absolutely essential that you come to lab, stay the entire time, and use that time well.
This course uses a "flipped classroom," which means that you can (and should) work on your own, at your own pace, and use lab time to ask questions, work with your teammates, and use our human resources. There will be no grades, but there are required projects, and it will be apparent who is and isn't doing the work.
Class time will also be used for developing "soft" people and career skills, interfacing with industry mentors, and discovering how you best fit into the tech world. Whether your like project management or being in the trenches, working on the front-end or the back-end, designing things or implementing them, each of these tracks is valid and there is a career to be made of it. Your team has been designed to incorporate a mix these talents into a complementary whole.
We will be using two main curricula: Code School and the Mozilla Developer Network. Code School offers comprehensive, multi-track programs that utilize video lectures and code challenges that can be completed in their browser-based applications. We prefer Code School for its speed and foundational approach, but a similar service, Treehouse, takes a deeper, hands-on route that some students may prefer. You're welcome to use Treehouse on your own, but we will not be using it in class. The Mozilla Developer Network is an extensive resource for programmers of all stripes, offering documentation and usage guides on many standards and languages. In addition to many in-depth articles, they have tutorials for beginners that include challenges you can complete on your own.
To use these resources you will need administrative privileges on a personal computer, a modern web browser, an Internet connection, and a text editor. YWebCA will provide these.
To get the most out of the lab you should have a private email address (for signing up for accounts and services) and an active Facebook account. You may also want a Google/G+ account in the event of the necessity to attend class remotely.
We will be using a number of tools to aid in group work and cultivating our virtual classroom environment. Currently we are using:
YWebCA, a partnership between YWCA Madison and Adorable IO, is a web developer training program aimed to provide access to education and on-the-job experience.