DockYard Academy

The DockYard Academy curriculum is an open source curriculum to help students learn Elixir. The beta_curriculum is a work in progress effort available for feedback and contribution. When launched, this curriculum will be used as the primary teaching material in DockYard Academy.

Contributors and beta testers are welcome to go through the course, raise issues, and make PRs.

Contact Brooklin (brooklin.myers@dockyard.com) or DM at @BrooklinJMyers on Twitter if you would like more information.

QuickStart

1. Install a compatible Elixir (1.13.3 or higher) and Erlang (24 or higher) version. You may wish to use asdf.

2. Install Livebook:

   mix escript.install github livebook-dev/livebook

3. From the project folder run the command below. This opens the navigation page where you can find the course reading material and associated exercises.

   livebook server start.livemd

If you cannot see mermaid.js graphs, ensure your Livebook version is correct.

Course Outcome

Students will be competent developers prepared to excel in the Elixir industry. They will have a solid grasp of Elixir fundamentals, Elixir project development, Phoenix project development, LiveView, and OTP. They will also have the researching and problem-solving skills necessary to expand their skill set and thrive throughout their career. Students will be capable of delivering high-quality, well-tested features to a production complexity codebase.

Curriculum Outline

The curriculum is still a rough outline subject to change and feedback. see start.livemd for a full weekly and daily breakdown.

Week 1 (Livebook Setup)

1. Course Overview, Command Line, Git, Livebook, PATH
2. Basics (Simple Types, Operators, Variables, Comments)
3. Complex Types (atom, tuples, list, keyword list, map, mapset)
4. Modules, Functions, Structs, Control Flow

Week 2

1. Problem Solving & Enumeration (ranges, map, filter, all, any, count, find, random)
2. Comprehensions, Enum.reduce
3. Built-In Modules (Map, Tuple, List, Date & Time)
4. Guards, Pattern Matching
5. String Manipulation (Regex, Charlist vs Strings)

Week 3

1. Polymorphism, Protocols & Behaviors
2. Performance (Immutability, Streams, Lists Vs Tuples Vs Maps Vs Mapsets, Big O, Benchee, :timer) & Recursion
4. File, .iex Scripts, Persistence, Data Validation (Ecto Changesets) (+Binary)
5. Processes (Processes, Generic Server, Genserver, Agents, ETS)

Week 4 (Dev Setup)

1. Mix Tooling (Credo, Dialyzer, Config, Deps, Documentation, ExUnit)
2. Supervisor Basics and Fault Tolerance (+Task)
3. BEAM
4. Ecto & Database Basics

Week 5

1. APIs & Parsing JSON
2. Networking Basics & Plug
3. Macros and use
4. Deploying Mix Project

Week 6 (Phoenix Setup)

1. Phoenix Framework & Generators (+ Testing Patterns)
2. HTML & CSS (+ Flex, Grid)
3. Ecto & RDBMS & SQL & Seeding Data
4. Tailwind
5. UX/UI Design + Accessibility (ColorZilla, Axe, Figma)

Week 7

1. Phoenix Authentication & Permissions
2. LiveView (+ Testing Patterns)
3. JavaScript & JS Interoperability & AlpineJS
4. PubSub & Channels
5. GraphQL & Absinthe (+ Testing Patterns)

Week 8

1. TDD Techniques (Red Green Refactor), Code Clarity, Mix Testing Tools (--slowest, --stale, tags, Elixir Test extension)
2. Metrics, Telemetry, Live Dashboard
3. Factories & Mocks (ExMachina, Mox)
4. Property Based Testing (Stream Data) + E2E Testing (Wallaby)
5. Code Coverage, Github Actions & Hooks

Week 9 (Group Project)

1. Software & Product Management (Agile, StandUps, Kanban)
2. Architecture Design & Patterns (Diagrams, UML, CQRS/ES, Contexts, MVC)
3. Advanced Livebook (Graphs, Tables, Connecting Projects)
4. Collaborative GitHub Patterns (PRs, Forking, Cloning, Issues)

Week 10

1. Emailing & Swoosh
2. Stripe
3. Oban
4. RabbitMQ
5. Kafka

Week 11

1. Umbrella Projects
2. Genserver Bottlenecks, Supervision Trees, Worker Pools, Tasks
3. Nodes, Clustering

Week 12 (Final Project)