Start Here If You're Brand New

This is an overview of all things software development.

It covers understanding the available technologies, career paths, and job market.

We also get technical and start looking at computers, programs, servers and the internet. We'll start installing tools, play with some HTML/CSS/JS, and go over other important concepts.

Intro to Web Development

Learn to build and deploy webpages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

We'll look at the HTML tags and CSS rules you need to know. We'll practice building practical things like landing pages for apps, restraunts, and other businesses. We'll also use JS to add some interaction and fetch data for our sites.

This is a mixture of the core technologies (HTML/CSS/JS), tools (Git/GitHub, debugging, search), and deployment processes (Heroku, Netify, Vercel)

Git & Github

Git is the tool developers use to save their code. GitHub is the website where developers share code online.

There are lots of ways to use Git but this course will cover using Git from the command line because I believe it's the most valuable form to know.

We cover important commands like git add, commit, and push. We look at what exactly happens during a merge, rebase, and merge conflict. We also cover how to get out of sticky situations and easy workflows to manage your code.

JavaScript and Node JS

There's a lot to learn about JavaScript.

This course strengthens your JS foundations (variables, loops, JSON) and covers some more complex topics (events, listeners, asyn).

We'll look at Node.js and why we need it to build modern apps. We'll use Express.js as a backend to provide data and functionality to our web page.

Modern Apps in React

React is one of the most popular JavaScript framework/libraries.

This covers the fundamentals of React and how to use components, state, and props to create applications. We'll look at events (onClick, onBlur), hooks (useState, useEffect), and other more advanced topics.

In addition to React, we be looking at some React frameworks like Create React App, Next.js, and Gatsby.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a popular backend framework for web applications.

This covers the fundamentals of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. We cover Ruby basics, the MVC pattern (model, view, controller), routing URLs, managing your database with "migrations", generating code using "scaffolds", and testing.

Ruby projects use "gems" (libraries/packages) to share code and functionality. We look at common gems like Devise, Pry, and RSpec.

Security for Web Apps

Bots and hackers will constantly try to attack your programs.

We'll look at common attacks that you're apps should be ready for and how to use things like honeypots or throttling to prevent issues.

Different apps are susceptible to different attacks. We'll see how the frameworks we choose are important to protecting our apps.

Performance and Web Vitals

Performance is becoming an increasingly important metric in web development.

We'll look at Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights to check your "web vitals" (LCP, FID, CLS) and how to optimze those metrics based on their suggestions.

We'll also discuss average response times for different frameworks, common causes for slowness, and how to scale your applications.

Getting Paid

This covers how to get hired and find contracts.

We look at how to find opportunities, how to prep for interviews, and how to get paid. You'll want to be prepared for technical interviews and ready to follow up afterwards.

We'll compare employment vs freelancing/consulting and go over things you want to keep in mind if you're building your own apps.