jonah-williams / curriculum

The curriculum of Techtonica, a free tech training and job placement program for women and non-binary adults with low incomes.

Welcome to the Techtonica curriculum!

Techtonica is a non-profit project of SocialGood that does free tech training and job placement for unemployed or underemployed folks. For more information, please see our website: Techtonica.org

Apprentices will learn to do full-stack web development using JavaScript. What bootcamps and apprenticeships like Techtonica have in common is the fact that they are intensive training. However, bootcamps can be pretty passive classroom learning with students and they cost between $15,000 and $30,000.

An apprenticeship aims to be more like the workplace to make the transition into the industry better—instead of having an instructor constantly guiding you, a facilitator gives you assignments and you're expected to figure out what to do with volunteers, mentors, tech groups, and other apprentices. In the best-case scenarios, there are regular check-ins with managers and mentors provide support. We’re making Techtonica’s program as hands-on and project-based as possible to best prepare you for work in tech.

Volunteering:

If you would like to contribute to the curriculum, please sign up here, then choose an issue in the to-do list.

Get started:

• Click a "to-do" issue link and add yourself as the assignee, and pull it into the "in progress" column. (You'll need a github account to comment. If you know someone connected to Techtonica, they may be able to add you to our slack channel.)
• In the issue, you should find a link for a lesson outline and for corresponding slides.
• If it is in the "to-do" column, that means it is available. You are welcome to message questions to past assignees that may still show on the issue.
  • To create an outline, fork the repo or commit directly onto the master branch. Here is a topic outline template that explains what we need for each section.
  • To edit a slideshow, you'll need to request edit permission by clicking View Only > Request Edit Access. If you are logged into an account ending in @gmail.com, you can simply make a copy, edit, and transfer ownership to [e-mail] when you finish. Either way, save on top of the sample template used in the slide, and cut any slides you find unnecessary.
  • To make a video, one effective solution has been to record your screen as you explain the lesson slides to the apprentices. An alternative can be a video found online that covers all the objectives of the lesson in a way suited to beginners.
  • Here is an example of a great lesson trio: MongoDB Slides, MongoDB Lesson Outline, MongoDB Video.

While working:

• Comment in the issue if you have a question, and add the "question" tag to help get our attention.
• People are welcome to team up on an issue. If you see someone is already assigned but you want to help, leave the other assignee a message on the issue about collaborating.
• Please note the due date! Any amount of help is appreciated, but if the deadline approaches and you won't be able to complete it, please leave a comment about your progress and unassign yourself from the issue so someone else can pick it up. If you forked the repo, go ahead and make a pull request with what you have, and transfer ownership of a copied slideshow to [e-mail].

Completed curriculum:

• Place a "completed" label on the issue once you've completed it, and leave comments about your work if you like. Grazie Mille!!

Table of Contents

Onboarding

1. Welcome, Tips, and Rules
2. How to Learn
3. Growth Mindset
4. Professionalism
5. Tech Industry Tips
6. Roles in Tech
7. Ergonomics

Programmer Tools

1. Intro to Command Line Interface Tools
2. Advanced Command Line
3. Bash Profile
4. Vim
5. Operating Systems
6. Keyboard Shortcuts
7. Asking Good Questions
8. Local Development with VS Code
9. Networking
10. Interpersonal Conflict Resolution
11. How the Internet Works: Requests and Responses
12. Intro to DNS
13. How to Pair Program

Client-side Development && Confident Programming

1. HTML
2. Recipe Page Project: HTML
3. Git Version Control
4. .gitignore
5. Using GitHub for Code Storage
6. CSS
7. Chrome Developer Tools: Setup
8. Recipe Page Project: CSS
9. Media Queries
10. UI/UX
11. Web patterns
12. Bootstrap
13. Building Confidence
14. Recipe Page Project: Bootstrap
15. Giving Presentations
16. Diversity, Inclusion, and Bias
17. Portfolio Project: HTML, CSS & Bootstrap
18. SEO: Search Engine Optimization
19. a11y: Accessibility
20. Portfolio Project: Incorporating SEO & a11y
21. Using GitHub for Project Collaboration
22. Portfolio Project: Personal Branding
23. Reading/Writing Documentation
24. Writing Readable Code
25. Deploy your Portfolio Project: Deploying Client-Side Apps with Netlify
26. JavaScript: Lessons 1-8
27. Whiteboarding
28. Datetime
29. Testing & TDD
30. OOP Project: Object Oriented Programming
31. Runtime Complexity
32. Debugging
33. jQuery
34. AJAX
35. APIs & JSON

Server-side Development && Agile Programming

1. NodeJS
2. ExpressJS
3. Data Models
4. .env & config
5. Relational Databases
6. SQL
7. Database Migrations
8. Intro to Scrum
9. Eventonica Project
10. MongoDB
11. React
12. Auth0
13. Functional Programming
14. Deploying to Heroku with React and Node
15. Recursion
16. Memoization
17. Agile Project Management
18. Refactoring
19. Optimization

Data Structures & Algorithms

1. Intro to Data Structures
2. Sprint Plan for Data Structures & Algorithms Week
3. Data Structures: Stacks
4. Data Structures: Queues
5. Data Structures: Deque
6. Data Structures: Linked Lists
7. Data Structures: Hash Tables
8. Data Structures: Trees
9. Intro to Algorithms
10. Algorithms: Searching
11. Algorithms: Sorting
12. Data Visualization

Career Development && Final Project

1. Navigating New Codebases
2. Technical Interviewing
3. Interviewing
4. Open-source Projects
5. Career Week: Machine Learning Engineer
6. Career Week: Entrepreneurship
7. Career Week: Data Science
8. Career Week: Security
9. Career Week: QA Engineer
10. Career Week: Developer Advocate
11. Career Week: Sales Engineering
12. Career Week: Technical Program Manager
13. Final Project: Selecting Your Final Project
14. Final Project: 5 weeks
15. Mobile Development
16. Resources: Women in Tech
17. Financial Literacy
18. Negotiating
19. Ethics in Software Engineering

Optional Resources:

• Sass
• Python

Creative Commons Open-Source License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.