This site is under active development. Feedback and pull requests welcome
At Elewa we remember learning to become developers, for some of us it wasn't even a year ago! It felt like we spent more time finding what we needed to learn and where to learn those skills than we did actually learning them.
Covering the basics of JavaScript wasn't hard, there's hundreds of great resources that teach this. Learning new libraries, tools or frameworks also wasn't difficult, it seems like every developer is releasing a tutorial for their favorite tools!
What we found difficult was tying it all together into a unified skill-set. With the great variety of opinions and resources it felt impossible to figure out what was most important, or what we should learn first.
We've spent the last year talking to employers, developers and students to answer these questions. What are the most versatile skills for a junior developer? How can you future-proof yourself? Can these skills be learned from the very beginning?
This curriculum is our attempt to share what we've learned so you can start with a leg up.
Happy learning!
The Elewa Team
We believe that no one should have to study alone, and that everyone should have access to quality, open learning materials. Our instructors have worked hard to embed their professional experience into the design & delivery of this curriculum, we hope this helps you reach your goals!
The true focus of these projects is how to think in abstractions, construct solutions, identify separation of concerns, divide work for collaboration, use pseudocode and other visualizations ... In short, how to use code effectively. Skills like these are usually taught after students have begun to master their language.
From our experience and research we have learned that these skills can, and should, be learned at the very beginning of your programming experience. Perhaps even before you master your programming language! The fundamental skills we cover in this curriculum can be learned effectively programmers of any skill level.
We've designed our projects to be as instructive as possible. The code for these projects is very simple, and this is intentional. It's much easier to focus on, and learn, these collaborative skills when you aren't also trying to understand complex code and new libraries. Keep this in mind and you'll find that you can learn a lot from these projects, even if you're no stranger to programming.
All of our projects require you to work directly with Git & GitHub, completing finished repositories to showcase your work. At times this may feel like a lot of extra work, but stick with it! We have intentionally designed our course to be this way.
A common difficulty for new developers is transferring their skills from friendly, guided learning environments (videos, integrated code execution, quick tips) to real development contexts. By interacting with our curriculum in a professional development environment (Git/Hub, Terminal, Editor, Browser) you are building fluency with the tools of the trade as a natural part of your learning process.
Coding is not about code. Coding is ...
* Communication
* A cognitive tool
* Practical problem solving
These carefully designed projects form the core of our Software Development curriculum. If you study them as recommended you will learn the fundamentals of programming & software development. Skills that transfer between any language or development environment. You won't learn any particular framework in depth. Instead, you will explore the fundamental design principles behind popular frameworks while building your own full-stack application fron scratch using Vanilla JavaScript.
Each project is meant to be just a starting point. After you've finished the requirements and you've understood the main learning objectives, take the simple base provided and make it something awesome.
Our projects do not cover the basics of JavaScript, DOM, HTML/CSS, or any other popular framework or library. There are already thousands of great places to learn those things. We link to our favorites in General Resources, and directly from the projects where you'll need them.
To study the projects we recommend you fork+clone the project repos. This will allow you to take notes, study sourcecode, and modify samples directly from your computer.
Stay tuned! We'll release more projects as we finish moving them to GitHub.
Get all the little stuff out of the way first. Once you're comfortable with JavaScript and have a live Gh-Pages Portfolio, you're ready to move on to The Essentials.
- Precourse GitBook
- Being a Developer
- The Internet
- JS, HTML & CSS
- Installations
- Publish your Portfolio
- JavaScript 30
Prepare yourself for success by establing strong study habits, learning to read & use code, understanding application desing, and mastering human-centered development.
- Fundamentals
- Collaboration
Take a deep dive into designing and building fullstack applications.
- Modular Design
- Portable Services
- Stateless Frontend
- Design Patterns
- Fullstack
- BDD
- Group Project
Find out how to design front end apps using Funtional Programming and Immutable Data.
- Hyperapp
- React/Redux
Dive deep into your interests to set yourself appart. Plan and build a project of your own. Maybe it's an app, maybe it's a business, maybe it's your own open community.
This wiki is full of everything you should need to know, or at least a link to it. Your one-stop shop for everything from learning and study tips to coding resources, to interview preparation & job search.
Feel free to contribute!
Our mission is to make learning open and collaborative. If you are interested in setting up your own Meetup or study group around this curriculum we would love to help out! Get in touch with us and we'll get back to you within a week.
