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.
Jump to Curriculum Table of Contents.
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:
- Choose an issue from the TO-DO column that seems right for you & leave a comment for Techtonica staff. If you know someone connected to Techtonica, they may be able to add you to our slack channel. If you are here for GHC or Hacktoberfest, message Alina, Leah, or TaLea and say you'd like to pick up the issue.
- 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, even if there's an "assignee".
- 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, or message Alina. If you are logged into an account ending in @gmail.com, you can simply make a copy, edit, and transfer ownership to techtonicaorg@gmail.com 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, or send a slack message.
- 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 techtonicaorg@gmail.com.
Completed curriculum:
- Place a "completed" label on the issue once you've completed it, make a pull request to Techtonica/curriculum master, and leave comments about your work if you like. Grazie Mille!!
Table of Contents
The following is the approximate sequence of the topics during the program but is always being tuned and optimized so if you have questions, please open an issue.
Week 0 - Pre-Work
Before beginning the program, apprentices meet weekly for 4 weeks to learn JavaScript fundamentals.
Week 1 - Onboarding & Developer Tools
- Welcome, Tips, and Rules
- Expectations While at Techtonica
- How to Learn
- Professionalism
- Roles in Tech
- Intro to Command Line Interface Tools
- Advanced Command Line
- Bash Profile
- Vim
- Homebrew ?
- How to Pair Program
- Project 0 - Week 1 Assessment
- Operating Systems
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Ergonomics
- Growth Mindset
- Asking Good Questions
- Local Development with VS Code
- Networking
- How the Internet Works: Requests and Responses
- Intro to DNS
- HTML
Week 2 - Webpages: HTML & CSS
- Git Version Control
- Recipe Page Project: HTML
- .gitignore
- Using GitHub for Code Storage
- CSS
- Article: What Exactly is the DOM?
- Chrome Developer Tools: Setup
- Recipe Page Project: CSS
- Media Queries
- UI/UX
- Web patterns
- Bootstrap
- Building Confidence
- Recipe Page Project: Bootstrap
- Solving Code Challenges
- Git Part 2: Study Guide
- Portfolio Project: HTML, CSS & Bootstrap
- Using GitHub for Project Collaboration
- Portfolio Project: Personal Branding
- Reading/Writing Documentation
- Writing Readable Code
- Deploy your Portfolio Project: Deploying Client-Side Apps with Netlify
- Portfolio Project: Collaboration and Review
- Debugging
Week 3 - JavaScript Fundamentals
Week 4 - Intermediate JavaScript
- HTML/JS Game Project
- jQuery
- a11y: Accessibility
- Portfolio Project: Incorporating a11y
- JavaScript 7 - Object-Oriented Programming
- Mini Project: Object Oriented Programming in JS
- Adding Jasmine Tests to your project
Week 5 - Eventonica & Advanced JavaScript
- Eventonica Project
- JavaScript 8 - Regular Expressions / RegEx
- JavaScript 9 - Callbacks and Promises
- Runtime Complexity
- Functional Programming
Week 6 - Web API's
- Intro to HTTP
- HTTP Requests Practice
- Intro to JSON (DigitalOcean)
- APIs & JSON
- TwilioQuest Exercise
- REST APIs
- Eventonica Part 4 - REST API
- Express
Week 7 - Databases
- Data Models
- SQL
- Install PostgreSQL
- Relational Databases
- Table Relationships and Join Queries by Treehouse
- Adding Tests to your NodeJS project
- Database Migrations
Week 8 - Eventonica with React
Week 9 - PERN Mini-Project (Postgres+Express+React+Node)
Week 10 - More PERN & Assessments
- Finishing PERN Mini-Project
- Coding assessment
- App development assessment
- Recursion
- Asset Optimization
Week 11 - Data Structures & Algorithms
Data Structures
- Intro to Data Structures
- Sprint Plan for Data Structures & Algorithms Week
- Data Structures: Stacks
- Data Structures: Queues
- Data Structures: Linked Lists
- Data Structures: Hash Tables
- JavaScript Map
- Data Structures: Trees
Algorithms
Week 12 - Final Assessments
Week 13 - Career Week!
- Technical Interviewing
- Take-home Problems
- Non-Tech Interviews
- Article by Techtonica Alum: Working in the field as a New Software Engineer out of Bootcamp
- Career Week: Machine Learning Engineer
- Career Week: Entrepreneurship
- Career Week: Data Science
- Career Week: Security
- Career Week: QA Engineer
- Career Week: Developer Advocate
- Career Week: Sales Engineering
- Career Week: Technical Program Manager
Week 14 - Project Prep Week & Electives
- Intro to Security in Web Development
- Refactoring
- Interviewing
- Resume Writing
- Front End Take-home Challenge
- Back End Take-home Challenge
- Technical Writing
- Final Project: Selecting Your Final Project
- Final Project: 5 weeks
- Resources: Women in Tech
- Difficult Workplace Situations
- Financial Literacy
- Negotiating
- Ethics in Software Engineering
Independent Topics
These are not blockers for any of the core sequence and so they are worked into the schedule as time permits.
- Interpersonal Conflict Resolution
- Diversity, Inclusion & Implicit Bias
- Tech Tips and Rules
- Giving Presentations
- Whiteboarding
- Whiteboarding Interview Challenges
- Agile Project Management
- Intro to Scrum
Optional / Elective Lessons
- SEO: Search Engine Optimization
- Sass
- Python
- Datetime
- Data Visualization
- Adding Chai/Mocha Tests to your project
- MongoDB
- Mongoose
- Auth0
- Memoization
- Data Structures: Deque
- Mobile Development
Creative Commons Open-Source License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
