gopher-snakes-2013/phase-2-guide

Phase 2 is your introduction to the world wide web.

Phase 2

Table of Contents

1. Day By Day Schedule
2. How this Phase Works
3. Week By Week Breakdown
4. A Day In The Life
5. What We Work On

How This Phase Works

Phase 2 is broken into three weeks with the following themes:

• Testing and Simple Web Applications
• Enhancing Web Applications with JavaScript
• Advanced Web Application Techniques

Each day looks pretty much the same:

• Mornings pair on a challenge
• Afternoons teams work on projects
• Evenings you optimize your learning

For more information, peruse the week by week breakdown, the day in the life, and what we work on.

Week By Week Breakdown

Week 1 - Testing, Simple Web Applications, and Github

In week 1, we introduce rspec, sinatra, ActiveRecord, Github, and Heroku. Your primary objective is to feel confident that you can create simple web applications on a team and on your own, test them, and get them hosted on the Internet for your friends and loved ones to see.

Week 2 - Enhancing Web Applications With JavaScript

In week 2 we add JavaScript, the best programming language ever, as a way to enhance your web applications. By the end of this week you should be capable of creating web applications that leverage JavaScript to create rich interactions.

Week 3 - Non-trivial Web Applications

Week 3 ties it all together. Now that you're capable of creating rich web applications, you must push your abilities to their limit as you discover how to use AJAX, background jobs, OAuth, and other APIs.

A Day In The Life

Mornings

On weekdays we meet in the meadow for emotional intellienge training at 9AM.

After search inside yourself, boots:

1. Work through the pair challenge.
2. Prepare their afternoon lightning talk.

Mornings may include an optional lecture on a specific topic.

Afternoons

Monday - Friday at 2 PM we meet in the cave for lightning talks.

After lightning talks we have team standup. Each team answers the following questions:

1. What did your team build yesterday?
2. What are you planning to build today?
3. What is slowing you down?

After standup, teams work on group projects. Teams wind down their work on projects at 6PM and must stop work by 7PM.

Evenings

We have another standup at 5:30. Each boot answers the following questions:

1. What did you wind up doing yesterday evening?
2. What are you planning to do this evening?
3. What "Aha!" moments did you have in the last 24 hours?

After standup, you should finish your group project work for the day and begin optimizing your learning..

What Do We Work On?

Pair Challenges

Pair challenges are handed out every morning, and are intended to give an isolated look at at the technical topics we'll be covering.

Group Projects

Group projects are only to be worked on until 6~7pm. You will not 'finish' your group project. There is always more to do, more enhancements to be made, more features to be added, and more bugs to fix. This is why there is a 7PM hard stop.

Emotional Intelligence

A key part of being an exceptional junior developer is sensitivity to your code, yourself and the people around you. Emotional intelligence training will help you become more self aware of how you learn and engage with teams.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are 5 minutes where you answer a single question or discuss a specific topic. By restricting it to 5 minutes, you must choose the most important things to talk about. Generally the best lightning talks is 1 idea, split into 2~3 parts. Any more parts and it gets rushed or too high level.

Lightning talks use a whiteboard. No projector allowed! Feel free to practice sketching before giving the talk.

Optimizing Your Learning

We all learn in different ways. Some of us learn best by:

1. Playing with a technology on their own or with a pair
2. Reviewing videos and tutorials
3. Setting an absurd goal and working towards it
4. Sleeping

In the week overview, We've aggregated some of the best tutorials we (and previous boots) could find, collected a few useful and interesting technologies, and even given some cahrazy ideas you may want to try implementing on your own or as a group. Of course, feel free to pursue your own!