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
Program participants will learn to do full-stack web development using JavaScript. What bootcamps and Techtonica have in common is the fact that they are intensive training. However, bootcamps can be pretty passive classroom learning and they cost $15,000+ for the students.
Techtonica aims to be more like the workplace to make the transition into the industry better—instead of having an instructor constantly guiding you (which you won't have in any software engineering job), you are given a general schedule of topics and assignments (see our curriculum repo for an idea of the resources provided) and you're expected to figure out what to do on your own or in collaboration with volunteers, mentors, tech groups, and other participants. 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 Cristina, Ruthie or Sarah and say you'd like to pick up the issue.
- In the issue, you should find a link for a lesson outline and for our resources about the topic.
- 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 main 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 [email protected] 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 learner. 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 [email protected].
Completed curriculum:
- Place a "completed" label on the issue once you've completed it, make a pull request to Techtonica/curriculum main, and leave comments about your work if you like. Grazie Mille!!
We'd love your help in improving this curriculum. See CONTRIBUTING for details.
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
- Week 1 - Onboarding & Developer Tools
- Week 2 - Webpages: HTML & CSS
- Week 3 - JavaScript Fundamentals
- Week 4 - Intermediate JavaScript and React
- Week 5 - Web APIs
- Week 6 - Databases
- Week 7 - Advanced JS and React
- Week 8 - Testing
- Week 9 - Eventonica Project
- Week 10 - More PERN & Review
- Week 11 - Data Structures & Algorithms
- Week 12 - Final Assessments
- Week 13 - Career Week!
- Week 14 - Project Prep Week & Electives
- Weeks 15+ - Final Project
- Independent Topics
- Optional / Elective Lessons
Week 0 - Pre-Work
Before beginning the program, participants meet weekly for 4 weeks to learn JavaScript fundamentals. Participants should memorize common JavaScript built-in functions within the first month.
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 Review
- Operating Systems
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Ergonomics
- Growth Mindset
- Asking Good Questions
- Networking (Career)
- Chrome Developer Tools: Setup
- One of either: Living in Open Workspaces or Working Remotely depending on program status. 😷
- HTML
- Intro to CSS
- JS HTML DOM Methods
- Debugging
- Recipe Page Project: HTML
Week 2 - Webpages: HTML & CSS
- Git Version Control
- .gitignore
- Using GitHub for Code Storage
- GitHub Collaboration
- Operating Systems
- Local Development with VS Code
- Article: What Exactly is the DOM?
- How the Internet Works (The Other Kind of Networking)
- Intro to DNS
- Recipe Page Project: CSS
- Media Queries
- UI/UX
- 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
Week 3 - JavaScript Fundamentals
- JavaScript 1 - Variables, Strings, Numbers
- JavaScript 2 - Arrays, Functions
- JavaScript 3 - Conditionals, Comparisons, Booleans
- JavaScript 4 - Loops
- JavaScript 5 - Switch Statements
- JavaScript 6 - Object Literals
- Datetime
- Basic JavaScript Practice
- Testing & TDD
- Assigned Reading - Eloquent JavaScript
Week 4 - Intermediate JavaScript and React
- JavaScript DOM Manipulation - formerly jQuery
- HTML/JS Game Project
- a11y: Accessibility
- SEO
- Portfolio Project: Incorporate SEO & a11y
- JavaScript 7 - Object-Oriented Programming
- Mini Project: Object Oriented Programming in JS
- Functional Programming
- All React Lessons
Week 5 - Web APIs
- Node
- JavaScript 8 - Regular Expressions / RegEx
- Runtime Complexity
- Intro to HTTP
- APIs & JSON
- HTTP Requests Practice
- Express
- REST APIs
Week 6 - Databases
- JavaScript 9 - Async, Callbacks, Promises
- Intro to JSON (DigitalOcean)
- AJAX
- .env & config files
- TwilioQuest Exercise
- import & require
- Install Postgres
- Intro to Databases
- Data Modeling 1 (Single tables)
- SQL 1 (Single tables)
- Data Modeling 2 (Multiple tables)
- SQL 2 (Multiple tables)
- Intro to Docker
- Install and Run PostgreSQL using Docker
Week 7 - Advanced JS and React
Week 8 - Testing
- Adding Tests to your NodeJS project
- Testing with Jest
- Rithm School- Testing with Jest
- API testing with Jest
- Testing React Components with Jest and React Testing Library
Week 9 - Eventonica
Week 10 - Full Stack Practice
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: Underrepresented in Tech
- Difficult Workplace Situations
- Financial Literacy
- Negotiating
- Ethics in Software Engineering
Weeks 15+ Final Project
After Week 14, Participants build a full-stack web application in the course of one month, from inception to production. This includes:
- Creating project planning docs with wireframes
- Planning out must-have features for their MVP
- Updating status on their Trello board to meet weekly milestones/sprints
- Gathering user feedback and adapting their remaining MVP plan
- Deploying their application to Heroku
- Recording a compelling demo for the finished product
For more details, see Final Project.
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
- Sass
- Python
- Data Visualization
- Adding Chai/Mocha Tests to your project
- MongoDB
- Mongoose
- Auth0
- Authorization
- Memoization
- Mobile Development
- web-patterns
- Database Migrations
- backend
- angular
- Intro to Optimization
Creative Commons Open-Source License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
