Intro To Web Development
Notes from A Workshop @ Devhub // Lighthouse Labs
Hello :)
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure to delivering a intro level, 3 hour workshop about web development to a crowd of sixty to eighty people at a new co-working space called Devhub in downtown Toronto.
To give you have a little bit of background, Devhub is an initiative started by Lighthouse Labs which is where I currently work as a Head Instructor for the Web Bootcamp in Toronto.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about why I absolutely loved that experience. And in the process of doing so, I’ll share with you what I did differently during the workshop as well as the contents of my talk.
The Basics
One of the main goals of the talk was to introduce people who have possibly never programmed to an overview of the some of the most basic principles of web development.
In the spirit of experimentation, the new angle I chose for the talk was an engaging way of going through the talk’s content. This meant we started with a map which we will explore, starting the with the intro block to the far left. With each split-road on the map, I’d give the audience the choice to pick one by using a tool called Kahoot, an in-class response system, to collect responses.
During the Intro section of the talk, we quickly went over what happens when we make a request to a server over the cloud, i.e. what happens when we type google.com, then press enter.
And then we deduced a few main areas of web development:
- Front-End (ex: phones, laptops, etc.. // referred to as Client above)
- Back-End (used to load data and files // referred to as Server)
- Databases (used to persist data // not shown in illustration)
- Infrastructure (ex: Heroku, DigitalOcean and Amazon AWS // used to host servers and services)
This lead us to talk about the kind of jobs that are currently in demand when it comes to web development.
We spent some time briefly discussing each of those areas of web development to familiarize the audience with areas of work currently available in the industry.
See resources below for more details.
The Building Blocks
The audience then chose to go the route of learning the basics of HTML and CSS in order for us the reach the goal of building a landing page. Although we only got through the HTML and CSS sections within the map by building simple examples of web pages, I had fortunately shared the landing page example and notes with the audience early on.
I had also encouraged anyone who is interested in learning further to pursue their learning, whether online or via real-life course such as the Intro to Web part-time course @ Lighthouse labs, which I previously taught twice :)
Conclusion & Next Steps
To wrap up this post, I’d like to note that this experiment taught me that the simple concept of giving choice to your audience can boost engagement rates as it invites your listeners feel like they’re truly a part of the talk.
The next steps would be to improve the talk and perhaps turn it into a e-book for everyone else to enjoy and learn from.
Resources
