If we run a 1-year Full-Stack Development program, what artifacts would we want students to exit with? What would hiring managers want to see? What will make our graduates stand out?
We should contact employer partners to ask them what they'd like to see, especially ones like who have strong apprenticeship/in-house training programs in place. E.g., thoughtbot.
Once we figure out the artifacts that would best demonstrate valuable skills/make candidates attractive, we should create a dream personal website/portfolio to act as a target for students, including stretch goals. We can then backward design the curriculum from there.
- Today I Learned (TIL) blog: a place where students write blog posts about things they learn. These blog posts are not intended to be groundbreaking research; mostly notes to themselves, for future reference. However, personal learning blogs like this serve as valuable evidence to future employers on what candidates have done in the past, problem solving skills, writing ability, etc.
- Stretch goal: get featured on Ruby Weekly or similar.
- Tag posts with whatever book/course they are doing at the time, as a log of books/courses they've done.
- Personal website w/ an easy to browse portfolio.
- GitHub repositories showing all projects.
- Nice to have: good commit messages and general git hygiene.
- Evidence of code reviews, both as recipient and reviewer.
- At least one non-assigned project. Can be their own idea or someone else's.
- Rebuild at least one project (Photogram?) in:
- Node
- Django
- Laravel? Spring? Go? Phoenix? Other frameworks TBD based on employer demand/ability to provide mentorship.
- JavaScript client frameworks:
- React (deploy with Vercel?)
- Vue? Angular? Other frameworks TBD based on employer demand/ability to provide mentorship.
- CSS:
- Some evidence of proficiency with vanilla CSS. (Completed exercises from CSS for JS book?)
- Bootstrap
- Tailwind
- Show an API that they've built to support JS client/native apps.
- Should show good versioning.
- Stretch goal: write excellent documentation / have an interactive API explorer (e.g. Swagger?)
- An iOS "hello world" app.
- An Android "hello world" app.
- A React Native app with some depth.
- A PR to an open source project
- Stretch goal: have it merged
- Show usage of tests/CI (GitHub Actions? Codacy?)
- Deployed apps on Heroku.
- Should have good sample data & generally be easy for a potential employer to check out.
- Deployed apps on Digital Ocean.
- With and without Docker?
- Deployed apps on AWS.
- At least one Lambda function (after learning Python?).
- Nice to have: Deployed apps on Azure, GCE.
- Solutions to leetcode problems (don't know the format for this; do they have badges? Or just write-ups on their TIL blog).
- DataCamp certificates for R/Python/SQL?
- fast.ai projects (certificate?)
If they're doing this then they are definitely interacting with an API. I think it would also be valuable and instructive to have them build their own API at some point.