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Guides

Lots of (hopefully) helpful information to help you get the most out of your time studying.

Like you, this document is always improving. If you feel something is missing or might be improved, please send a pull request or open an issue in your class repository.

Good luck on your journey to a new future for yourself and your loved ones! 🍀

DeNepo Curriculum: a Spider Web

It’s helpful to imagine the DeNepo curriculum as a spider web with two types of thread:

Skills: The lines going out from the center represent the skills you will practice each and every week.
Technologies: The circles going out from the center represent the languages and technologies you will learn in each module.

The Workflows modules starts in the center of this spider’s web. You will already be practicing all of the skills but with projects that use only Markdown. Because Markdown is small and simple you will be free to focus on more important things like communication and code review.

After you have practiced working on full group projects written in markdown, you will expand to the second circle with the Agile Development module. This is when you learn how to collaboratively plan and develop web pages written with HTML and CSS. You will continue practicing all of the skills you learned in Workflows, only now the programming languages will be more complex.

… and so on, forever! DeNepo is just the beginning. Your web will continue to grow after you finish studying this curriculum, you practice the skills in your web and add rings of new languages and technologies.

What is Programming?

Programming is communication. It’s also a lot of other things, but this curriculum will focus on the different ways you communicate with your code.

When you write code you are really just writing a text document, exactly like you might write an email or a note. The biggest difference between an email and a computer program is who you are writing for.

When you write an email you’re writing for the person who will be reading it. When you write a computer program you are writing for 3 very different audiences at the same time! One single document (your code) needs to be understandable to:

Developers: A developer needs to read your code and understand what you were trying to do and why.
Computers: Your code needs to have perfect syntax so the computer can parse it, and you must write instructions that are allowed by the programming language or the computer will throw an error.
Users: The instructions you give to the computer must create an intuitive and pleasant experience for the user.

Being a developer means understanding how all these characters interact, then communicating with everyone involved to deliver quality software within your project’s constraints. This diagram shows the different channels of communication in a software project:

You are in Control

Throughout your DeNepo journey and your overall career as a programmer, you will be responsible for your own learning. 25-30 hours of study is just the minimum we suggest. The more time you spend and the better you study, the faster you will find yourself in a job you love. The more you participate and become part of the web development community, the more friends you will make, and the more people will want to help you.

This is not a race against the curriculum or a race against other students. It’s a marathon to a new career, and no one is giving you a rank.

Collaboration vs. Cheating

Collaborating is encouraged, cheating is not tolerated. There is a large difference between stealing and collaboration, even if the end result looks the same (you and another student have the same code). If we find two or more homework assignments with the same code we will check in with everyone involved to see if this was collaborative work or cheating:

Collaboration is when you ask each other for help or for explanations, you voluntarily share code, and take the time to explain/understand what has been shared.
Cheating is when you copy someone’s code to complete the homeworks without taking to the time to understand it, without letting them know, or without them explaining why they wrote what they did.

You will not be getting grades on every exercise, so if you cheat you’re only cheating yourself!

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