Nate Finch

All the things, keeping it clever…🤓

Self-Directed Full-Stack Developer Bootcamp

Developer Bootcamps seem to be all the rage these days. And why not? When it comes down to it, they offer a great value, experience, community, and connections with people looking to hire you. That’s great right?

Well, I’m loving working from home, and I’m not ready to commit to a company (yet!). I also love self-directed learning, and so I’ve come up with my own Self-Directed Full-Stack Developer Bootcamp.

There’s a LOT in here.

Over the past eight months or so, I’ve been cherry picking courses here and there. If I saw a sale on a course I’d been eyeing, I bought it. If there was another reasource I found that was available, I noted it.

I put all of these into a Trello board list, which, until recently, was pretty haphazard.

Last week, though, I tried to organize these as best as possible and and move forward based on my abilities and what is most pressing to learn.

So,

One-time costs: (calculating)

Recurring monthly costs: $25 (Lynda.com membership)

I’ve also bolded the courses and exercises with a project that I’ll put in my portfolio. I tried to focus a lot of learning on public results, namely my GitHub and a portfolio of projects I could show off.

Pre-Bootcamp Experience

Before doing ANYTHING else on this page, I did (and would highly recommend doing) all the basic courses on Codecademy. Going through these very quick courses will quickly show you whether you actually like working with code and seeing the results and if you “get it”. So, do these before anything else:

WordPress

WordPress is so accessible, and is easy to install and get up and running. There is also plenty of WordPress work out there, and as WordPress continues to expand in usage, there were only be more jobs.

Overview and Theme Development

  • WordPress Masterclass on Lynda.com from Morten Rand Hendriksen (completed)
  • Book: Professional WordPress Design and Development (completed)

Plugin Development

Genesis Framework

WP Application Development

 

PHP

The following are on this PHP Playlist I made. Why PHP? Well, WordPress is built on PHP, a ton of websites are still run on PHP, you can build web applications with PHP, and there are some good frameworks running PHP (Laravel, Cake, and others). So, even though it’s not sexy like Ruby on Rails or Django or any of the new JS server-side options, it’s still pretty powerful.

  • Into PHP, Foundations of OOD, OOP w/ PHP: 10 hours (completed)
  • PHP w/ MySQL: 14.5 hours (completed)
  • PHP for Web Designers and JS and PHP: 8.5 hours (completed)
  • Choosing a PHP Editor: 1.5 hours (completed)
  • PHP 5.5 First Look: <1hour (completed)
  • Unit Testing with PHPUnit: 1.5 hours
  • PHP with MySQL, Beyond the Basics: 10.5 hours
  • Debugging PHP: Advanced Techniques: 1.5 hours

PHP Frameworks

  • Up and Running with Laravel and Laravel 4 Ess Training: 7.5 hours
  • MVC frameworks for building PHP WebApps: 2.5 hours
  • Up and running with CakePHP: 1.5 hours
  • Up and Runnding with PHP CodeIngnite: 1.5 horus

Also look at this Foundations of Software Development playlist for some extra goodies.

Some books that keep coming up:

Javascript (and jQuery) Basics to Intermediate

The following are a mix of resources from Lynda.com, Codermanual.com and other resources I’ve been told about or picked up along the way that I want to check out. The Javascript videos from Lynda can be seen on this playlist.

Online Courses

  • Front End Nanodegree from Udacity
  • Free Code Camp
    • Front End (HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Algorithms, JSON, APIs, Projects)
    • Back End

JS Frameworks

Backbone

  • Backbone.js: 1.5 hours

Node

Angular

Meteor 

Front-End Framworks Overview

After completing all this, check Lynda Explore Front End Web Development Playlist for extra goodies on this one.

 

Ruby and Rails

There’s a TON of Ruby on Rails courses that have sprung up over the last few years. I’m sure all of them are pretty good, but these ones caught my eye and stand out as the best, mostly because of the variety, depth and bredth to the tutorials, including membership sites, test-driven development and a variety of applications (not just Twitter knockoffs).

 

APIs

APIs are still a mystery to me, but as one of my developer friends says, “once you have the information from the API, the world is yours!” If anyone has any recommended resources, I’d love to know!

 

Working with Databases

  • Relational Database Fundamentals

SQL/MySQL

  • SQL Essential Training
  • MySQL Essential Training
  • SQL Server 2014 Essential Training
  • Up and Running with MySQL Development
  • Up and Running with phpMyAdmin

NoSQL, MongoDB, etc…

  • Coming soon…

After completing all this, check Lynda Database Playlist for extra goodies on this one.

 

Tools

Command Line, Git and GitHub

Text Editor