This course has no required material that costs money. It is my personal belief that it is completely unethical to charge students $100s of dollars for materials after expecting them to pay $1,000s for access to information that is largely available online. You are paying for an experience and access to expertise; resources are free and plentiful.
You are required though to engage in the course using a series of services that we will use as a class:
- Slack
- get a slack account. The link to the ELMS / HAXTheWeb community is https://bit.ly/haxslack
. We will use Slack to easily send links, questions, and collaborate in class and out of class. It's also where many of our guest speakers have accounts so if you want to reach out to them personally and ask questions you are one step closer. It's a space for our community though so please treat it as you would joining an other professional community. There will be a dedicated #edtechjoker channel for in-class discussions as not to flood other channels.
- Github
- Get a github account, and please personalize your account in some way (either personal photo or just some abstract photo) + name. You'll need it to be a developer in the world and it'll also help me put names to accounts between IRL and digital.
- Dev.to
- This is a Medium-like service that you connect to via Github. It's going to be the platform we use for blogging this semester and it's also a great community of the world's developer pool. We've had past students write posts that go semi-viral and get 1000s of views, though the goal is really to practice technical writing / communication and start building a name for yourself in the dev community.
- VSCode
- I highly recommend VSCode for a variety of reasons. One, it's free. Two, it helps with consistency for me and your peers at the low level. Three, the live paired programming shared screen mode is incredible. Four, its used by a wide swath of the industry.
- A computer that you have admin over so that you can install the necessary command line dependencies. These are mentioned in the next page of the course and are an absolute requirement for taking this class. If you can't install dependencies and build projects locally then I suggest registering for another IST 402. The entire course is about being a real front end developer and so you need to use tools and tooling just like we do in the real development world.
