This is under revision! You are free to check it out in its current form but all labs are subject to modification.
Course currently under revision for Spring 2021. You are free to check out the Spring 2020 offering. The new version will take on the dystopian flavoring added to my IST 210 course that added texture, caramel after-taste, and a smokey bitterness that comes with living in a hellish alternative reality where no one will solve complex problems with anything but simplistic platitudes.
A GIT repo is backing this website , check it out!
My name is Bryan Ollendyke, and welcome to IST 402: Emerging Tech
Dystopian Technologies
!
I am excited to expose you to the ideas and technologies I wish I had been exposed to when I was in IST. I graduated from IST in 2006 (and again in 2015) and even though that makes me one of the olds you youths are always on about, I assure you, I haven't screwed up society as much as the rest
. While I took some programming focused courses in undergrad, it wasn't until I starting working on projects for the university that I had to learn on the job all aspects of real software development.
I am a unicorn in the industry. A unicorn is often known as a "Full Stack Developer". It's a thing that "doesn't exist" or isn't to be sought after.
The market tends to force hyper specialization, front end, back end, sys ops, dev ops, css / designer as opposed to one person that can touch all aspects of the application. I've been collecting a mix of unicorns through my work at the university and would love to share our experiences with you and expose you to technologies we work on every day.
I love open source software, hockey, web technologies, Penn State
ZoomU, and memes. I presented regularly at events around the country in the previous reality, on web components / front end development, educational technology, NGDLE, and Drupal / PHP at both technical events and educator centric ones. Now I sit in my basement and talk to the screen for which you pay much money.
I walk between worlds and hope to provide you with a unique perspective on society's downfall
and the world that we can build together out of its ashes
.
We're going to learn about and participate in open source software communities. We're going to use github to do this. We're going to make YouTube channels full of knowledge that you've assembled in this course, blog and make matching social media accounts to up our SEO (and learn what SEO is / how it works briefly), and generally give you a sense of the skills required to get involved in web projects.
We'll cover some human things like user experience, community building and accessibility.
We'll get into amazing web services like Stackblitz.io, CloudFlare, DigitalOcean, Github, IFTTT, TravisCI, Slack, talk about how they work, play with them, and blog about using them.
We'll cover technical concepts like Web components, version control (git), Content management systems (CMS), "flat file" systems and how the web works, and will work in the future.
We'll get hands on with every lab and write markdown, yaml, json, web components (HTML/CSS/JS).
We'll generally remove the magic that divides consumers from producers in the digital realm and get you a step closer being involved in the web industry.
The vast majority of your work will be done out in the open to help you build an identity as an IT professional and someone that has the right accounts and is active with them come interview time or where ever you find yourself after this place.
My goals for this course are to get you more comfortable with these tools, build your online personal / brand, and hopefully get you commits to real world open source projects.
This course is also meant to challenge your notion of the power of the web and the web developer. By unpacking that there is nothing unique about web development, perhaps one day we can live in a world without web developers enforcing the Zoom Caste upon the masses.
"You see I'm not CrAzY , I'm just ahead of the curve " - The Joker in The Dark Knight
Venture through the looking glass as I will occasionally detour into the bizarre and unsettling realities of the world we in web are making possible. We'll watch movies at times that helped influence my world view as a developer activist that will try and help you see the world as I did as opposed to how I once did.
I hope that you learn something from this experience, both the course and our present reality, and are able to be the better more talented people our future needs to truly progress.
The "Start up" culture is a world that lives by "move fast and break things". But how do you get into the start up scene? Or more importantly, what do you need to know in order to attract offers, and get your resume to stand out in a world where thousands of "IT workers" will graduate along side you.
You'll contribute to a large Penn State lead Open Source software project while building your digital identity as an IT professional on your journey to 1337 (elite). You'll improve online education while using things like version control (git), docker, web components, terminal, servers, screencasting and writing technical documentation.
You'll work with platforms like Github, Digital Ocean, HAXcms, IFTTT, Slack, Travis CI and YouTube. Prior programming knowledge is beneficial but understanding of technical concepts is more important.
(Fun) Reality description on following pages they has.