In my early days at Atomic, before Teach and Learn became a Core Atomic Value, its practice was already in full swing. My first months were spent having vim commands barked at me from Dave Crosby while trying to figure out how to build good software. I was very much on the learning side of Teach and Learn.
Nowadays, more than a dozen years later, I’m tipping the scales in the other direction: I’ve started teaching this fall at Hope College.
The course is “Building Single Page Web Apps,” but I’m cramming in as much as possible. I’ve always wanted to teach, and working at AO has prepared me to teach software development to new developers and to share knowledge with my peers. I’m teaching more as an Atom than a professor, with the goal that by the end of the class, any of these students could jump on my current project and start contributing.
I realize that this is a lofty goal, but I think it’s one worth pursuing. I don’t want other students to experience the same gaps I had in my education before I started interning at Atomic.
The curriculum includes:
- Web basics, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.
- Git basics (branching, merging, tagging)
- UNIX command line basics
- Data-driven apps in Ember.js
- JavaScript testing
Where were the biggest gaps in your own education as a developer? If you could go back to school and teach yourself one thing, what would it be?