3 ms·

Updating an “Intro to Web Design” Course

2 points by joshinma 8y ago

Hi folks. I'm a college professor teaching largely non-technical students. I used to teach our "intro to web design" course regularly, but haven't taught it since spring of 2015. I'm about to teach it again for the first time in a while and while—at the level of these students—most of the material will be the same (file structures, html, css, js/jquery, a tiny bit of server-side stuff, like php and sql), I know the larger world of web design changes very rapidly. So I'd love your advice on tools / standards / libraries / frameworks that have evolved or become newly popular in the last few years, and what that might mean for a novice/intro curriculum. In particular, I'd love to know what bigger trends like the rise of serverless, the ascendance things like node.js and GO, and the reimagining of mobile web design might mean for an intro curriculum.

MrTonyD 8y ago
I don't have advice - but just to share my own confusion in this area - I'm working more and more with containers and microservices. In the old days I used Eclipse, makefiles, and mostly vi to do my work. I'm not really sure how to integrate this with things like container deployments (lots of copying and shell scripts?) and with Kubernetes where things are getting very dynamic (scaling up, down, upgrades). The tooling just doesn't seem to be there. Right now, I'm relying on the old standard of vi along with some bash scripts. I don't know if that makes sense, but these old tools seem to work with the least obfuscation.
- joshinma 8y ago
  That does make sense. The whole world of Docker and so forth is still pretty mysterious to me. I mean, I get how it works in principle, but I'd have to seriously update my skills to teach an advanced course. Though, if I get what you're saying, it's that fewer training wheels—IDEs, etc.—are better in the beginning. Which is good (hopefully?), since I typically force them to use a text editor for everything.
Eridrus 8y ago
What's the goal of the course? A lot of the changes I've seen (from a distance) in the last few years are about how to better scale front-end development, which isn't really necessary for people who don't plan to be developers. Serverless is interesting in that it lets you get a real application running with less ops knowledge, but are the people taking this course interested in making applications, or do they want the skills to make some changes to a wordpress blog? The combination with single page applications can remove the need to learn a server-side templating system, but with the downside that you need to know more JS than a simple PHP page. One thing that HN doesn't talk about, but could be useful for non-technical folks is low-code frameworks for building typical business apps.
- joshinma 8y ago
  All great answers, thank you. My goal isn't to have them become cracker-jack developers, but rather to get a good enough sense of how web applications work that they have a better idea of what developers do and how to talk with them. In the past I've typically had them complete simple exercises—with lots and lots of scaffolding—using different technologies in the stack.

2 points by joshinma 8y ago

MrTonyD 8y ago

I don't have advice - but just to share my own confusion in this area - I'm working more and more with containers and microservices. In the old days I used Eclipse, makefiles, and mostly vi to do my work. I'm not really sure how to integrate this with things like container deployments (lots of copying and shell scripts?) and with Kubernetes where things are getting very dynamic (scaling up, down, upgrades). The tooling just doesn't seem to be there. Right now, I'm relying on the old standard of vi along with some bash scripts. I don't know if that makes sense, but these old tools seem to work with the least obfuscation.

joshinma 8y ago
That does make sense. The whole world of Docker and so forth is still pretty mysterious to me. I mean, I get how it works in principle, but I'd have to seriously update my skills to teach an advanced course. Though, if I get what you're saying, it's that fewer training wheels—IDEs, etc.—are better in the beginning. Which is good (hopefully?), since I typically force them to use a text editor for everything.

Eridrus 8y ago

What's the goal of the course? A lot of the changes I've seen (from a distance) in the last few years are about how to better scale front-end development, which isn't really necessary for people who don't plan to be developers. Serverless is interesting in that it lets you get a real application running with less ops knowledge, but are the people taking this course interested in making applications, or do they want the skills to make some changes to a wordpress blog? The combination with single page applications can remove the need to learn a server-side templating system, but with the downside that you need to know more JS than a simple PHP page. One thing that HN doesn't talk about, but could be useful for non-technical folks is low-code frameworks for building typical business apps.

joshinma 8y ago
All great answers, thank you. My goal isn't to have them become cracker-jack developers, but rather to get a good enough sense of how web applications work that they have a better idea of what developers do and how to talk with them. In the past I've typically had them complete simple exercises—with lots and lots of scaffolding—using different technologies in the stack.