With credit to Mason F. Matthews for much of the content.
Kelly M. Murray
Email: [email protected]
Slack: @kelly
The cohort runs from the beginning of February to the end of April.
Lecture is from 9 AM to 12:30 PM Monday-Thursday, with breaks during that time. Depending on the topic, we may end early.
Lab is from 1:30 PM to 5 PM Monday-Thursday and 9 AM to 5 PM on Friday. On Fridays, some time will be taken for campus meetings such as the Weekly Huddle.
A teacher or TA will be available during lab times. You can schedule one-on-one time with either of us, but we'll also regularly reach out to you for homework review or other technical discussions. After hours, we may be available in the classroom or in Slack, which we use for group communication.
Short one-on-ones (15 minutes) are scheduled on a rotating basis with all students, and will occur for you once every three weeks. These are not meant to be technical, but to seek your opinions on how the class is going.
Staff will not be on campus for Good Friday. Students are welcome to continue to use the lounge and classroom space during holidays, however.
The general breakdown of the cohort is listed below.
The first nine weeks of the course will concentrate on the programming fundementals of Front-End Engineering. This includes but isn't limited to:
- HTML5/CSS3
- JavaScript Foundations
- JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and Lodash
- Front-end tools such as Gulp and Bower
- User Experience and User Interface Design
- Client-side JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS
Friday of week 9 will be Pitch Day. You will pitch your project ideas to the entire cohort (all the classes will be together) and then vote on your preferences. We will assign you to teams based on your preferences, and you can start work as soon as Friday evening.
During these weeks, final projects will be in full swing. Ad hoc lectures may occur, but they will be optional. You should be comfortable with:
- Breaking up features into distinct tasks
- Estimating the size of programming tasks
- Using Agile development to run a project
- Shipping early and often
- Pitching your work to others
During breaks in the lecture during the first half of the course, you will be given exercises or quizzes for practicing the content you've just learned. In most cases, you won't have time to finish the exercises before I ask you to stop and throw away what you've done. This is normal (if not disconcerting) and will be somewhat liberating a few weeks in.
During the second half of the course, we'll have reached a point where the knowledge we accumulated in the first few weeks risks being crowded out by new content. In order to combat this (and to actively prepare for interview questions), lecture will include challenges that cover fundamental Front-End topics. You will have approximately 20 minutes to work on each of these challenges, and you'll do so individually.
After classes on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, you'll be given an assignment. You'll work on these during the lab time that afternoon, and it's expected that you won't finish them by 5pm.
After classes on Thursdays, you'll be given a substantially longer assignment. You'll often work on these assignments in pairs (which we'll assign for you), and you'll occasionally be working with students from other courses. Lab time on Thursday afternoon and Friday will be dedicated to helping you with these. As above, we expect that you won't finish these by 5pm on Friday.
During the last three weeks of the course, you will be working on your capstone project, putting all you've learned into practice. You will be working with a group of 2-5 people on your project, and these groups CAN include students from the other courses.
During weeks 10, 11, and 12, you'll spend all of your time working on this project (minus some field trips and guest speakers). We will potentially have occasional lecture time, but it will be tailored to what you need to know for your project and will be optional.
If you miss more than 4 lectures, your enrollment in the job placement program is forfeit and you may not be allowed to graduate. I don't recommend missing any lectures, as we will be moving very fast.
Your homework is due by 8 AM on the day it is due. After that, it is late. If you regularly turn in your assignments late, your enrollment in the job placement program is forfeit and you may not be allowed to graduate.
We would rather see a solid incomplete attempt on time than a complete assignment late. Solid incomplete attempts turned in on time are not considered late.
You are expected to do your own work. You should use all resources available to you, including open-source code, but if you copy and paste anything, you MUST understand every line of that code and credit the appropriate source.
Copying homework is taken very seriously and can result in forfeiting job placement or explusion.
Like the technical community as a whole, classes at The Iron Yard are made up of a mixture of people from all different backgrounds.
Diversity is one of our huge strengths, but it can also lead to communication issues. To that end, we have a few ground rules that we ask people to adhere to when they're taking a class at The Iron Yard. These rules apply equally to teachers, students, other staff, and guest lecturers.
This isn't an exhaustive list of things that you can't do. Rather, take it in the spirit in which it's intended - a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us, the technical communities in which we participate.
This code of conduct applies to all communication: this includes in-class discussions, Slack, Teamwork, email, and other forums.
If you believe someone is violating the code of conduct, we ask that you report it by talking to your teacher. If you do not feel comfortable talking to your teacher, speak with any Iron Yard teacher or campus director.
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Be welcoming, friendly, and patient.
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Be considerate. Your work will be used by other people, and you in turn will depend on the work of others. Any decision you take will affect your colleagues, and you should take those consequences into account when making decisions.
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Be respectful. Not all of us will agree all the time, but disagreement is no excuse for poor behavior and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we cannot allow that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It's important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one. Members of the Iron Yard community should be respectful when dealing with other members as well as with people outside the Iron Yard community.
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Be careful in the words that you choose. Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other people. Behave professionally. Remember that harassment and sexist, racist, or exclusionary behavior are not appropriate for this class. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Violent threats or language directed against another person.
- Sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
- Posting sexually explicit or violent material.
- Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms.
- Unwelcome sexual attention.
- Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.
- Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.
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When we disagree, we try to understand why. Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time and The Iron Yard is no exception. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views constructively. Remember that we're different. The strength of The Iron Yard comes from its varied members, people from a wide range of backgrounds. Different people have different perspectives on issues. Being unable to understand why someone holds a viewpoint doesn't mean that they're wrong. Don't forget that it is human to err and blaming each other doesn't get us anywhere, rather offer to help resolving issues and to help learn from mistakes.
This code of conduct is adapted from the Django project.