Filling the education gap — how we organized our first JavaScript school
Last week we ended our little JavaScript adventure, five free workshops which we conveniently hid under the name — Axilis JavaScript School. It was a great experience for us and for a few minutes, we’re going to describe what made us undertake such journey and dedicate our employees’ Saturdays for this cause, what were the challenges we fought and how satisfied we were with the overall result.
Post Graduation Reality
One of the problems we face, as a development agency in Croatia, is that we get a lot of fresh graduates with strong theoretical backgrounds but often lacking real-life practical knowledge. Our experience has shown that graduates with strong theoretical background end up as a pretty good molding material — they are problem solvers, they adapt quickly to new environments and they learn new technologies pretty quick. But there has to be a better balance between practice and theory, because today a great amount of work falls on our backs. Companies are required to invest time, resources and people into the molding process. That could take months or even years and is an investment that most companies can’t afford.
Universities in Croatia are recognizing this issue. There are more and more optional classes that are giving students practical experience, but unfortunately, they can often lag behind the reality in terms of latest technologies.
On the other side, as a development company, we always need to be on our toes, we early adopt new technologies and that makes us early competent to transfer knowledge to other people. We decided to take action and jump on the education train to fill in the gap. We decided to open our first Axilis school.
What’s Cookin Doc?
Majority of the work done today in Axilis is related to JavaScript. Be it backend applications on Node or mobile apps with React Native and Cordova, we have guys here that really know their business. It was no brainer, our first school had to be about JavaScript. We also anticipated more people would be interested in learning JavaScript than anything else since it’s everywhere today and the business opportunities are pretty rich. And did I mentioned it’s not covered in our universities?
But there were some other floating questions. How many people are we capable of handling? What format should we deliver the lectures in? How many lectures should we do? What should be the time frame in which the lectures will take place? We started tackling questions one by one.
First major issue was the time frame. School was open for people of all profiles but we expected most of our applicants to be students still doing their homework and exams. We didn’t want to overlap with their activities. The other thing we didn’t want to overlap with were some similar initiatives by our local friends. We found a nice, untouched stretch of five weeks, just before final exams and summer break, leaving enough room for students to tackle their other activities after the JavaScript school.
We were counting on five weeks, Saturday morning sessions were a safe bet which meant we had only five lectures to spare. Some of our speakers were already raging — you expect me to teach them Node in just one session?! Of course it was impossible to cover everything there is about Node in just a couple of hours, a certain amount of individual work was expected of our attendees. Everybody had to understand that our job was to kick start them, show them the basics and give them an opportunity to grow further with our assistance and mentoring.
The other thing we had to settle was the number of attendees we would be able to accept during the lectures. This was directly tied to the question of lecture delivery format. We knew that the best way to learn was through hands on labs. We wanted the attendees to be involved and active, so we didn’t want the groups to be too big. We also had a limited number of staff available for every lecture, we needed to make sure the number of staff and attendees is sufficient for every attendee to get the right level of support during the assignments.
We kept our expectations low regarding the applicants number, because we had no clue about how this will catch on in the community. We decided to go with a magic number of 15 attendees which has, spoiler alert, proven to be a great choice.
The Magnificent Fifteen
So, everything was settled, we agreed on five lectures, we had the dates, five experts that will cover the topics. There was no going back. We pushed the registration page online and then we got a nice surprise — in just a few days, we got more than 200 applications. It was a nice confirmation that our school was heading on a right track, a lot of people recognized the gap we were trying to fill.
After the initial excitement came a cold realization — we will have to say no to a lot of quality individuals. Our registration form was relatively simple, the exception being a small motivational letter we expected to see from our applicants. It wasn’t such a good idea since many candidates didn’t find the field important, but it ended up being our only mean of filtering people. Definitely, in the future we will probably go with some kind of problem solving assignment.
In the end, we’ve read every single motivational letter and finally decided on 15 great attendees. Profiles varied, most of them were software engineering or computer science students, but we even had civil and mechanical engineers in the group.
Schedule
Now a few words about the organization of the workshops. As I already said, we had five different speakers, each expert in the topics they were assigned to speak about. Some of them didn’t have any experience with public speaking, but a friendly atmosphere in the room helped the speakers and attendees to really be themselves. Good thing we decided for a smaller group.
In the first workshop we had a slow start with JavaScript language basics. We knew that almost nobody in the room could say they perfectly understand JavaScript and all of its flaws (or dare I say it, features) so the lecture was convenient for the first timers, but also the JavaScript veterans.
After the torture with vanilla JavaScript, second workshop introduced the much friendlier ES2015 standard. Attendees managed to see how they can use this new JavaScript today, even without the full browser support. Additionally, they got a sneak peak of the concepts they’ll be using in Node and React applications.
Third workshop was dedicated to building server applications with Node and Express, and the fourth one rounded it off with building web clients with React. We decided to leave the fifth workshop as a let’s-see-what-we-learned lecture. Attendees were split into teams and they had to build a final project using the knowledge they gathered during the workshops. Of course, we were always there for them, mentoring and assisting.
Finally, just by looking at the applications number, it’s obvious a large interest exists for these kinds of initiatives. We got good feedback from our attendees, we’ve met some quality individuals and are more than satisfied with the experience got from organizing the JavaScript school. We definitely plan on organizing similar events in the future especially since there are plenty of interesting topics we could cover. Regarding the JavaScript school, there is no reason not to see it again next year (or who knows, even sooner).
If you want to see what we did, all school materials are available on GitHub!
