Talk Like a Developer: Back End Development

Are you a creative or entrepreneur that wishes you could speak tech with your web development team? Maybe you wish you could code a bit yourself? In this workshop we'll tackle some development principles to get you on the right path. We'll look at questions like, "Front-end vs. Back-end?", "What is this Javascript function thingy, and why am I passing strange math equations to it?"

If you're running a tech start-up, it's essential that you familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of web development. Ultimately knowing how to "talk to the talk" will help you communicate better with developers, and overall just look really cool. Come with questions, and a desire to have fun! No prior development knowledge required.

This session is the first of two, focusing on back-end web development. The other part of this series is the Front-End Web Development Focus.

Takeaways

Fundamentals

• What is programming?
• The different coding languages and how they fit
• Back end vs Front end
• Overview of databases and key coding languages- PHP, Ruby, Java, .Net

The Back End

• Database fundamentals
• SQL the database language
• Server side code
• The anatomy of a web server
• Understanding architecture and why its important
• Model, View, Controller: the basis of all frameworks
• Server side frameworks
• The class will go through the exercise of creating a database table and storing some data

Putting it all together

• Starting and configuring the application
• Creating database tables
• Building the controller
• Building the views
• Making the views prettier
• Making the application more usable through AJAX

Preparation
Note students should bring laptops as we will be doing live coding during the class and a number of exercises.