Where to find this site

This is the “official” course website. All the material we go through will be on this site, as will links to all tools and products used in this course.

We’ve tried to design this course to be open-ended, so that if some of you have the time and desire to explore further, you can. Most topics will have suggestions for extra activities and options to expand, however, none of these will be assumed in further lessons.

If at any point you’re struggling, ask for help. The lessons are aimed to be medium pace, but we’re definitely not leaving anyone behind, and we have people who are specifically here to help you. Please let us know as soon as possible if something is not working as described.

We will need some tools and accounts for this course.

This site is largely made using the technologies explored in this course, and the source code for it can be freely explored on Github.

Assumptions

We’ve tried to specifically not make any assumptions about your individual setups, but everyone’s computer is different.

We’ve given instructions for Windows & macOS, for our recommended tools.

If you feel like you’re familiar with an aspect of the course, you’re free to diverge and / or not use the suggested setup. For example

• if you’re well familiar with how to use git on the command line, we’re not going to force you to use one of the suggested UIs
• if you have a favourite editor you’re comfortable with, we’re not forcing you to use Sublime

If you’re running Linux, we’ve tried our best to suggest options, but to an extent, we’re also assuming that you’re running Linux because you know what you’re doing. Linux generally provides unlimited customisability, and it’s not feasible for us to cover everyone’s individual setups here. Same rules apply, if you’re struggling with anything, please ask for help, and we will do our best.

Intro

During this course we will create a website and deploy it to a publicly accesible place. The aim is to show you that you can build a decent looking website quickly, and get it out to the public, for entirely free. One of the core philosophical goals of the internet was (and still is) democratising access to information. We want to show you how easy it is to do that using a platform you build yourself.

We’ll cover a fairly broad range of skills, going through some basic applications of them. Creating a high quality, good looking website takes more in-depth studying of all of them, but this course is more about showing you what goes into it, than making you an expert in any one area. All the things we’re covering have lots of free material online, and we’ll link to more in-depth reading at the end of each section, should you be interested in delving deeper into a particular area.

The tools we’re using are widely used in the industry, and power lots of things already present on the internet.

We make no assumptions about the content of your site, we leave that up to you. I can be an online CV, a portfolio, a fan page for your cat, or anything else you can come up with.

We encourage you to stay within copyright law, e.g., if you need an image for something like a banner, please don’t just go to Google Images and grab the first thing you find. There are ways to find legal content, e.g., Google Images allows you to specify you want to search specifically for images you can reuse, it’s under Tools -> Usage rights, or Unsplash has tons of free-to-use images.

Finally, throughout the course, we encourage you to experiment! Make changes to things, see what happens. The beauty of software engineering is that unlike, e.g., mechanical engineering, typically nothing is irreversible, and nothing has any consequences beyond some characters displayed on a screen. If you make a mistake on your computer, nothing explodes, no physical harm comes to anyone, nor is there any financial loss to anyone or anything. A bruised ego is the worst you get. So play around, explore, do break something if only to see what happens when things go up in smoke!