Ask HN: How to train my students to be Unicorns

Hmm, are you advertising that this is a series on web development? Do these students have prior development education? I fear that you're agenda is bloated.

* Vim deserves a class of its own. My personal experience is that it takes months of using Vim before it starts paying off. Your students will struggle with and be distracted by Vim.

* Git is an invaluable, industry-standard tool for collaboration. Still, is it helpful for learning to code or is it also a distraction? Pastebin/Dropbox/etc. are sufficient for collaborative efforts when your students are writing no more than 100 lines of code a day.

* Angular/Backbone/Knockout are all opinionated and assuming. jQuery is also too much "magic" for someone who just learned what a variable is a few weeks prior. These are just getting in the way.

* Yeoman/Grunt/Bower are cool. But there is something much more intuitive about just manually linking in a .js file to learn about dependencies.

* Gulp/Coggle/Balsamiq are similarly unnecessary.

In general, I think you're trying to teach opinionated tools that will frustrate, distract, and mislead your students. There will be a lot of "wait, which one's Bower, again?"

I hope I haven't been discouraging and unnecessarily critical... my doubts would certainly need to be revised if these students indeed had prior experience. My idea of a schedule for starting web dev:

* Very short overview of how a web browser and a server communicate.

* HTML: creating interactive elements for humans with textual markup.

* Node.js/Sinatra/etc. (students might benefit from using Node.js here as to not be overwhelmed with languages later): code a simple server to respond to a POST.

* CSS: modifying the visual representation of HTML elements for a better user experience.

* JS: react to HTML element events.

* Expand your Node.js server to respond with JSON instead of HTML, and rig your JS to asynchronously communicate with the server.

* Throw in a simple JSON/SQLite database. Flat file databases are great. Make the tried and true to-do app.

* Teach deployment (real-world servers). Git should probably be fit in here!

* Bonus: a whole class on how to solve problems using Google.

If your students are intermediate/advanced, ignore me completely.

Anyone who has ever lost or accidentally saved over a file should appreciate git. They might not appreciate the complexity of git, but they can see the purpose.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. My motivation behind this is to teach people who have a goal or dream to be a software developer that can't go to school for whatever reason and can't afford a bootcamp.

By Unicorn I mean rockstar or be in the top percentage among peers instead of just being average.

It has been hard to find quality people who have the motivation, passion and drive to be able to have the determination to teach themselves.

What I meant be exceptional is someone that has tried and failed to teach themselves but is willing to give it another go. I should have used dedicated instead of exceptional.

I have already done the Front end curriculum this past year and weeded out all the bad videos and books to find the best material. It would take a part time student learning at night about 9 months for the bootcamp.

Thank you for your input.

I picked vim because of all the plugin support and its long history. A person is going to have to learn an editor anyway so might as well learn the best. The learning methods I use for vim are just one book and several videos. I do not expect anyone to move on to the next learning topic until they feel comfortable and positive about learning vim. So if it takes a few months to learn vim they will retain the knowledge before they move on.

Thank you so much for your comment.

I dont really know if bootcamp is the right description of the school. It really does not have a time limit and my role is more of a mentor than a teacher. I did the Front End Developer curriculum to weed out all the bad videos and books and it took me about 9 months doing it part time at night. I dont expect a student to move on to the next topic until they feel comfortable with the current one and can do it by themselves.