Welcome to the MSIMBO Prework
Here you'll find mandatory tutorials that need to be completed to be considered for the program. This can also be used as a great refresher for grads and newbies interested alike. While, we don't expect you to be experts, but we do expect you to be familiar. There is a lot of content to consume here, get used to the fire hose!
When you've completed the project at the end of this section, continue your application here
You should have a professional presence on these platforms, as well as a professional email account. A personal brand is really important.
Another important aspect of communicating your brand on the Internet as a developer is being able to use Markdown formatting. Markdown is a way to write plain text documents that get formatted into html for display on the web.
This guide you're reading is written in Markdown. Markdown is extremely popular and as part of the prework, you're going to take some time to understand it.
Being able to code well requires you to be able to use your machine well. We're going to start with setting up your machine and then move into learning a few tools that are staples to web development. If you're on Windows your setup instructions are here, MacOS users look here.
We use two editors to write code. VS Code and PHPStorm.
Download and install VS Code here; play around with it to become familiar since you will spend many hours in this environment!
Next up, learning what the command line is. You won't be the same after you learn how command the terminal. Work through this tutorial here!
Here's a great tool to decode some of those spell like chunks of texts you've been blindly copy pasting into your terminal.
Git is used to track who changed what on files, as well as many other things. It's going to be one of your top tools, so bookmark the documentation. Now, work through this hands on tutorial, don't worry it's really quick.
Now take a look at Gitflow, it may seem a little advanced, but this is how we use git within MSIMBO. The reason is because that's how the real world works with Git.
Github Tutorial (don't worry too much about reading all of these. Wet your pallette and bookmark for later)
Download Chrome (This is the browser we prefer for development.)
Below is a tutorial covering what web development is and how it all comes together to create web applications. The tutorial mentions installing Atom, don't worry about that. You're going to use VS Code instead.
HTML & CSS Tutorial (Go Through The Tutorial)
Getting a good grasp of how to layout websites is VERY important. The course below is going to get you moving on just that with some cool new additions to CSS.
JavaScript is where you go from being an artist to being a wizard in web development. A deep knowledge of JavaScript fundamentals will make you a highly employable developer. Complete Javascript Info to get a good beginner grasp of JS.
JavaScript is derived from ECMAScript. This is important since new versions come out having major impact on JavaScript. Read through this resource to understand the newest version of Javascript:
Build a website telling about you and include your favorite things and then push it to GitHub. Bonus points if you use vercel to host your site.
NOTICE: DO NOT USE A TEMPLATE OR THEME IF USING THIS PREWORK TO APPLY FOR MSIMBO. USE ONLY YOUR OWN HTML, CSS AND JAVASCRIPT.