The Virtual Classroom has been posponed until August 3rd, 2020

Unfortunately, classes have been rescheduled to start on August 3rd, 2020 due to unexpected circumstances. As a result, on behalf of the trainers, mentors and staff of the Jamaican Developers Group, we apologize for the untimely delay and responsiveness.

Nevertheless, we want to ensure that this programme is a success, beneficial to trainees and is held annually. For the past few days, we’ve been regrouping, reorganizing, restructuring and preparing for the official launch on August 3rd, 2020. Here are some of the changes we’ve made to the programme,

Reschedule the first classes in the first week of August.

The first week of August is geared towards the following topics:

  • Getting trainees familiar with the project and it’s objectives
  • Getting trainees familiar with Scrum, User Stories and other Project Management
  • Getting trainees familiar with Git, Gitlab and Gitlab Workflow
  • Getting trainees familiar with the mentioned technologies
  • Setting up the skeleton project on the trainee computer or cloud services like AWS Cloud 9

Host free events and training between July 19th and 1st of August

The aim of these events is to introduce trainees to some of the technologies we will be using in the virtual classroom. Also, it is a means of building a community and meetup sessions for various technologies and topics.

Please note, all events will be posted on Jamaican Developers Website and JDG Meetup Group

Career Roadmap in Software Development

DateTime: Tuesday, July 21, 2020 @ 6 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Webinar
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Duration: 2 hours
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Oshane and at least 3 guest speakers
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Presentations from guest speakers ( 1 hr and 30 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (10 mins)
  • Breakout sessions (10 mins)
Git, Gitlab, Github and Git Workflows

DateTime: Thursday, July 23, 2020 @ 6 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Training
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Duration: 2 hours
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Oshane Bailey
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Training (1 hr and 30 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (10 mins)
  • Q&A (10 mins)
Getting Started with Laravel

DateTime: Saturday, July 25, 2020 @ 12 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Training
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Duration: 3 hours
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Oshane Bailey or Khary Sharpe
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Training (2 hr and 30 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (10 mins)
  • Q&A (10 mins)
Getting started with Flutter

DateTime: Tuesday, July 28, 2020 @ 6 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Training
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Duration: 2 hours
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Andrew Gray and Guest Speaker from the US
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Training (1 hr and 30 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (10 mins)
  • Q&A (10 mins)
Software Testing

DateTime: Thursday, July 30 2020 @ 6 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Training
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Duration: 2 hours
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: (Phillip Lopez or Orandi Harris), Oshane Bailey and Jordan Jones
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Training (1 hr and 30 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (10 mins)
  • Q&A (10 mins)

Host the Virtual Classroom Introduction Webinar on July 27th, 2020.

An introduction webinar will be held for prospective trainees to get more information about the Virtual Classroom and meet the mentors, trainers and coordinators. Also, there will be a Q&A session for prospective trainees to ask questions related to the programme.

DateTime: Monday, July 27, 2020 @ 6 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Webinar
Duration: 1 hour
Audience: Companies, Developers and Students
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Oshane Bailey
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (40 mins)
  • Breakout sessions (10 mins)

Host the first Virtual Classroom Orientation on July 28th, 2020.

The aim of this orientation is to help prepare students for classes, which includes:

  • Setting up the various environments
  • Setting up their account on the various services we will be using, e.g. Gitlab, Slack, Jamaican Developers Forum, etc.

DateTime: Sunday, July 26, 2020 @ 2 p.m
Venue: Zoom
Event Type: Orientation
Duration: 2 hour
Audience: Trainees
Recorded: Yes
Speakers: Oshane Bailey
Agenda

  • Welcome Slides (10 mins)
  • Virtual Classroom Presentation (50 mins)
  • Breakout sessions (1 hr)

Downscale the programme from 6-9 months to 3-6 months

Originally, we had scheduled 6 months of Software Development training and an additional 3 months of training in DevOps, Server Management, Marketing and Starting a company. The reason why the programme was 6 months was to ensure that the programme has flexible training sessions and does not consume a lot of time for the various trainers, mentors and trainees.

However, we have scaled down to 3 months of training that is dedicated to Software Development and the additional 3 months of training cover Software Support, DevOps, Server Management, Customer Development and Starting a Company. The programme still aims to have flexible training sessions, but it may require more time from trainees. Nevertheless, the reason for the change was to ensure that mentors, trainers and trainees do not have to dedicate more than 3 months to learn how to develop software using the technologies mentioned in a previous post.

Develop a single product/service instead of two (2) products/services.

Originally, each product or service has its own set of web, mobile and desktop application, as a result, we would have built 6 applications in 6 months with a group of 50 or more developers. Afterwards, we would launch two companies within the remaining 3 months.

Nevertheless, reducing the initial development period from 6 months to 3 months yields a faster ROI and scale-up of skilled developers. Also, we will be focusing on building a single product or service, the goal is to build at least the web and mobile application of the product or service. As a result, reduces the technical and management debt required for learning and building the web, mobile and desktop for each product or service.