PROGRAMMING WORKSHOPS

Each workshop is hosted by a fellow Colgate student and is a hands-on programming session designed to introduce you to a new programming language or framework. There are three levels of proficiency:

1. BEGINNER: no coding experience required (open to ALL majors)

2. INTERMEDIATE: some coding experience required (CS 101/102)

3. ADVANCED: working knowledge of programming languages and frameworks OR attendance to our Beginner and Intermediate level workshops

Also, some workshops are part of a series and are recommended to attend in succession. Click here to see all recommended series.

BEGINNER

• Web Development Fundamentals

  Monday, March 28th, 6-7 PM

  Building a personal website with GitHub Pages pt. 1

  Hosted by Lily Davisson '22

  Learn the basics of HTML and CSS to create static websites and create a one page personal website.

  Setup instructions

  1. Install Visual Studio Code

  2. Install the Live Server extension for Visual Studio Code by navigating to the extensions tab on the left vertical menu (looks like building blocks) and searching for Live Server by Ritwick Dey.

  3. Install Mozilla Firefox

     You can use Firefox or Chrome for web development, but Firefox has the best tools.

  4. Set Firefox as your default browser for when you launch live server. Open the VScode command palette under view>command palette

     

  5. Type preferences, and click on the "open workspace settings" result

     

  6. In settings, search for "liveServer.settings.CustomBrowser" and switch the dropdown from null to Firefox

     

  7. Create a GitHub account: https://github.com/

  8. Follow along with the "complete" code here. You can look through the files and copy and paste into your own files or clone (copy, basically) the entire repository (all of the files) to your computer. We will also go over this part in the demo, but feel free to clone it on your own time as well.

     Ex to clone the repo to your desktop: (type these in a terminal, but do not include the $ symbol, that indicates you should be typing the following code in a terminal or command line)

     $ cd Desktop $ git clone https://github.com/techimmersionweek22/Demo-Personal-Site.git

     Here's an article with some more detail.

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

  • Open presentation slides in Google slides

  • Download presentation slides as PDF

  • "Complete" demo site repository

• Intro to IDEs

  Monday, March 28th, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Thanh Dang '25, Taz Syed '22

  Technically, you can write code on Microsoft Excel — but that doesn’t mean you have to. Learn about the most popular development tools and how they can help you write correct and maintainable code.

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Data Science Basics

  Wednesday, March 30th, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Taz Syed '22

  Data science is one of the most popular fields today, and almost every programmer will have to wrangle with data one way or another. Learn how to solve a data problem from start to finish, and see if statistical analysis is for you!

  Setup instructions

  • Setup Instructions

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Networking 101

  Friday, April 1st, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Alex Ng '22

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

  • Presentation Slides

  • Networking Tracker Spreadsheet

  Networking has become almost necessary to get a foot in the door to high-demand roles in industries like tech, finance, and consulting. Learn best practices regarding networking to land your dream job!

• Blockchain Basics

  Sunday, April 3rd, 5-6 PM

  Hosted by Alex Ng '22

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

  Blockchain is an emerging technology that has seen rapid growth and demand in recent years. This workshop will cover the technicals of what the blockchain is and offer a discussion on its potential.

• Python Basics

  Sunday, April 3rd, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Honorine Kwizera '24

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• GitHub 101

  Monday, April 4th, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Josiah Paintsil '23

  The GitHub 101 workshop will be an interactive workshop where we go over all the basics of GitHub. We will go over how to use GitHub for personal use, collaborative use, review some helpful commands, and practice some useful yet advanced techniques.

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Command Line Fundamentals

  Tuesday, April 5th, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Zach Birenbaum '22

  This workshop will cover important skills for working at the command line locally, or on a remote server, including navigation, file editing, writing and using basic scripts, building applications and more.

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Java Basics

  Tuesday, April 5th, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Maeve Farley '24

  Come learn the basics of Java, one of the most used programming languages! The fundamentals of Java will be taught before applying them to some practice problems.

  Setup instructions

  • Visit https://codingbat.com/java

  • Click create new account in top right hand corner (unless you already have an account)

  • Use preferred email and create a password

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• R Basics

  Thursday, April 7th, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Taz Syed '22

  Setup instructions coming soon

• No Code Tools

  Thursday, April 7th, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Josiah Paintsil '23

  The No-Code tools workshop is an interactive workshop where we will learn how to use popular No-Code tools to create an app, handle a database, establish automation, and deploy that app.

INTERMEDIATE

• Django Framework

  Tuesday, March 29th, 6-7 PM

  Building a web app with Django and React pt. 1

  Hosted by Bonnie Chin '22

  Learn how to build a Django backend for a to-do app.

  Required Experience:

  • Some experience with Python

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Javascript Basics

  Wednesday, March 30th, 5-6 PM

  Hosted by Lily Davisson '22

  Learn the basics of JavaScript and make a static website interactive. If you do not have any experience with JavaScript, attend this before React Basics.

  Suggested Experience:

  • Experience with a c-like scripting language (Ex: Java, C), think curly braces and semi-colons

  • An understanding of the browser DOM OR attendance of web development basics workshop

  Setup instructions

  Note: Code lines beginning with the '$' symbol indicate that everything AFTER the $ should be typed/copied in a terminal or command line.

  1. Install Node JS using the install wizard. Use all of the recommended settings, don't change anything.

  2. Ensure Node is installed correctly. Open a terminal (On Windows, open start and search for Windows terminal, on mac search for terminal from the launchpad) and type

     $ node -v

     You should see something like the following:

     

     If it does not recognize node, it has not been installed correctly.

  3. Create a Github account if you do not already have one.

  4. Install Git: https://git-scm.com/

  5. Clone the JS-Basics-Worshop repository wherever you would like. It contains some start code.

     Ex to clone the repo to your desktop:

     $ cd Desktop $ git clone https://github.com/techimmersionweek22/JS-Basics-Workshop.git

     If you use https instead of ssh to clone the repo as seen in the example above you will need to log in to your Github account as directed after you paste the above code.

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

  • Intro To JavaScript Jupyter Notebook

• Personal Website Deployment using GitHub Pages

  Wednesday, March 30th, 6-7 PM

  Building a personal website with GitHub Pages pt. 2

  Hosted by Ahmed Kamran '23

  Learn how to host your personal websites for free by using GitHub Pages

  Suggested Experience:

  • Attendance of Web Development workshop

  Setup instructions

  • Create a GitHub account: https://github.com/

  • Install Git: https://git-scm.com/

  • Install VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• React Basics

  Thursday, March 31st, 6-7 PM

  Building a web app with Django and React pt. 2

  Hosted by Ahmed Kamren '23

  Learn the fundamentals of React, a front-end framework for building web applications with JavaScript, by building the front-end for a to-do list app.

  Required Experience:

  • Experience with Javascript OR attendance of Javascript basics workshop

  Setup instructions

  1. Install Node JS: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

  2. Install VS Code: https://code.visualstudio.com

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• How to contribute to Open Source

  Friday, April 1st, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Zach Birenbaum '22

  This workshop will cover the necessary topics for someone to be able to make quality contributions to open source. Topics will include intermediate git functionality, choosing projects to contribute to, determining features to implement, guidelines for working in open source, and an interactive activity.

  Setup instructions

  • Create a GitHub account: https://github.com/

  • Install Git: https://git-scm.com/

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• Unit Testing

  Tuesday, April 5th, 11:20 AM - 12:20 PM

  Hosted by Raluca Ghilea '22

  A fundamental aspect of software engineering is code testing. In this workshop, you will learn how to write tests for individual functions using Python's unittest library. We will also cover more complex topics such as mocking and stubbing, and you will get a chance to practice writing your own unit tests!

  Required Experience:

  • Some experience with Python OR attendance of the Intro to Python workshop

  Setup instructions

  • Download Python: https://www.python.org/downloads/

  • Install Git: https://git-scm.com/

  • Create a GitHub account: https://github.com/

  • Clone this repository: https://github.com/techimmersionweek22/Unit-Testing.git

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

• REST APIs

  Wednesday, April 6th, 6-7 PM

  Hosted by Raluca Ghilea '22

  Most applications on the internet communicate with each other via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In this workshop, we will go over the fundamentals of HTTP requests and REST design principles, and we will apply these concepts in building a simple REST API using the FastAPI framework.

  Required Experience:

  • Some experience with Python OR attendance of the Intro to Python workshop

  Setup instructions coming soon

ADVANCED

• Functional Programming with OCaml

  Saturday, April 2nd, 7-8 PM

  Hosted by Taz Syed '22

  Recording and other materials

  • Recording

  How many times has your program crashed due to a null pointer exception or a runtime error? Learn a functional programming language that maps much closer to the way humans naturally think, and ensures that if your program compiles then it works.

  Required Experience:

  • Experience with a scripting language like Python or Java

• Building a single page app using Django and React

  Wednesday, April 6th, 7-8 PM

  Building a web app with Django and React pt. 3

  Hosted by Lily Davisson '22

  Combine what you learned in the Django Framework and React Basics workshops to create a dynamic single page to-do list application.

  Required Experience:

  • Attendance of React Basics workshop

  • Attendance of Django workshop

  Setup instructions

  Clone the repository that has our progress up to this point.

Workshop Series

This series consists of the following two workshops:

1. Web Development Fundamentals

   Monday, March 28th, 6-7 PM

2. Personal Website Deployment using GitHub Pages

   Wednesday, March 30th, 6-7 PM

This series consists of the following three workshops:

1. Django Framework

   Tuesday, March 29th, 6-7 PM

2. React Basics

   Thursday, March 31st, 6-7 PM

3. Building a single page app using Django and React

   Wednesday, April 6th, 7-8 PM