Collaboration for the

Udacity & AT&T Backend Nano Degree

[email protected] | 630.551.8482 MAKERSQUARE.COM

What is MakerSquare? MakerSquare is a highly selective school that has trained over 100 qualified professionals to be full-time web and software developers through an in-person immersive training program.

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We have included details about the MakerSquare
 program as well as two projects that represent the skills and principles we find necessary to find a full-time position as a backend developer. We hope these two projects can serve as a benchmark in order to develop the back-end nano degree.

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Job Placement 116 graduates. 105 were software/web development career seekers. 98 of our 105 career seeking graduates are working as developers

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93% placement rate from start to date

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Job Placement (cont.) We work with our graduates to place them where they want. We place our developers as frontend or backend software developers. The companies they choose to work with range from small tech agencies to large tech giants.

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Our software engineering focused curriculum allows our graduates to be language agnostic: they have worked with Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Ember, Python, C++, Java, PhP, and the variety of other JavaScript frameworks (jQuery, Node, D3, etc.)

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MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Job Placement (cont.) We reach out to employers to ensure they are happy with hiring our developers.

“It was nice to interview individuals that have both relevant technicals skills and real-world work experience.”

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R.C. JOHNSON WP ENGINE, CTO

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“For the hires we needed, we chose to hire from MakerSquare over a University, because they had relevant skills. We wanted someone that could write code on their first day”

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HUDSON CARLTON PAYPAL, ENGINEERING MANAGER

See more reviews here

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Class & Curriculum We are constantly evolving our curriculum based on feedback. We have also consistently transformed our curriculum every 3 months. Students often remark they are jealous of the upcoming class because of all the new curriculum being designed.

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Our feedback loop consists of feedback from students as well as employers. Employer feedback has involved our instructors and curriculum designers meeting in-person with developers at Mass Relevance, PayPal, YouEarnedIt, Datafiniti, T3, and Google on a regular basis.

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Class & Curriculum (cont.) We take pride in providing each and every student an absolutely amazing experience.

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5/5 on Yelp reviews

4.9/5 on Google reviews

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

MakerSquare Class & Curriculum (cont.) Our students continue to have great things to say.

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“I conceptually learned how computer languages work.” NEIL MITHIPATI, COHORT 4 DANA LEV

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“The environment is one of enthusiastic learning. It was a joy to be around intelligent, knowledge-seeking individuals.” EMMA LAROCHE, COHORT 3 BYPASS MOBILE

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“You need to dive in head first and just try to absorb anything and everything and the investment will be worth it immediately.”

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BEN WHITE, COHORT 3 PAYPAL

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree We have included two projects that represent the skills and principles we find necessary to find a full-time position as a backend software/web developer. The projects are Gear2Peer and Tyto. Both of these projects are Rails-based and focus on software design on the backend.

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Click to see the code on Github: Gear2Peer and Tyto

! “In our curriculum, we stress Software Architecture and Design in the context of Web Development.”

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SHEHZAN DEVANI CO-FOUNDER, LEAD INSTRUCTOR

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree THE PRINCIPLES WE STRESS ARE:

So!ware Development Modularity Separation of Concerns, Single Responsibility Testing

Web Development Ruby on Rails API & Gem Usage API Creation Full Stack Development (includes JavaScript & HTML/CSS)

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree So!ware Development Principles Modularity. This is the principle that any piece of your application should be interchangeable with other similar components without changing other parts of your application.

! Tyto

This application’s delivery mechanism fits this definition. Rails is just one of many delivery mechanisms that this application can use. As seen on their Github page, there are 2 alternates that it can use - Twilio and Puma. This shows that multiple delivery mechanisms can re-use the same piece of code without needing to rewrite or change any code.

Gear2Peer They show this through their persistence layer. They have it interchangeable, so they can use either ActiveRecord or just an in-memory database. Although in practice, you would not want to use in-memory databases for this, they demonstrated the principle of modularity

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree So!ware Development Principles (cont.) Separation of Concerns & Single Responsibility principle. All portions of your code should have only one responsibility. This allows your code to be decoupled, more testable, and easier to maintain and build upon. • Database related logic - they separate the schema, the migrations, and the seeds from the other logic by storing it in the database folder. • Rails as a delivery mechanism - located in the web or Rails_server folder. It only has logic related to displaying the information via Rails. It delegates all other responsibilities to the application logic. Because Rails’ only responsibility is to deliver information to the user, they separate this concern from the rest. • Application logic is within the lib folder - this has all of the business logic for the application. They choose to not have logic in their Rails application, as many newer developers do, because of their understanding that Rails is a small component of a larger project. • Entities - contains the different units of business related objects • Database - contains logic about how the application interacts with the given database • Use Cases - Any complex logic is put into this folder. Each task that a user may want to do, is converted into a Use Case that interacts with both entities and database • By separating their concerns, they make the code a lot easier to navigate through, and a lot easier to maintain in the future. MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree So!ware Development Principles (cont.) Testing. If you look through the spec folder, you’ll see that every aspect of this application is fully-tested. We teach TDD from the get-go which encourages students to always prove their code to be correct via testing. This group in particular went above and beyond to learn about testing constructs such as Fixtures and VCR (to test HTTP interactions)

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION

Skills Needed for Nano Degree Web Development Principles Ruby on Rails. Both of these applications use Ruby on Rails and demonstrate a good understanding of web development. They both use the concepts of MVC architecture, and they both use databases and templates to create dynamic web pages. Note that there are slight differences from a traditional Rails application. They’ve put their Rails application instructions inside of separate folders, and their database logic is inside of the lib folder.

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API and Gem usage. Both applications use multiple APIs and gems to enhance their functionality. Gear2Peer uses the Amazon S3 API for remote file storage, and they use several popular gems such as BCrypt (security), VCR (testing), RMagick (image logic), and more. Tyto uses the Twilio API to give users access to their application via text messages.

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Creating APIs. Looking at several of the controllers within Tyto, you can see that they are rendering JSON objects. This is because of their understanding of Ajax requests and ability to create APIs that a clientside application can use.

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Full Stack Development. Aside from just the Rails and backend portion of these applications, our students learn to employ the full stack including client-side JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and Ruby on Rails.

MAKERSQUARE - UDACITY, & AT&T BACKEND NANO DEGREE COLLABORATION