Welcome to the first NodeSchool newsletter! NodeSchool is a 100% volunteer run open source projects with chapters around the world. We produce a variety of self-guided + automated workshops to teach web skills. NodeSchool started in the Node.js community but has since expanded to offer workshops for things like graphics programming, source control and JavaScript.
These newsletters are drafted by the community and are meant to give a glimpse of some of the things that have happened in the NodeSchool world, both online and offline.
Workshop Spotlight: webgl-workshop
In preparation for the latest CampJS, a JavaScript focused "summer camp" style event that happens regularly in the Australian Hinterland, 3D graphics wizards @hughsk and @mikoalysenko of the stack.gl crew created a new workshop for learning the fundamentals of WebGL from the ground up.
webgl-workshop is the sequel to their previous workshop shader-school, which focuses on graphics programming fundamentals with the GLSL language. shader-school has been one of the most interesting NodeSchool workshops because it's one of the only ones that doesn't involve any JavaScript. The new webgl-workshop builds on the GLSL shader fundamentals and dives into the world of JavaScript based 3D programming using WebGL.
A couple of months ago NodeSchool Chapters were introduced, and we now have 47 registered chapters around the world! To start a chapter you simply apply for membership by opening a GitHub issue and then you set up the infrastructure for your repo, all on GitHub:
At the recent JSDC conference in Taipei, Taiwan the topic of "Why isn't there a NodeSchool chapter in Taiwan yet?" came up. Then with only 24 hours notice (!!!) @clonn and the JSDC team got 60 attendees to come to the first dedicated NodeSchool Taiwan event. It was hosted in partnership with the Mozilla Taiwan Community Space in Taipei. They have a awesome event space next door to their regular community space that they rented out for the evening so we could hold all of the NodeSchoolers.
The event went from 7 - 10PM. We started with me (@maxogden) doing an intro to nodeschool and learnyounode, which was live translated into Chinese. I also showed people http://generalhenry.com/ as a fallback in case they couldn't get learnyounode installed.
After a few minutes @substack mentioned that he had recently found the javascripting workshop by @sethvincent, so we decided to tell attendees about it. Sure enough a lot of attendees lacked a lot of JS experience and immediately switched from learnyounode to javascripting.
Two women who attended, who both work at http://womany.net/, a lifestyle blog for women in Taiwan, stayed late and finished the javascripting workshop and are now planning on starting a regular class to get more women in Taiwan into web development by hosting javascripting workshops as a sort of gentle introduction to NodeSchool in general.
I also tried a new technique that worked pretty well: using NodeSchool and GitHub stickers as bait to get people to register on the Taiwan NodeSchool Team. Basically we announced that if you want NodeSchool + GitHub stickers you can come up to the front and enter your GitHub username into my laptop. I had them enter it into the 'Invite or add users to this team' field of the Taiwan team page under the NodeSchool org on GitHub. This page is not publicly viewable for some reason (I emailed GitHub today to ask why this is) but it looks like this:
Now we have ~50 people on the Taiwan team, which means they can use the nodeschool/taiwan repo as a discussion board to talk about nodeschool stuff and plan future events in Chinese.
This concludes the first newsletter. There will be more in the future! You can find the source markdown for all newsletters here.
NodeSchool is fully volunteer run. Nobody gets paid to work on anything and everything is open source. If you want to get involved here are some suggestions:
- Internationalizing workshop content
- Documentation about how to run a chapter
- Fielding questions from workshop learners (click watch to subscribe to questions)