20 December 2013
JavaScript, jQuery, and Angular Training (and Why Sharing Is Important to Gaslight)
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of joining SuperChris and 5/3 Bank employees in downtown Cincinnati for a JavaScript workshop. I was asked to come along to film the training in case other employees wanted to watch it later. As a design student, I was lucky to attend the workshop and learn more about client-side development.
As a novice developer, I was able to approach the workshop with a beginner’s mind (or as a victim, SuperChris said). SuperChris was a funny, yet very knowledgable instructor. He was able to keep the whole group engaged and also challenge them to grow past their current ability. The richness of the workshop came from learning about new ideas, being able to practice them in class, and ask a knowledgable teacher questions when we got stuck.
This training session was useful for front-end developers, like me, who want to improve a user’s experience in an app. But it was even more ground-breaking for back-end developers learning how to do more heavy-lifting on the client-side. We explored JavaScript’s syntax and common usage, as well as how jQuery makes everyone’s work easier by giving us shorthand ways to manipulate the DOM. Finally, we ended the 2-day training workshop with an introduction to Angular (which, I’ll admit, went bit over my head).
Although this was my first time attending a training workshop, Gaslight has been doing it for years. Gaslight is dedicated to sharing awesome things in their community, which must explain their motto hung proudly on their office wall. Not only do they go out to other companies to train employees, but they also invite user groups and meetups to the Gaslight office for mutual sharing and networking.
Gaslight doesn’t have just 1 teacher either. The whole company has a culture of learning, building and sharing awesome things with others. If you keep up with our blog, you’ll see posts about what our employees have been hacking on, like Rails Engines and Angular + Firebase. Our team also speaks at conferences, like the recent Cincinnati Day of Agile, and volunteers our time at community events like GiveCamp and Rails Day Cincinnati.
If you would like more training in JavaScript, frameworks like Angular or Ember, agile software development methodologies, or Ruby on Rails, tell your employer to email us or schedule an office hour to discuss hosting a workshop at your company. We also offer a couple of our video training courses online, including BackBone.js and coming soon Ember.js.
Keep learning, building and sharing!
