Roadmap
This is your roadmap. This is what you need to study to go from not working in IT, to working in IT. It's linear, opinionated, highly focused, and designed to be read from top to bottom (and nothing can be skipped unless you're super confident with that particular technology or skill.)
Here's what your journey will look like:
Big Versions!
You'll likely want a much bigger version of the roadmap, so I've provided two links to much bigger copies:
The whole roadmap is divided into Stages, which in turn are broken down into Topics. This will make it easier for you to set goals and achieve success in chunks, rather than having months worth of work to do and simply being overwhelmed by everything.
Our "Why?"
We're going to imagine we received the following email from a friend of ours:
Help!
I need to share long, messy hyper-links with my customers but the special characters are causing
problems in some emails. I'm losing out on business!
I've tried everything I can think of. What can I do?
Cheers,
Carl.
We need to help our friend out, so we're going to build a URL shortner, like Bitly. A URL shortner allows you to shorten (hence the name) URLs like this:
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10256233?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop#:~:text=Go%20to%20a%20page%20with,Select%20Copy%20link%20to%20highlight.
Into something like this:
http://bit.ly/3TiL1Sc
This will really help Carl out because now all the complex symbols and characters in the original link won't confuse or break his customer's email clients. What's more, you can setup such a system to track the clicks and a lot of other data. Only problem is Carl is very tight with money, so of course he doesn't want to pay any money - typical!
So that's going to be our challenge throughout this course: we're going to build our own URL shortner web app, from scratch, and host it for Carl using increasingly progressive technologies, from EC2 all the way up to Serverless. It's going to be called Tightly - because it'll be a free, simpler version of Bitly, but for Carl, who's tight with money. Get it? (Sorry, Carl.)
The architecture
We're going to take Tightly through several architectural stages. By the time you're done with Stage Six, the final stage, your architecture is going to look like this:
Note
You can click on the images to make them bigger. The X in the top-right closes the popup
gallery view.
The How
To accomplish all of this, you're going to go through a few Stages (in order):
Each of the Stages in the roadmap will be broken down into a high detailed plan in their respective section, to the left. There you'll find more details about each section such as why it's important and what you'll be doing.
The ultimate goal here is for you to build something based on a pre-existing application - Wordpress in our case - then build your own software solution. You'll take ownership of that software solution and run with it until the very end of your training.
That's how we're going to take from you zero knowledge to job ready.
Next
Move onto Stage One and start moving through your roadmap.