Chronological Index of Blog Posts

The initial construction process is complete enough that I’m ready for a soft opening. I welcome visitors and would greatly appreciate feedback. After you have looked around a bit and think this might be helpful to you, please let me know. On posts like this you can simply leave a comment. It should also give … Continue reading Post 1: Welcome to my mentoring site!

Philemon Bahati has been a friend for over a year now and I had the pleasure of meeting him in person in April/May 2023 in Bukavu, DR Congo where he lives. He has been actively reviewing this site and taking on challenges. During his reviews he has made a number of recommendations and authored some … Continue reading Post 2: Welcome a new contributor: Philemon

I first met Destin in Bukavu in May 2023 during my first visit. He impressed me then with his breadth of knowledge in web development. His review of this site has solidified that impression. He has a wealth of information and does his research very thoroughly. As a result I invited him to edit the … Continue reading Post 3: Welcome a new contributor: ASHUZA Destin

Today is a big day in the history of this effort for several reasons! Our first cohort #1 has now finished the introductory challenges and are ready to work as a team. Meet Philémon , Destin , and Efatha . Two of our members have also finished projects that are important contributions to this site. … Continue reading Post 4: A Big Celebration!

My last post announced that cohort #1 was beginning their first project together. I am very pleased to tell you that they are hard at work and making good progress. There are in fact two efforts underway: Philemon is the team leader on this project. He is wearing several hats and juggling those hats effectively. … Continue reading Post 5: The cohort #1 team is busy!

Last week as the cohort-1 team was busy working on their respective parts of the demo project they hit a few speed bumps. There is certainly no surprise there. The work is complicated and with everybody busy working on their assigned issues in the same project repository it is inevitable that we would discover issues … Continue reading Post 6: Speed Bumps Drive Process Improvements

In my previous post (#6) I described how there were speed bumps in the team’s process that resulted from them working as individual developers often do. However, this created a few issues now that they were working on a team project. I was able to use that as a teaching opportunity to not only explain … Continue reading Post 7: Process Improvements Stick!

Cohort 1 is finishing up their demo project this next week. You can see the results posted on their Cohort-1 page. Also on that page is a short profile for each of them. Finally there is a short video interview of Efatha regarding his experience. The video was shot and produced by Théophile who is … Continue reading Post 8: Cohort 1 wrapping up their demo and cohort 2 is being organized.

NOTE: This is one of a few occasions where I will post that my readers should, and my students MUST stop and read. So, I’m going to use a label we use on our most important GitHub issues: I know that network security is such a bother! But, please, read this carefully! Network security begins … Continue reading So, you want to be a pro do you?

In my last security post I discussed the fact that good secure passwords and proper storage and use are every web user’s responsibility. This is even more important for those of us working as web developers. Providing a username and password to a website or application does primarily only one thing, and that is to … Continue reading Security lesson #2 – Secure Web Browsing Is Your Job Too

image source: Unsplash Over the past decade, the freelancing market has exploded, fueled by technology and the gig economy. This presents a golden opportunity for young people in Africa. It allows them to work remotely, earn income, and be their own boss. However, to thrive in this competitive space, they need the right skills and … Continue reading How Freelancing Can Drive Economic Growth

Cohort-1 and Cohort-2 will join to form the new A-Team. You can visit those links to their respective pages in our About section. Since Cohort-1 has successfully coached Cohort-2 through their preliminary training their next step is to work together to produce an application that is a second iteration to the Cohort-1 demo application. The … Continue reading We have a Team working together.

As announced on the post ‘We have a Team working together’ post, we have our first integrated team. More details coming soon…

AI is pretty awesome, and very helpful. BUT, there are serious implications and moral issues with it’s use. This will be the first post in a discussion that I would like everyone of my team members to read and respond to. So, I went to an AI expert and asked him this question: ”what are … Continue reading Let’s talk about proper use of AI in development.

We will soon be announcing a dozen or so new students in Cohort-3. This requires some changes to our mentoring and challenge process. Previous Challenge Page. We have been operating for two years now with Cohort-1 and Cohort-2 using the simple Take a challenge page. I trained the Cohort-1 guys, and they in turn started … Continue reading New Challenge Section For Cohort-3

The A-Team has completed the new version of our Student Survey Site and it is now online! There were a few hard links to the old demo.MichaelKentBurns.com site in these pages. Those in the Challenge pages have been corrected now. So, if you have been a reader and were not able to take a survey, … Continue reading Our New Student Survey Site is Online

The A-Team has been mentoring Cohort-3 for a couple of weeks now, and I must say that I am very impressed with the process and the results! The Cohort-3 members may not know this, but it has been a challenge to organize this effort. Philémon did an excellent job of conceiving of and organizing the … Continue reading Observations about the mentoring challenge

I have been working for over a year to get us some real professional work as a team (with pay). I have not finalized the deal quite yet, so I can’t give you many details at this time. The opportunity is a perfect extension of the work we have been focused on as a team: … Continue reading Learning the art of UI testing

There are a number of cloud computing providers, but the big 3 are: AWS – Amazon Web Services AWS overview Great YouTuber for understanding AWS – This woman does a great job of creating explainer and tutorial videos especially for AWS. Her “Explain Cloud Computing to Grandma” video is awesome. Azure – Microsoft Azure Google … Continue reading Cloud Compute Providers

I’m sorry that my last post was hasty. It was an incomplete page I was adding to the Cloud section and I did not have time to finish it yesterday. Nonetheless, I knew that several of you are anxious to start reading about Cloud. So, it is now an official page called Cloud Compute Providers. … Continue reading Adding new content to the Cloud section.