I am hungry and itching for my first immersive class with Momentum to start. We have a great program put together that is going to change people’s careers and their lives. One of the pieces of the program I’m most excited about is called “Development Practices.”

In putting together our new curriculum, I spent a lot of time thinking about what’s missing from code school curricula. I realized that in the past, I’ve taught people to code, but the harder part is teaching them to be developers.

There are certain skills you’re expected to have as a developer that you learn from experience, and if you can walk into a job with these skills as a junior developer, you are ahead of the pack. The skills I identified are:

• Asking questions effectively
• Real debugging – beyond print statements
• Pair programming
• Researching technologies
• Giving and accepting feedback
• Reviewing pull requests
• Speaking on technical topics
• Whiteboarding

That last one might be controversial to use in interviews, but I haven’t had a job in years where I didn’t have to write code on a whiteboard almost daily, or at least design systems on a whiteboard.

Designing Momentum has been a chance to rethink code education. I can’t wait to share what we have with our first batch of immersive students.