consensys-academy / basic-training

Open-source repo for ConsenSys Academy's Basic Training: a software fundamentals course covering Unix-like OSes, CLI, Git, Javascript and more

Basic Training

Table of Contents

Introduction
Purpose
Fundamentals
Tool Bag
Course Outline
Contributions

Introduction

First, please give this repo a star ⭐️!

If you are interested in Ethereum development, be sure to have a look at our DevPortal and other course offerings.

• Dev Portal
• Course Offerings

Purpose

This course aims to teach software developers the best practices for using fundamental software development tools.

It is aimed at new learners and intermediate software engineers. This course is helpful for general software engineering and for those wishing to enter blockchain development. Prior to digging into Web3 development, having a firm grasp on some of the core tools you'll use throughout your projects will better equip you for success.

This course helps showcase the tools a developer has at their fingertips and will show you some tips and tricks along the way.

Fundamentals

It's the little things that count. In a professional software developer's life, these tools are like air: ever-present, all-encompassing, and direly needed. To be at our best, we need to learn how to utilize these properly.

We believe being a developer means you're a forever student. New versions, syntax, tools, and documentation constantly roll out, only learning the minimum in order to achieve X may be a slippery slope.

Too often, we are taught what is "good enough" to accomplish the job, but not necessarily the best practices. This results in compounding bad practices, resulting in wasted time and unnecessary agony.

We built this mini-course to give a place to learn these fundamental tools in a deliberate, focused way. This came from our experience of seeing many people signing up for our Blockchain Frontend Bootcamp and having to learn the fundamentals, frontend development, and blockchain skills.

Learning these tools is similar to learning how to breathe properly. It seems foolish at first. But if done properly, it's the key to a meditative rest that allows you to get into the zone. Or at least not deal with an unnecessary disturbance in your everyday workflow.

We hope to pre-emptively help with many of the issues we've seen people struggle with over the years.

Tool Bag

If you're staring at a code editor for hours on end, shouldn't it be tricked out in the best way possible? What you learn here could make your developer experience not only more efficient but fun!

Even if you're very familiar with the technology in these lessons, we encourage you to flip through them. Along with introductory material, we've curated tips and tricks for optimizing and improving your use of these tools.

We want to help ensure you not only have the tools, but the fundamental knowledge on how to make them work for you, espcially as you start to develop your workflow & preferences.

Course Outline

In this mini-course, we will go through:

• Unix / Linux Operating Systems
• Command Line
• Code Editor
• Git
• Javascript / Node / Web Frameworks

We will provide some material in these lessons, but we'll mainly provide links to other places where you can learn more. There are a number of fantastic resources we point you towards and similarly to being a dev, exploring the links and documentation will help solidify your knowledge.

If you never left the mini-course, after completing it, you'll be able to find your way around a computer pretty well. However, please follow the links within a lesson to dive deeper, deepen your knowledge, and enhance your developer experience.

Now, let's take a deep breath, relax, and learn the way.

Contributions

This course will grow over time. Contributions are HIGHLY encouraged and desired. If you see an error, please open an issue and submit a pull request.

We envision this course to grow over time—sections on "contributing to open source" would be helpful. Should you have an idea, please open an issue and discuss it with the team. Pull requests are highly appreciated.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for how to make a contribution.

An example of this process found below: Found in the top right of the repository information

1. Fork it (https://github.com/ConsenSys-Academy/basic-training)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b branchName)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Added X input')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin branchName)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Built by ConsenSys and

basic-training's Issues

[Suggestion] Add DCO content

A suggestion for the open source contribution section would be to add some content or links on contributing to codebases with a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), as they are very common in open source.

Further reading:
https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/BESU/DCO
https://devlog.hexops.com/2021/cla-not-for-open-source-use-a-developer-certificate-of-origin

walk through git workflow for a project that requires certain branching strategy

The Git section, Module 6, is a bit light in terms of walking through common git flows. It'd be great to use a real-world example to show forking a project, making changes, committing those changes, then issuing a PR. Also good to address what happens when you need to rebase your commits to make descriptions pass requirements by the repo or project.

Add build script to process markdown into HTML with auto footer and header

This is an advanced request that will take a few months to build out -- a build process similar to The Odin Project, where lessons can be written in Markdown, but then incorporated into the site itself with an automated build process. Odin Project is written with Perl, I believe.

add linux commands

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/linux-bsd-command-line-101-using-awk-sed-and-grep-in-the-terminal/

Add "check date for tutorial" somewhere in the course

This is a bit random and low hanging fruit, but maybe in the "How to Ask a Question" section, we can add that folks should check when tutorials were written. Particularly for blockchain, specifically Ethereum, these tutorials go stale rather quickly, so you want to check the date and the main libraries used to make sure you don't get weird errors different from the tutorial.

Please don't just copy the above message into the HTML somewhere. If someone could explain it a bit and find a reasonable place to put it, that'd be great!

We're open to a new section about troubleshooting, maybe?

Broken Links

The link structure of basic training has changed with the latest deployment to GitHub pages. For example, thttps://consensys-academy.github.io/basic-training/M1/L1/ is no longer a valid link, causing a 404 error message. The same is true for the other modules and lessons.

Add Linter for HTML

Since there will be a number of contributors, it'd be great to have a linter for the HTML. This could be done on the local level or whenever a PR is submitted. Up to the dev!

discuss --force-with-lease pushing

Add text to README.md

Add text to basic training README.md describing:

• CTA to star repo
• The target audience
• Motivation for creating the mini-course
• Motivation for a user to take mini-course
• Overview of repo/course

Empty link in basic training

In this section:
Advanced: Pull Requests, Rebasing and Guidelines: Contributing to Open Source

The link to Pull request tutorial shows an empty repository.

history expansion prompted by the "!" char in the echo "Hello World!" command

For bash & zsh shells the ! character combined with a " prompts history expansion , so when I enter echo "Hello World!" the shell outputs a prompt.

Removing the ! character or using single quotes works as intended by the tutorial:

add this to the node section

https://nodejs.dev/learn/run-nodejs-scripts-from-the-command-line

add to command line section

http://bashrcgenerator.com/

Unfinished link to "Edit this page in Github"

In https://github.com/ConsenSys-Academy/basic-training/blob/main/M5/L6/index.html you forgot to edit the last link. There are still MODULE_NUM and LESSON_NUM

https://github.com/ConsenSys-Academy/basic-training/edit/main/MODULE_NUM/LESSON_NUM/index.html

Also the link to https://github.com/ConsenSys-Academy/pull-request-tutorial is an empty Github page.

Add to Github Section -- "First Contributions" tutorial

https://github.com/firstcontributions/first-contributions

add formation to the OSes section

https://github.com/minamarkham/formation is a setup script to make your mac better for development and design

would love to add it to the Unix-like OS section, namely L3, more resources. It shouldn't be used by everyone, but I think would be helpful for devs who are familiar with some of the tools installed.

Add Figlet for ASCII art

Find a fun place to add how to install and use figlet, or other random fun things to do on the command line!

Probably would go somewhere in Module 3: Command Line, maybe More Resources section?

Add how to use nodeJS to run snippets of code found in Stack Exchange

I'd have a suggestion in Module 1, "How to ask a question"

How about adding a short section how to use node index.js as a REPL, where index.js is a snippet of code, to test the answers of people to a Stack Exchange question. Some answers are good, some answers give a general idea but their snippet of code is buggy. So it's better to test it separately first, instead of including it immediately in your own code to test.

Also, many tutorials assume the reader knows how to run the snippets of code. Like this one about OrbitDB

Sentence to edit in Javascript vs Python

In page "Javascript vs Python"
this sentence would need to be edited to be understandable:

An analogy might be a browser extension's relationship to a browser: the extension needs to be installed by was developed by a third-party to extend the capacity of the browser

add to ssh section

https://rabexc.org/posts/using-ssh-agent

https://rabexc.org/posts/pitfalls-of-ssh-agents

add to VSCode personalization section

https://realdougwilson.com/writing/coding-with-character

javascript quiz comes out of nowhere, very technical

per Discord, it'd be good to make more clear resources for students before taking Javascript quiz

Add CONTRIBUTING.md

Create a CONTRIBUTING.md file to root that covers:

• CTA from top of README.md: give star, check out ConsenSys Academy, etc.
• How to set up the project
• How to setup origin and upstream
• Brief gitflow description
• Branching & forking strategy (main -> dev -> feat / update / fix)
• branch naming convention
• commit message convention
• Add Made with ❤️ by ConsenSys

No Bing advanced search criteria or Bing chat included

I use Bing search and Bing Chat (based on ChatGPT) as my preferred search tools over Google. I have created a fork and will add the related documentation in this area if you wish to include it as an alternative to "Google it"

Add to Command Line -- resources

h/t @tesla809

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_testing/Understanding_client-side_tools/Command_line

https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/reference.html

Linux / Unix:

https://caiorss.github.io/C-Cpp-Notes/Linux-unix-system-programming.html

https://notes.shichao.io/apue/ch1/

add google navigation tricks to how to google section

switch between windows

toggle between tabs

jump to address bar

Dealing with Merge Conflicts on PRs

Want to put this tutorial in the advanced Git section:

https://akshayranganath.github.io/Git-Pull-Handling-Merge-Conflict/

add to how to google section and call out some of the tips!

https://denic.hashnode.dev/use-google-like-a-pro

https://twitter.com/Insharamin/status/1406867009350955009

typo in url on basic-training/M1/L1/index.htm

Line 48 of this file has a typo, states bsaic-training instead of basic-training.

Typo and issue with wording in the M6 Javascript Exam

For Question three there is an error with a missing beginning parenthesis, this error is not supposed to happen as the correct answer is how the code would work sans typo. Question one the wording seems weird and I couldn't decide if I was supposed to select from the most popular of the primitive data types that were listed. Question eight I'm unsure of, I think that the standard only specifies 3 states for a promise, though it does mention settled descriptively it doesn't indicate that settled is a state, see http://262.ecma-international.org/11.0/#sec-promise-objects

Sorry if this isn't in a correct format or doesn't actually belong here as an issue, wasn't sure where to provide feedback and am not familiar with using github.

Remove no trace mentions from all <a> links

Emmet expansions for links with target="_blank" also add rel="noopener noreferrer" to all href tags, like this example here:

<a href="https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/wiki/Themes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this page</a>

It'd be great to do a "Find All" and delete in VSCode or similar of all the rel="noopener noreferrer" that are in the course, as they mask where the user is coming from.

Someone will have to clone the repo locally on their machine and run Find and Replace on local editor

Add enki's Git section to learn more

discuss difference between npm vs npx?

not sure about this one

add this to "how to ask a question" section

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/how-to-learn-stuff-quickly/

Add asciinema examples for common command line commands

Module 3, Lesson 3: Command Line: Common Commands

It would be helpful to use Asciinema to record these different commands being used. Best to use a default terminal setting in case they need to be rerecorded by someone later. Asciinema is preferred because it can be used in a number of different settings and is very light!

Reach out here in this issue if you're interested!

Developer Roadmap

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Add description of other Linux distros

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7e77y/the-dollar149-smartphone-that-could-bring-the-linux-mobile-ecosystem-to-life

Discussing KDE vs GNOME and windowing styles, for example ...

Great general resources to add

Great tips here as well as a good contributing guidelines!

https://github.com/trimstray/the-book-of-secret-knowledge#black_small_square-developers