Web Development for Non-Developers: The Big Picture

As a part of our outreach and marketing, one of my roles as a coding bootcamp instructor was to introduce technical topics to a non-technical audience so they would know a bit more about what they were getting into before deciding to attend a bootcamp. Over that year and a half I came up with a number of different talks.

My favorite was a talk about the big picture of web development. At the beginning I would ask the audience to start calling out terms related to programming that they had heard before. As they mentioned them, I would write them all down round the edges of a big whiteboard. Since most of these people were looking at coding bootcamps, most of the terms were either programming languages or frameworks, though you would get a good smattering of other terms as well. I started the rest of the meeting with a short discussion and diagram of how the Internet works, and then started explaining the differences between front end, back end, and other things based on that, attempting to put technologies in their proper contexts.

This screencast is an attempt at recreating that. The process works better with an audience though, so perhaps a live recording would be better. Perhaps I'll get some volunteers at some point to do that. Also, I am a bit rusty. But in the meantime, here it is. If you are a non- or barely-technical person and you want to know more about web development, you might find this useful.

If you have any thoughts or follow up questions, let me know!

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