In this informative session, you'll be introduced to the Joomla! Content Management System through a demonstration style presentation that walks you through the process of setting up a Joomla! site including categories, articles, menu items, modules, and template installation. We'll review the capabilities of the Joomla! Content Management system along with how to expand its core offerings with proprietary extensions, plugins and modules. Showcase websites will be included to illustrate the capabilities.

We'll talk about the fundamentals of participating in Free Software projects and communities, which is why this is in the Fundamentals track, but we'll also talk about how we as individuals and as groups can shape what our powerful software is built to do— and how we build power through coördination in the context of extreme power inequalities that we, mere web developers and other information technology workers, are well-positioned to change, which is why this could be in the Revolution track, if there was one.

How Do You Make a Difference?

In this track, learners will learn about the basics of the Rails 4 environment and learn how to set it up for development and build an app that works just like twitter! We will deploy our apps to heroku to share with our friends. I will also share more resources for learning.

If you've made a website lately, you've used CSS. If you've used CSS there's probably a head-sized dent in the wall near your desk! Sass is an amazingly useful CSS pre-processor that brings a suite of programmatic tools such as variables, operators and functions to your CSS. It helps you keep your style code tidy and dry by letting you nest styles inside the selectors to which they apply, and break your styles into logically organized partial files among other wonders.

HTML and CSS are sibling markup languages that every web site is built with. HTML serves as the structure, with CSS adding style. If you think of a house, HTML would be the foundation, the walls, the doors…and CSS would be the paint color, the light fixtures, the curtains, etc.   In this session, we’ll have a crash course on the basics to put together a web page with HTML and CSS:

• Tools for writing your code
• Working with HTML tags like headings, lists, images, links
• Adding style with CSS
• Getting your work online

As an instructor with the Women's Coding Collective, at the Harvard Extension School, and Wellesley College, I spend a lot of time teaching people how to code. As one would expect, this invariably leads to lots of calls for advice from students: How do I get started in this field?

 

In this keynote, I'll walk through the advice I typically give when faced with this very good question.

 

Key points: