workshop: Zero to Webapp in Python

(This page is http://bit.ly/jta-webapp)

Slides: Google Slides

Workflowy outline

GitHub source code


Web development is amazingly complicated. Can we get away with not learning that much?  John will do an interactive workshop on how to start with nothing and wind up with a working web app!

Goal

Students will learn how to write a tiny webapp without their brains exploding. NON-GOAL: we'll simplify the stack to exclude many things required for real projects. We won't cover classes, many types, modules, the debugger, nor testing. We might get to packages, virtual environments, and 3rd party modules like Flask. The intent of this workshop is to get something working with a minimum of magic.

Technologies:

* Python!
* HTML+CSS (a tiny amount)
* Bash shell (a little)

The goal is to deliver a simple working webapp, then refine it with small changes, each time understanding _why_. Students  become much more comfortable and confident with Python, the console, and web technologies in general.