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Suncoast Developers Guild — the tech heart and soul of Tampa Bay’s St. Pete side — has been around for two years! Since opening their doors in the summer of 2018, this coding school has graduated 100 students in the tech community, and there are others who attended their previous incarnation as the Tampa Bay branch of The Iron Yard.
I used to be a developer evangelist who travelled across North America in another life, and I can tell you that one of the signs of a healthy tech community in a small- to medium-sized city is a coding school that acts as a social/technical/gathering place. Here in Tampa Bay, Suncoast Developers Guild fills that role, and it does so spectacularly.
In their blog post Two Years in and Still Improving, Campus Director Katherine Trammell writes about one way they’re marking their two-year anniversary: by updating the handbook that they make available to their students, alumni, and even the community at large. It’s a useful piece of documentation that ambitiously tries to cover a wide variety of topics that a professional software developer will need both while in class and later on, in the real world — from the technical topics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and C# — to what you’ll have to do when it’s time to go out there and land a job. They plan to expand the handbook into other topics, including “Java, Python, Typescript, Go, Angular.” (I’ll take this moment to cast my vote for Dart and Flutter.)
Better still, the community can contribute:
Our Handbook is also open-source; we look forward to having the community contribute. Community contribution is so significant to us that we added a button that sends contributors to a live Github based editor where they can make pull requests to suggest updates and edits. We’ll take pull requests both large (re-explain something) to small (fix our typoes, please!)
Congratulations on two excellent years, SDG, and great job with the handbook!
Want to see their handbook? It’s at handbook.suncoast.io.