Catalyst Full Stack Program

Learn about all the necessary onboarding info you’ll need to quickly set up all the programs and processes we use while you’re enrolled at Covalence. As you're getting started, we’ll also give you some insight into how you can get help when you need it, and what resources are available to you as a Catalyst student.

No mystery here. Module 2 builds the foundations for front-end web development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We'll work through simple concept labs to build your first website, style it with CSS, and add some basic functionality with JavaScript.

Module 3 expands the foundations you set in Module 2, starting with one of the most popular CSS frameworks (Bootstrap) to allow your websites to look better than raw HTML, and then we expand our JavaScript knowledge with your first introduction to the manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM) natively and with jQuery, which is your first foray into JavaScript libraries.

With the basics out of the way, Module 4 is where the rubber meets the road with more advanced JavaScript techniques. You'll learn all about async functions, scope, promises, closures, spread operators, template literals, and more – everything you need to know to really understand and use modern JavaScript, not just copy and paste it from Stack Overflow.

Module 5 is all about one of the most popular JavaScript libraries in the world right now – React.js. We've been teaching it since 2018, and we keep our curriculum up to date with the latest version changes and improvements the React team has made over the past several years. We'll start simple with concepts and architecture of a React web application, and from there we'll teach you how to set up the proper Hooks, state management, and more.

Once we round out Front End Development with React, we make our way over to the server-side, still in JavaScript with Node.js and Express as our back-end framework. We'll set up routes, APIs, and start letting the data flow from the front to the back end of our applications. There's not as much "visualization" to this section of the curriculum, but we'll teach you how to figure out what's going on with plenty of console.log()'s and Postman tabs.

JavaScript's popularity is not always well-received with programmers and institutions that rely on more stringent (less dynamic) languages to ensure proper code etiquette and cleanliness – that's where TypeScript swoops in to save the day. It's the best parts of JavaScript with the best parts of a more strongly (or static) typed language, like C#/.NET or Java, and the best part is that it's a superset of JavaScript – which means that if you know JavaScript, learning TypeScript is pretty easy and makes your life a lot easier. So that's what we do… teach JavaScript, then rehash all of the previous module topics in TypeScript.

A front-end and back-end is only as good as the data that it's showing – or retrieving from other services – so we'll teach you how to set up and manage your own relational databases with MySQL, along with some basic ETL protocols and stored procedure techniques to make your life a little easier. Our speciality isn't in database management, so this introduction is intended for web developers that need to set up Full Stack applications – or work in a team that manages their own. You'll also learn how to send transactional emails with Mailgun, process payments with Stripe, and control access to your applications with user authentication protocols.