Presented by

  • Matt Cengia

    Matt Cengia
    https://blog.mattcen.com

    Matt (they/them/their) is a queer, autistic nonbinary human with ADHD, from the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation (so-called Melbourne, Australia). They have a long background in Linux systems admin and software development, as well as strong interests in communication, empathy, consent, openness and transparency, privacy and security, diversity and inclusion. Matt identifies as a generalist, polymath, or multi-potentialite, and their breadth of interests often give them a unique perspective on how to relate to, and mediate between, people of different specialities.

Abstract

Come listen to the tale of how I and a small team of Scout Leaders from Australia developed and delivered a weekend course that took 11-15-year-old young adults from knowing almost nothing about networking or code, to being able to follow along and build their own website, complete with static HTML, CSS, and then transitioning to a simple Python Flask app, requiring nothing more than a web browser and Visual Studio Code on the student computers. I'll cover how we gave each student full root access to their own "server", through to how we built the course material to be a manageable learning curve over such a tight timeline, the challenges we faced with content delivery, and ideas for improvements before we run our next course.