Our training program mostly revolves around teaching them the fundamentals, where I give them some specs & resources, and once they code that, I give a code review: - They learned how to build some CLIs programs, where they make small clones of cat, find, grep, and cut. - They learned how to build some basic data structures such as linked lists and some sorting algorithms. - They learned some OOP by creating a CLI employee management system - Also some Network Programming by replicating the core features of the rack gem, and building their own web framework from scratch - They then take their hand-rolled frameworks, and they build the web version of the employee management system and ship it to heroku - Other projects also include some common tasks in the company, such as creating their own authentication system. - Lastly, they build their own design system using BEM CSS (a designer hands them a figma file, and they follow our internal CSS template / variables)
All of the above projects include code reviews, and the hope is that they learn how to become independent programmers & be able to contribute to any code, whether internal or open source. The goal is mastery of fundamentals.
I am not sure if I am too demanding -- our sprint is about 1.5 months long (0.5 months are for QA), but the expectation of that sprint is to ship one or a few features (e.g. a share button for a CRM for example).