Welcome to the end of this course! I'm so glad you made it here. We've covered a lot of ground, but I hope that the internet as a whole -- and the people that work on it -- make more sense now.
Let's do a recap of what we've covered to see how it all fits together.
You first learned about the internet and the web. The internet is a giant network of connected machines, but the web is more specific than that: it's a network of hypertext documents that can be accessed from one another. You probably spend most of your time on the internet actually experiencing the web through different websites!
We also learned about clients, servers, and databases. These machines request and respond with information between themselves that allows for you to request a website and get a web page back.
We then tackled DNS, which stands for Domain Name System. This allows you to type in https://openclassrooms.com instead of a long, hard-to-remember IP address. That IP address is always behind the scenes, though. DNS takes care of translating a URL to an IP address for you though! Glorious.
We then moved onto databases, which store all sorts of data. This could include email addresses, passwords, profile information, images, and more.
The final chapter in part one taught you some important ways to stay safe on the internet and on the web. Despite how amazing these inventions are, they come with their fair share of risk and danger. Use them intelligently!
In part two of this course, we explored the people that work every day with the technical concepts from part one.
We started with the front-end developer, who writes code that you see in your browser in the form of a website. They might control the structure of a website, the way it looks (colors, fonts, etc.), how accessible it is to people with disabilities, or how it behaves when certain elements are clicked or interacted with.
Next up, we checked out what a back-end developer does. This type of coder writes back-end code in languages like Ruby, PHP, or Python to control logic like who sees what page and when or how required data is requested from a database.
The last person in our developer adventure was the mobile developer. They write code for iOS and Android devices like iPhones or iPads, since a custom experience for these devices is often better than having them use the same website that full computers see.
We then learned about UX designers, UI designers, and product managers. The designers consider what makes great user experiences and user interfaces. Product managers coordinate with everyone above and other stakeholders to make sure the tech team has its act together and is working on projects that are useful for the business.
As you can see, there's something in tech for everyone. I hope this course has given you ideas about how you might be able to participate. Thanks for following along!
Try It Out For Yourself!
Apply what you've learned with this short, independent activity!
Now that you know a bit more about different roles in tech, it's time to think about what you would do if you worked in tech! Maybe you love the idea of performing user research and improving the ease of use of a product, in which case you'd make a great UX designer. Maybe you're more interested in creating complex code systems that live on servers and make sure clients are sent the right pages with no bugs or weird behavior, in which case you might be interested in back-end development. It's all possible!
You don't actually have to start doing or trying to get any of these jobs, but reflect a bit on your personality and your interests. In this exercise, write 2-3 paragraphs on your background, your goals, and why you think you'd make a good (pick one of the following):
front-end developer
back-end developer
mobile developer
UX designer
UI designer
product manager
If you can, review it with friends and people close to you in order to get their feedback.
