When: Saturday 1 September 2012
Where: General Assembly, 
9 Back Hill, 
4th Floor, London EC1R 5EN

Amanda Foley, London Community Ambassador, recently attended ‘Programming for Non-Programmers’, an intensive day-long workshop at General Assembly London, designed to teach you the basics in web development.

The course was a full-day intensive workshop at GA London led by Devin Hunt, YC 2007 alum and founder of Lyst, and was assisted by Rik Lomas. It was designed to give total beginners a crash-course in web development basics, including HTML, CSS and javascript.

Long before class was due to begin, the room was completely filled with eager mac-wielding students keen to learn and get their hands dirty with a bit of code. The crowd had varying levels of experience, from complete and total newbies, to folks who had a bit more experience, like myself, who just wanted to brush up on their skills.

We were warned that it was going to be seriously jam-packed day of information, so if you’re a total web development newbie, I’d recommend a full night of sleep and a strong coffee before you attend this course. Staying up late unpacking boxes is definitely not recommended. You may or may not nod off halfway through*.

You may think that six hours isn’t enough time to teach a complete newbie how to code a website, but you’d be wrong. Lucky for us, Canadian-born Devin can teach as fast as he talks, and after a mere six hours, we walked away having coded an entirely functional “business card” site. Courtney Boyd Myers, GA London’s Director of Audience Development took part in the day-long workshop as well, and even uploaded her website to dropbox to share.

Personally, I learnt a few amazing new tips and techniques to help my basic coding skills, which is invaluable for my career. It made me hungry to learn much more…and I’m already browsing the GA course lineup for more advanced courses!

If you’re interested in learning the basics in development yourself, they’re hosting another ‘Programming for Non-Programmers‘ in October. If you’re hungry to dive even deeper into learning front-end code, they’ve got an 8 week intensive crash-course on front-end development which looks seriously awesome and should turn into anyone into a front-end wizard in no time.

And lastly, you’re interested in any of their other courses, do check out the full GA London course lineup as listed in The Fetch each fortnight. They’ve got more design, development, social media, business and UX courses than you can shake a stick at!

*I may or may not have stayed up until 3am moving house the night before. Oopsie!