Hi all. Colleagues recently wrote on this blog that to the next School of Interface Development in Moscow. I am very happy with the new set, because I was one of those who came up with the School in 2012, and since then I have been constantly involved in it. She has evolved. A whole mini-generation of developers came out of it with the broadest horizons and the ability to take on projects in general everything related to the frontend. Some of the graduates work at Yandex, some do not.
SRI is like a service: it also requires different formats of interaction, automation and experiments. That's what we'll talk about today on Habré. There will also be useful links for candidates.
I don’t want to repeat too much: all the basic information about SRI 2019 is on the website. Just a reminder about the opportunities for children from other cities: indicate in the questionnaire if you want to pass the first part (from September 7 to October 25) in absentia. Of course, we will not refuse full-time participation for those who cope with the test task - we will pay for the hostel and meals.
We invite everyone who is interested in front-end development and lacks practice to join SRI. During the School, students gain experience in team development, learn systems thinking, and develop the skills necessary for future work at Yandex and similar companies. The career track of SRI graduates looks something like this: first they become junior developers, then developers, and eventually team leaders.
This will be the seventh School in Moscow and the fourteenth, if we take into account all the cities where it was held - Simferopol, Minsk, Yekaterinburg, St. Petersburg. We have a flexible project. Every time we listen to students' feedback: we change, remove, add something based on their needs and changes in the industry.
Start
We make the introductory task quite difficult. In terms of meaning, the task for recruiting in Moscow is similar to the fact that this year. We will give a task for dynamic layout, for writing JavaScript, and we will need to understand a new subject area. According to our calculations, it will take 5-7 days, maybe a little more.
After enrolling in the School, participants must go through two stages. At the first of them, students listen to lectures, do their homework and then analyze them together with teachers and other students right in the classroom. There is a powerful synergy effect.
One of the lectures is necessarily held in a much more intensive format than the others. We are engaged in algorithms at it: for several hours in a row, students learn key algorithmic techniques in practice.
During the second stage, the participants unite with each other in small teams and work in the hackathon mode (we call them shrikathons). Throughout the second stage, students work on real projects under the mentorship of Yandex employees. In the final - protection of projects. The most successful ones have a real chance to get into production.
It wasn't always like that.
How SRI has changed
We first held the School in 2012. Initially, the idea was that we ourselves lacked specialists and we decided to “grow” them. But even then, we did not limit students in where they then work. It is important to solve a high-level task - to strengthen a large ecosystem by returning graduates to it with an acquired deep understanding of the front-end. At conferences and meetings with developers, you can see how this process is bearing fruit.
Formats and program
Previously, there were only lectures with homework and defense of the graduation project. Moreover, the lectures are wide, designed for the basic level of knowledge of students. Gradually, we realized that this does not make much sense. All information is already available online, it is more important to motivate students to find the necessary information themselves, set them the right vector and, in general, instill a desire to learn. In addition, over the years of the SRI, we have accumulated a lot of material on basic topics, and we update it regularly.
Now we are concentrating more on the public analysis of homework. This is an important part of the educational process. A joint analysis of the most common problems in each of the topics after each lecture helps to consolidate the material in practice.
When the shrikatons format was invented, it gave a certain boost to the process. Prior to that, students prepared graduation projects at home alone. We thought that it would be more efficient to pump teamwork. This skill is just hard to get if you are a novice interface developer who works in a small company, and even more so if you are a freelancer. At shrikathons, each team has mentors from Yandex — experienced developers, they help students establish relationships and build a workflow.
One of the shrikathons
We also tried the connected schools format when we worked in the context of Mobilization, a 2017 educational project to develop mobile products. Students from SRI, the School of Managers, the School of Mobile Development and the School of Mobile Design were united into teams at the same time.
This year we want to repeat something similar: we will make mixed teams of SRI and students from .
Checking test items
Each year, the test task becomes a little more difficult for applicants, and its verification is a little easier for us. Dozens of applications came to the first School - we then checked them manually. This year there will be about two thousand applications. We had to optimize the verification process: we made a single checklist and distributed the verification of tasks among a large number of people. At the last SRI, we have already tried, and on this one we will strengthen various automations and semi-automations of the verification process. For example, we will use autotests to quickly check the work before giving it to the developer for peer review.
Team
About a hundred people are involved in the organization and conduct of the SRI. These are interface developers from all over Yandex, from all departments, even from business units. Someone helps to make the program, someone conducts lectures or supervises shrikathons. Since there are many organizers, this does not greatly interfere with the current work tasks of employees. They also benefit from this: they learn to teach others, mentor, and generally do more complex projects. win-win.
People
As with our vacancies and internships, there are no age restrictions. We are waiting for university students and professionals who have minimal experience in front-end development. It is important for us that a person has the desire and ability to learn.
A student of SRI is in a borderline state: he already knows and can do something, but he may lack system knowledge and team development experience in large companies, he lacks practice. SRI does not teach from scratch.
At the same time, you may not be a front-end developer, but, for example, be engaged in design, technical project management or back-end development. In any case, if your knowledge and experience are sufficient to complete the test task, it makes sense to go to study at SRI. An in-depth knowledge of the frontend will allow you to better understand the problems of colleagues.
If every designer and manager we work with had this level of understanding of interface design, everyone would definitely be better off.
Over the years of the School, we have noticed that developers who come to work at Yandex from SRI show excellent results in internal reviews.
We attribute this to the fact that SHRIShnikov have the right way of thinking and the archetype of a disciple. They look at the world with open eyes, do not hesitate to ask if something is not clear. Able to work independently and easily team up with others.
From other cities
We bring students from all over Russia, because active study and living together with like-minded people creates a very intensive regime - thereby tearing them out of their home context. It's like a summer camp, a student dormitory, or the now popular coliving format. Some participants from Moscow are jealous and ask to join their fellow students in a hostel.
Part-time education
This year, the first stage with lectures and homework can be completed online, remotely, directly from your city. But for the second stage, you need to come to Moscow, because then the magic of teamwork begins. We do not yet know how many places will be available for remote learning. The psychological moment of group dynamics is important here, it is important to feel belonging to the group.
We want students who study in the same stream to communicate with each other and become friends. If half of the applicants study remotely, and the flow is too large, for example, 100 people, then there will be an unpleasant effect of loneliness in the crowd. Therefore, we usually have 30–40 students per class.
Statistics of conversions to Yandex
From each stream of recent years, we take on internships and vacancies from 60% to 70% of graduates.
In total, 539 students studied at SRI, 244 of them became Yandex employees (not counting those who were only on internships). Now the company employs 163 graduates.
Since last year's Schools, we have employed 59 people in the company: 29 interns, 30 full-time developers. Graduates work in a variety of Yandex services: Direct, Search, Mail, home page, Market, Geoservices, Auto, Zen, Metrika, Health, Money.
BEM and a hybrid approach to mobile development
SRI is not tied to BEM. Of course, when we talk about interface development, we mean the one that has developed in Yandex — that is, heavy workloads, many users, high quality standards and attention to detail. Even to create small regional sites, it is important to understand the foundation of the profession, to figure out what you can save on and why, and what not. At the request of students, we devoted one of the lectures to BEM, since this methodology has become the standard in many places.
We teach web development and related technologies, as well as mobile development and mobile layout in the context of web technologies, we use a hybrid approach to creating applications. Therefore, in SRI, we do not touch on aspects of native programming in Swift, Objective-C, Cocoa, C ++, Java. We also do not touch development under React Native.
Open webinar
This Wednesday, June 19, at 19:00 Moscow time, my colleagues and I will organize a webinar about the School - we will answer the questions of those who are thinking of applying or have already started doing the task (of course, I will also come in the comments to this post). on YouTube, you can click "Remind".
What to read for preparation
Useful sites
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Books
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Courses on Udacity ()
- Linux Command Line Basics
- Browser Rendering Optimization
— Website Performance Optimization
— javascript
— Networking for Web Developers
- HTML5 Canvas
— Responsive Images
— Responsive Web Design Fundamentals
— Offline Web Applications
— Web Tooling & Automation
— JavaScript Testing
— Intro to Progressive Web Apps
— Software Testing
— Object Oriented JavaScript
Video
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And you can try yourself in solving problems on .
This is not a complete list, there are many more useful materials. Rather, we want applicants to pay attention to certain topics, devote time to them. It is important that students want to search for information themselves.
Source: habr.com