The Learning Path: 36 weeks from first line to deployed app

01

Foundations

Weeks 1–12 · Parts 0–2 · 14 projects

You start below the code: how a URL becomes pixels, what a server actually does, and why the browser is the strangest runtime you’ll ever love. Then the language itself — slowly, with more repetition than feels necessary, because fluency in the basics is what makes everything later feel easy.

Weeks 1–2How the web works: HTTP, DNS, browsers, and servers. You trace a real request end-to-end and diagram a full-stack app before writing app code. (Part 0)

Weeks 3–6JavaScript fundamentals: values, types, control flow, functions, arrays, and objects — drilled through 46 exercises. (Part 1)

Weeks 7–10The browser and the DOM: selectors, events, forms, rendering, and managing state without a framework. (Part 2)

Weeks 11–12Consolidation sprint: Git workflows, debugging habits, and your first mentor-reviewed capstone.

HTTP & DNSSyntax & typesDOM APIsForms & eventsGit & tooling

02

The Language, Deeply

Weeks 13–22 · Parts 3 & 5 · 12 projects

This is the stage most courses skip and most interviews live in. Closures, prototypes, the event loop, promise semantics, and error handling — the machinery underneath every framework you’ll ever touch. You’ll also pick up the testing habits of professional teams, because untested async code is where confidence goes to die.

Weeks 13–16Asynchronous JavaScript: callbacks, promises, async/await, and the event loop — with a live data dashboard built against real public APIs. (Part 3)

Weeks 17–18Closures, scope, and prototypes in anger: 31 progressive exercises that make the language’s strangest behavior obvious.

Weeks 19–21Testing and quality: unit, integration, and end-to-end tests with Vitest and Playwright; linting, formatting, CI. (Part 5)

Week 22Refactor week: you return to your Stage 1 capstone and rebuild it with tests — then compare the diffs with your mentor.

Promises & async/awaitEvent loopClosures & prototypesVitestPlaywrightCI pipelines

03

Full-Stack Engineering

Weeks 23–36 · Parts 4 & 6 · 16 projects

The same language, now on the server. You design REST APIs in Node and Express, persist data in PostgreSQL, handle authentication properly, and then bring TypeScript across the whole stack so the compiler catches your integration bugs before your users do. The stage ends with a complete product — built, tested, documented, and deployed.

Weeks 23–28Server-side with Node.js: Express, REST design, middleware, validation, PostgreSQL, and authentication. (Part 4)

Weeks 29–32TypeScript across the stack: static types, generics, and sharing types between client and server. (Part 6)

Weeks 33–35Production concerns: Docker, environment configuration, logging, deployment, and a performance budget you actually hold.

Week 36Final project demo: you present a complete product to a panel of mentors and defend your technical decisions.

Node & ExpressREST designPostgreSQLAuthenticationTypeScriptDocker & deploys

The same four beats, every week.

Roughly ten hours a week, split so that most of your time is spent writing code, not watching it being written.

1

Read & watch ~2h

Short readings and focused videos introduce the week’s concept — never longer than the exercises they unlock.

2

Drill ~3h

Progressive exercises with instant feedback. Early ones feel easy on purpose; retrieval beats re-reading.

3

Build ~4h

A weekly project that combines this week’s concept with everything before it. Specs are real; edge cases included.

4

Review ~1h

You review a peer’s code and, at each part boundary, a working engineer reviews yours — line by line.

Chosen from the data, not the hype cycle.

The path commits hard to JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, and PostgreSQL. That’s not taste — it’s what the industry’s own numbers keep saying.

JavaScript is still the most-used language

In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey of more than 49,000 developers across 177 countries, 66% reported doing extensive work in JavaScript — a position it has held nearly every year since 2011.

Stack Overflow Survey 2025

TypeScript leads GitHub activity

GitHub’s Octoverse report found TypeScript became the most-used language on GitHub by monthly contributors in August 2025, with roughly 2.6 million people committing TypeScript that month. Our final stage exists because of it.

GitHub Octoverse 2025

PostgreSQL is the most-used database

The same 2025 survey places PostgreSQL first among databases at 58.2% usage. When you learn persistence here, you learn the database working teams actually run.