Congratulations, you have been tasked with teaching a class in full-stack web development, both front-end and back-end, given a sketchy syllabus and a cheery “good luck” from your chair. Now what? One of the myriad tasks on your to-do list is to figure out hosting – students are going to be building websites, writing back-end services, talking to databases. Should you set up your own servers? Maybe, but now you’re instructor and sysadmin, and we’ll bet your chair didn’t include a bonus with the assignment! Rely on a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure? Perhaps, but the complexity, oi! And none of these offer any of the other features that you, the hard working academic, are going to need: how are you going to easily grade assignments? Monitor students working in teams? And then there’s FERPA.

Fear not, dear instructor, because we have done the spadework and have some classroom-tested solutions. In this workshop we are going to examine tools that will let you focus on what you want to do, instructing, without getting distracted by pesky infrastructure issues. Specifically, we will walk through the use of two products, Replit and bit.io, that are engineered with the needs of academia front and center. In the first half of this 3 hour workshop, you will deploy a front- and back-end (don’t worry, we’ll supply the code), and wire up a database. In the second part of the workshop you’ll set up a team-based project, write tests for it, and grade it. And because these tools are so well-designed, we will still have ample time to discuss our experiences using them in the classroom.

This workshop is intended for anyone who is teaching, or contemplating teaching, full-stack web development. For those who are just focused on one half of the stack (front- or back-end), this workshop will still be beneficial. The only needed technology is a laptop and a modern browser.