Ever wondered what the fast track to being a full-stack developer is? It’s true we learn best by delivering, but what how should we structure our learning approach to maximise results?

In this talk I’ll share my method of bringing juniors up to speed in order to work on large, critical, customer-facing projects. It’s been verified on tens of developers over the last 7 years, and refined by personal input from each and every one of them. It takes me between 2 and 3 months to add a new valuable team member, by following a personalised learning plan.

We use a kata approach to building one product several times, so that the delivery is happening fast, and the minions are getting a true sense of their contribution. Key concepts are learned at this point, and in the remaining stages we build on top of them to gain even faster delivery of the same requirement set. Later, in the second iteration, we focus on the disaster recovery and introduce frameworks to aid us compose our application from 3rd party libraries. The third kata is about working with the full tool stack: builds, automated tests, one-click deployments, refactoring.