Training & Workshops

Why Most Technical Training Doesn't Work

Corporate technical training has a poor track record for a specific reason: it's designed around information transfer rather than skill development. A developer attends a two-day course, receives a lot of information about a technology, passes a multiple-choice exam, and receives a certificate. Six weeks later, asked to apply what they learned, they open their notes and find that the gap between the information they received and the ability to use it in a real context is larger than expected. The information was delivered but the skill wasn't built.

Skills are built through practice — specifically, through working through problems that are difficult enough to require the skill being developed, with feedback available when you're stuck. This is how software developers learn on the job, and it's how training works when it actually works. We design workshops around practice, not presentation. The ratio of hands-on work to explanation is roughly two to one: for every hour of instruction, there are two hours of writing code, debugging problems, and building something real.

Next.js and React

Next.js is the framework most React teams graduate to when they need server-side rendering, file-based routing, and a production-ready deployment story. Teams that know React often know it from single-page application contexts and find that Next.js introduces concepts — server components, the App Router, route handlers, streaming, caching behavior — that require a different mental model.

Our Next.js workshop covers the practical aspects that teams actually need: understanding when to use server components versus client components and why, how the App Router differs from pages-based routing and what that means for application structure, data fetching patterns in the App Router, caching strategies and when to opt out of them, optimizing for Core Web Vitals, and deployment and environment configuration. We cover these through building a realistic application that exercises each concept, not through abstract examples that isolate features from their context.

For React fundamentals, we cover the patterns that distinguish maintainable React code from code that's technically correct but becomes hard to work with as applications grow: component composition, managing state at the right level of the tree, custom hooks, performance optimization (when it matters and when it doesn't), and testing approaches that check behavior rather than implementation.

React Native

React Native training is most valuable for two situations: web developers transitioning to mobile development for the first time, and teams starting a mobile project who have some React experience but need to understand what's different about building for mobile.

The workshop covers the core differences from web development: the navigation model (React Navigation versus web routing), styling in React Native (StyleSheet versus CSS, flexbox as the primary layout system), platform-specific code when you need different behavior on iOS and Android, handling the keyboard and safe areas correctly (a common source of visual bugs), debugging tools and techniques, and the process of building for production and submitting to the App Store and Play Store.

We also cover native modules — the mechanism for accessing platform capabilities that React Native doesn't expose out of the box — and Expo versus bare React Native workflow tradeoffs. Teams consistently find these the most useful parts of the workshop because they're where React Native diverges most from what web developers expect.

Node.js and Backend Development

Node.js backend training covers two different audiences: developers who are new to backend development and need to understand how servers work, how databases work, and how to build APIs; and frontend developers who already understand JavaScript but need to think in terms of server-side concerns — security, performance, database access, error handling, and reliability.

We cover Express and Fastify for HTTP server setup, REST API design principles, authentication and authorization patterns, working with PostgreSQL and MongoDB from Node.js, environment configuration and secrets management, error handling and logging, and deployment. The workshop builds a complete API with authentication, a database, and a deployment pipeline, so participants leave with something functional rather than just having worked through isolated examples.

AI Integration

AI integration training addresses the growing demand for developers who can add AI capabilities to existing products — not AI researchers building models, but application developers incorporating AI APIs into the applications they're already building. This is where most of the practical demand is right now.

The workshop covers the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs: completions and chat completions, function calling and tool use (how to give AI models the ability to call your application's functions), prompt engineering for reliable outputs, streaming responses for a better user experience, and error handling and retry logic. We also cover RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — how to give AI models access to your specific data — and how to build simple agents that can complete multi-step tasks.

The hands-on component builds a practical AI feature: a document Q&A system, an AI assistant with access to external tools, or a classification system, depending on what's most relevant for the team's current work.

Workshop Format

Workshops run as full-day sessions (seven to eight hours including breaks) or as half-day sessions over consecutive days. Full-day sessions have higher intensity but get through more material. Half-day sessions allow time for participants to try things on their own projects between sessions, which often produces the most useful questions for the next session.

We run workshops remotely via Zoom with shared coding environments, or on-site if the team prefers and logistics allow. Remote workshops work well with groups of up to about fifteen participants; on-site workshops can accommodate larger groups. We use interactive coding environments so everyone has an identical setup and no one is stuck on environment configuration issues during the session.

Custom Curriculum

Most of our workshops start from a standard curriculum and are customized based on the team's current level, the specific technologies in use, and the immediate context — if the team is about to start a specific project, the workshop examples are drawn from that project's domain. This customization makes the training immediately applicable rather than generic.

We assess the team's current level before the workshop to calibrate the depth and pace appropriately. A team of experienced JavaScript developers who are new to React Native needs different content than a team of junior developers who are new to React entirely. One-size-fits-all training that pitches to the median leaves the senior engineers bored and the junior engineers lost.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many participants is optimal? Four to twelve participants per session works best. Smaller groups allow more individual attention and make it possible to tailor examples to specific contexts. Groups larger than fifteen make the hands-on work harder to manage effectively.

What do participants need to bring? A laptop with Node.js installed and a code editor. We provide everything else including the starter code for exercises, reference materials, and access to any APIs needed for the workshop.

Is there follow-up support after the workshop? Yes. Participants have access to us for questions related to the workshop content for thirty days after the session. This is when the real learning happens — when they're applying the concepts to their actual work and encountering the specific issues their situation raises.

Getting Started

Tell us about the team, the technology they need to learn, their current experience level, and when you need the workshop. We'll propose a curriculum and session structure appropriate for the team and goal.