Building Your Technical Skills Over the Summer

Published in

dscutsg

4 min readApr 3, 2021

This blog was written by Komal Saini (First-Year Representative at DSC UTSG) and Jia Hao Choo (Mentor at DSC UTSG).

As the school year comes to an end, we are sad to announce that this is our final blog post before the summer. We hope that you are excited for the summer as much as we are, and hopefully you have some exciting plans for the summer! Some of you may be taking on an internship, embarking on a personal project, or maybe you’ve decided to take the summer off to enjoy a break from online university. Regardless of what your plans are, we have curated a list of resources that you can use to build your technical skills over the summer. We hope that you will find this blog helpful to help boost your productivity over the summer and gain some skills for your personal development.

(1) If you’re new to tech, learning to code is a great first step.

Some resources to learn Python, a beginner-friendly programming language, include:

Our very own University of Toronto Computer Science professors Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries offer two “Learn to Program” online courses on Coursera. Check them out:

(2) Are you interested in coupling your technical skills and artistic passions or creativity? Learn the basics of UX design!

Receive a design lesson in your inbox each week, hand crafted by a design pro. Learn at your own pace, and apply it to your real life work: https://hackdesign.org/
UI/UX Design Course: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/ui-ux-design
UX Crash Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lyzy-vChh4&list=PLrtjkLnNjGHvbsas7_YIpkAvGsqkRsn-R
Creating your first UX design portfolio website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU2jEsI1qfM

(3) Love playing games? Build your own games!

Unity Learn https://learn.unity.com/ provides free resources for students to learn 2D and 3D game development, as well as scripting in C# and XR development.

(4) Want to build your own website? Learn the holy trinity of front-end web development!

Check out Codecademy to learn not just the front-end of web development but also master the back-end and APIs
Another awesome resource: https://www.htmldog.com/
Tip: You can host your website with a free domain using Github Student Developer Pack https://education.github.com/pack

(5) Do you have lots of experience programming and want to take your skills to the next step? Learn about emerging technologies and build projects!

Blockchain:

MIT OpenCourseWare — Blockchain and Money: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s12-blockchain-and-money-fall-2018/
edX Courses: https://www.edx.org/learn/blockchain

Internet of Things:

Stanford Online — Introduction to Internet of Things: https://online.stanford.edu/courses/xee100-introduction-internet-things
Udemy Courses: https://www.udemy.com/topic/internet-of-things/

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning:

Artificial Intelligence Certificate — University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies: https://learn.utoronto.ca/programs-courses/certificates/artificial-intelligence
Machine Learning — Stanford University (Taught by Andrew Ng!): https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

Cloud Computing

Learn Microsoft Azure at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/ and get the chance to be Microsoft certified!
Learn Google Cloud Computing: check out our previous blog post!
Learn Amazon Web Services by signing up as a student at AWS Educate: https://www.awseducate.com/student/s/pathways

(6) Check out these tech conferences/events that will take place over the summer:

IBM Think 2021 (May 20–21) https://www.ibm.com/events/think/
Google Summer of Code — work with mentor organizations to get involve in open source software development https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

(7) Lastly, if you’re a bookworm and want to spend some time away from a screen, check out some of our book recommendations!

Crack the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell: https://www.amazon.ca/Cracking-Coding-Interview-Programming-Questions/dp/0984782850
Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/032157351X/ref=as_at?linkCode=gs2&tag=fivebooks-20
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0132350882/ref=as_at?linkCode=gs2&tag=fivebooks-20

❤️ Thanks for reading!

This list is not exhaustive, and there are a lot of other things you can do over the summer. Feel free to do some more digging on your own too! We hope that you will have a productive summer ahead, and feel free to tell us what you’re up to over the summer on the DSC Discord #casual channel.

Check out Developer Student Clubs @ St. George

Join DSC’s Discord Server to stay up to date on news, opportunities, resources and more: https://bit.ly/dscutsg

Check out our website: https://sites.google.com/view/dscutsg/home