Hello, World!
Meet Kottans. IT community
We are community of developers that love to code and help each other.
We are looking for smart, friendly, self-directed and intellectually curious people who enjoy programming and want to get significantly better.
We are passionate about programming and think that everybody can pick it up or switch to the different field at any time they want, given some amount of motivation, dedication and hard work.
Nevertheless, doing that on one's own can be challenging when it comes to continuing without support from surrounding people, such situation really beats the motivation, especially when encountering either boring or impossible to do (at first glance) task or illogical aspect of programming language you can't just grasp.
That's the reason behind us getting together and sharing knowledge.
Our initiative is community driven, making it super-flexible in terms of adapting to what students want while keeping in mind the main idea - learn something new and do it in the fun way, creating something meaningful along the way.
When next course starts?
We don't know :) Our courses don’t have a fixed schedule. Whenever we decide to launch one, we will make an announcement on our twitter account and telegram channel Radio Kottans. But don't get upset if no courses are currently running, because all programs are available on GitHub and you can complete tasks with other students. We call this format P2P education.
How to join a course?
Wait for the course announcement and follow the guides. In general, we do not require any formal registration. You can just dive into the curriculum by starting to complete tasks. Yes, it is that simple.
What does a course look like?
Usually, we separate our course in two parts - online and offline. To get to the offline part, one should complete the online part. The online part is a list of tasks - video-lectures, code tasks, etc. The offline part - set of meetings, workshops, etc. We try to record all our lectures and keep them available to students who missed a lecture and to everyone interested. You can take a look at our lectures in our YouTube channel.
Will you have courses in other cities (except Kyiv)?
For a Kottans course to be held we rely on volunteers. You can be the person to start a Kottans course in your city. Few dedicated mentos and a location are minimal requirements.
Will you have courses in Java/C#/PHP/other technology?
Same as with other cities: we are happy to support initiative from people willing to start a course. This is not as hard as it sounds.
Why are your courses free? Do I need to pay anything later?
We enjoy sharing our knowledge and experience and we do it for free just for fun. We see this as our contribution to Ukrainian developers community. We are not recruiters. The courses do not have any hidden penalty.
Will I get a job after successfully finishing your course?
We are not affiliated to any company and we cannot guarantee employment for our students. Neither are our courses tailored to successfully passing the job interview: we teach what we think is important. Yet from our experience people who work hard have no problem finding a job. We always gladly give recommendations for our alumni.
I am a complete beginner doing my first steps in programming. Can I join?
Yes, we welcome all people regardless of programming experience or prior knowledge. Join our chats and feel free to ask any questions about the material you are learning.
Conference with a bunch of
uncut talks from
people working in IT, for
people, who just want to try
Community driven knowledge sharing platform
- 4k+ Members
- 20+ Courses
- 7 Years
- 2 Meetups
- 1 Conference
Because we are not affiliated to any company, we are absolutely neutral platform for any events and we can help you with organization of one.
We have a lot of experience in conducting of courses, meetups and conferences as well.
If you want to create your own community or your event, but don't know how to do it or don't want to do it alone - we can help you!
Starting from consultation and ending with help in looking for the place, team, partners or sponsorship. Also, because we have a large community, we can be media-partner for your event.
Our help is completely volontier and we have only one pre-request - your event must be free or at least non-profit.
Anyone who finished courses and participates in our day-to-day activities is considered a Kottan. Because of our volunteer nature, we are pretty flexible and the number of people changes constantly - some can come, others - go.
Also, we have a Core team, which consists of most active community members. To become one of Core, one must take responsibility, generate ideas and be an active part of our community
Guest mentors are participants who come to us to read lectures, conduct a workshop or other learning activities. New guest mentors are always welcome! Don't be discouraged if you consider yourself a beginner. Usually, we try to match mentor's level and audience's level.
So even as a beginner, you already know more, than trainees or students, who know nothing at all. Also, you are closer to problems of newbies, because you haven't forgotten what it was like to figure them out :)
If you feel the strength to share knowledge with others, come join us
Mentors:
What People are Saying
It so happened that at some point I was surrounded by people related to the IT industry. In conversations I have again and again heard topics that were unclear to me, and, judging by those conversations, web development was quite a creative job (and I love to be creative). I challenged myself: "Can you do it?" And I got enrolled to the course after diligently making all test assignments. Not only do the Kottans explain the basics and repeat it a number of times to make material completely clear, but they also help to train self-organization very well (personally, my level has risen). And this is a big family - there is always support in chat rooms (if you’re stuck), informal outdoor parties, etc.
And yes! I quickly found a job. Not after the first interview (you need to acquire some experience points in passing the interviews), but a housewife (with a long experience) without formal education started to work as a Junior front-end developer in the Ministry of Finance (and coded not only HTML & CSS but did proper JS tasks).
There is still a lot to learn, to grasp, to understand, and I manage it more or less quickly - the main thing is the start, and then it works like clock-work :)
Anna Stepashko
Front-end developer
Recently I finished an interview task and thought to myself: could I even imagine a few months ago myself being able to make something like that? A wonderful feeling, I must say. The work was truly hard, and it will remain hard in the future. However if you progress at least in baby steps and with every step become better than your previous self, it's worth it.
I wanted to join Kottans 2 years ago, but I thought it was too early for me and I would not make it, I thought I needed work experience first... But time passed, and no particular experience or knowledge appeared) because the right time is here and now. Until you try, you do not know what you really are capable of and in what direction you want to go. Kottans offer not only cool courses, but it’s also a community, it's a whole subculture. There is no such thing as a dumb question here. Here you can both study and teach others, each time discovering new nuances of seemingly clear things.
The course mentors deserve special mention. They are people you respect, admire and on which you really want to be like, when you grow up)) Who else would explain seemingly obvious things to an unknown person several times without losing self-control? :) Things like this are very motivating. It's awesome to learn from those who believe that quality knowledge is not a business, but a way to make the IT industry well developed, more successful and productive. You are cool, Kottans! Thank you!
Mary Fedirko
Front-end developer at MacPaw
Before joining the Kottans course, I went to "study" to a small company to a friend of mine. There I was immediately given React docs and told that this is how it works. After a month of such studies, I realized that I was clearly lacking the basics. And then I came across the announcement of an online course from Kottans. I took a look at the program - it was just what was needed. And I think that is what all beginners need.
The program is systematized by experienced developers, and includes subjects from the very basics to reasonably advanced things from the development world. Live communication from the very beginning of the online course with pull-requests and reviews, an absolutely unique experience that is difficult to obtain even on paid resources. By the way, the lack of a fee in itself is amazing in our time, and at the same time guarantees the transparency of motivation of mentors - they want to help people, and therefore the reviews were as detailed and qualitative as possible. the course left only positive impressions. In addition, I got the opportunity to contribute to community life, which is invaluable in principle.
Vlad Vorobiov
Front-end developer at Jupser
I am very satisfied with the course! Almost all of my expectations were confirmed: I found new friends, new colleagues, gained new knowledge, received valuable tips and code review. When I joined the course, I was already working as a frontend developer knowing HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript basics, but I knew I wanted to have a more solid understanding of modern approaches to JavaScript development. I am grateful to mentors and active students for their high professionalism and contribution to such a cool community, for their positive attitude, openness, valuable advice and enthusiasm! Personally, I was waiting for the next class not only to get a new batch of knowledge but also to hang out after class))) During the training, we tried to contribute to various initiatives of the Kottans: social network postings, mutual assistance, help to students from the p2p course and so on.
And the pinnacle of teamwork for all of us was the Input Conference, which our cool team succeeded to organize! To our team-lead and mentor Oleksiy Rudenko great respect for the fact that he wonderfully led the whole process and was an example for us! In my opinion, communities like this one help to change our country for the better! After all, mutual assistance, communication, and cooperation are the keys to success! I am proud to be a Kottan! And I feel that after the courses I became more professional in my field, and also contributed something useful to this community!
Maksym Kalashnyk
Front-end developer at Uptech
It's more than courses, it's a whole family! Every Saturday I wait as a holiday and I have great pleasure in going to classes. But no matter how good is the support and no matter how good are the study materials, it's mainly about your effort. If you do not devote time each day to practice and analyze each source code line, the result will not come. An easy way into the IT industry is a fairy tale. You need to work on yourself and your self-organization. But if you still decide to change your life, then you definitely need to go to Kottans. Only modern technology stack, working programmers as mentors, not one, two, but many, and many of them will always answer your questions. And most importantly, there is no such thing as a stupid question here. I am very glad that I joined them and became a part of a big family.
Aleksey Ivanov
Front-end developer at UTAS
