by Sean T. Larkin

Introducing Webpack Academy: comprehensive webpack training courses

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Webpack Academy was made for the webpack community. You are in the driver seat.

A few weeks ago I announced that I was leaving my job to go work at Microsoft. I soon realized that I would leaving behind a lot of work for my team at Mutual of Omaha.

As a maintainer of webpack, I knew had really pushed the build tool to its limits. Through advanced webpack techniques, our team was able to re-architect MutualOfOmaha.com into a multipage app that was at the same time a Progressive Web App.

But who was going to take this over this complex implementation when I was gone? I had handled a majority of our webpack setup and configuration. Had I really done enough to transfer this knowledge to my team mates so others could step up to maintain it?

All this made me feel anxious and a bit guilty. I wanted to give back to them for all the support they gave me when I was pursuing open source, and the trust they’d placed in me in embedding webpack into the site’s architecture.

We tried scheduling a bunch of different learning sessions, but it was hard to find time to get everyone involved. So I looked into screencasts.

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Introducing Webpack Academy

I decided to create Webpack Academy, a training and educational platform for those wanting to learn more about webpack. This was a perfect way to not only allow me to give back to my team — by giving them free access to all of the content — but to also benefit the community by sharing it with everyone.

Today I’m releasing the first course titled The Core Concepts. I modeled it after the concepts section of our docs page. It helps you get started “with nothing more than a command line” and walk away with a basic understanding of webpack and the confidence to use it.

Because I believe that anyone should have access to this knowledge, it will be a free course forever.

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The Core Concepts Curriculum. At your fingertips.

What about my open source work?

The work I did for this first course was not just for the webpack community and my team at Mutual of Omaha. This is a springboard for a learning platform.

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Webpack Academy homepage (http://webpack.academy)

Already I have multiple curriculums planned and outlined for release.

Here are just some of the paid curriculums you can look forward to:

  • Web App Fundamentals (“VanillaJS”)
  • Advanced Webpack — Environments, Deploy Targets, Scalability
  • A series for each major framework (React, VueJs, Angular, Choo, Legacy Libraries)
  • A comprehensive configuration review
  • Writing Custom Loaders & Plugins

If you do decide to pay for these courses, 30% of any funds generated from this platform will go directly to our webpack open collective.

Without webpack, there would be no courses. So you can give back to open source and make it a simple work expense by enrolling.

The time I will spend on Webpack Academy will always take a back seat to my open source work for webpack. So although I can promise to deliver high quality work, I will only work on it in my free time.

I’m look for feedback and ideas form the webpack community to help me decide what we should focus on releasing next.

In the end, Webpack Academy started as a way to help share my passion and love for webpack to those who want to listen. So once again, you are in the driver seat! Period.

Try it out!

So enjoy The Core Concepts, share it with your co-workers and let me know on Twitter and tell me what you think. Tweet it out with #webpack or #webpackAcademy.