01
Python Foundations & Dev Environment
Installing Python · REPL vs scripts · terminal basics · virtual environments · pip · Git and GitHub · your first commit.
Mini-project
“Hello, You” — a personal CLI greeter
A fifteen-week, open-source Python bootcamp — designed for the absolute beginner, sharpened to the standards of professional engineering. Five hundred and forty hours of lectures, labs, projects, and a capstone. Free, forever.
§ I · The Program
Code Crunch Convos began in August 2024 as a small interview-prep workshop run by Code Crunch Worldwide — a global, student-led community. It ran quietly through its first year and a half while we built out the branding, website, assessments, and event programming behind the scenes. In 2026 we rebuilt it as a complete fifteen-week Python bootcamp — a public curriculum that any learner, anywhere, can use without permission or payment.
The course is structured like a real-world bootcamp: lectures, hands-on labs, weekly projects, quizzes, homework, and a portfolio capstone. It is engineered to be taken on its own, or taught from by instructors and university clubs. Everything is GPL-3.0 licensed and lives on GitHub.
“The best way to predict the future is to teach it.” — Code Crunch Worldwide
§ II · Who It's For
No prerequisites beyond a willingness to read documentation and roughly thirty-six hours a week. There is room for everyone.
Has never written code. Week 1 begins with installing Python and ends with their first commit on GitHub.
Has dabbled in tutorials. Wants structure, accountability, and a portfolio of finished, polished work.
Needs hire-ready Python skills, version control habits, and projects to show — all without paying for a paid bootcamp.
Teaches a club or class. Wants a ready-to-deliver, modifiable curriculum that they can fork and adapt.
§ III · The Five Phases
The arc of the program is composed in five phases — each builds on the last, like chapters of a book.
Set up the development environment. Master the absolute basics: variables, types, operators, control flow, and the function as a unit of thought.
Choose the right data structure. Read and write files reliably. Begin to think in objects and design clean class hierarchies.
Call APIs over HTTP. Build a small web app with Flask. Speak SQL fluently. Adopt the engineering habits — tests, CI, code review.
Automate the tedious. Analyze real data with pandas and NumPy. Train and evaluate a machine-learning model — and learn when not to.
Ship a substantial, public, portfolio-grade project across one of five tracks. README, tests, CI, deploy, video walkthrough.
§ IV · The Curriculum
Each entry below corresponds to a folder in the GitHub repository, containing lecture notes, exercises, challenges, a quiz, homework, and a mini-project.
Installing Python · REPL vs scripts · terminal basics · virtual environments · pip · Git and GitHub · your first commit.
“Hello, You” — a personal CLI greeter
int, float, str, bool, None · type casting · arithmetic, comparison & logical operators · string methods · f-strings · type hints.
Unit converter CLI
if / elif / else · truthiness · while and for loops · range, enumerate, zip · break, continue · the loop-else clause · nested loops.
Number-guessing game with replay
def syntax · parameters, return values, defaults · *args / **kwargs · LEGB scope rule · lambdas · importing · writing your own module.
Personal finance calculator
Lists, tuples, sets, dicts · mutability · nested data · list / dict / set comprehensions · generator expressions · Big-O intuition.
Contact book manager
open() and the with-statement · pathlib · the csv and json modules · the exception model · try / except / finally · custom exceptions · logging.
Log file analyzer
Classes, instances, self · inheritance & composition · super() · dunder methods (__repr__, __eq__, …) · properties · @dataclass.
Library management system
HTTP methods and status codes · the requests library · query params, headers, auth · pagination and rate limits · producing and consuming JSON.
Weather dashboard CLI
Routes, request & response · Jinja2 templates · static files · HTML forms · sessions and flash messages · deploying for free.
Personal blog web app
The relational model · SQL CRUD · JOINs and GROUP BY · SQLite from Python · parameterized queries · intro to the SQLAlchemy ORM.
Task tracker with SQLite
pytest, fixtures, parametrize · mocking · coverage · the pdb debugger · ruff and black · mypy · pre-commit · GitHub Actions CI.
Tested utility library + CI pipeline
argparse for CLI tools · subprocess, pathlib, shutil · scheduling with cron · web scraping with BeautifulSoup · ethics of automation.
File organizer bot
NumPy arrays and broadcasting · pandas Series and DataFrame · loading, cleaning, joining · groupby and pivot tables · plotting with matplotlib.
Real-world dataset analysis
Supervised vs unsupervised · train/test split · linear & logistic regression, decision trees, k-NN · pipelines · evaluation metrics · bias & fairness.
Spam classifier
A polished, public project of your choice. README, tests, CI, deployment, a video walkthrough. Pick one of five tracks: Web · Data · ML · Automation · API.
Your portfolio centerpiece
§ V · The Weekly Rhythm
Each week is designed to add up to roughly thirty-six hours of learning — spread across study, practice, projects, and reflection. Part-time learners can stretch the program to thirty weeks at half-pace without changing the content.
| Component | Hours / week |
|---|---|
| Lectures & readings | 6 |
| Hands-on exercises | 8 |
| Coding challenges | 4 |
| Quizzes & references | 3 |
| Homework problems | 6 |
| Mini-project | 7 |
| Self-study & review | 2 |
| Total | 36 |
The work is project-based by design. Every week culminates in a small shipped artifact — a script, a CLI tool, a web page, a tested library — that is pushed to a public GitHub repository. By the end of week fourteen, you have fourteen small projects in your portfolio. Week fifteen turns that into a capstone you would be proud to put on a résumé.
Reading the documentation is treated as a skill in itself. We cite the official Python docs constantly, never as a chore but as a habit you will rely on for the rest of your career.
§ VI · Tooling
No paid platforms. No proprietary dependencies. No required SaaS. Every tool below works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
§ VII · Skills You Will Carry
By the end of Week 15, you are able to do each of the following — credibly, on a real codebase, in front of real reviewers.
§ VIII · The Capstone
Week 15 is reserved for a substantial, public project of your choosing. Pick the track that excites you most. Each track has a worked example in the repository.
A Flask application with database, multiple routes, and one significant interactive feature.
A real public dataset analyzed end-to-end, with cleaning, EDA, and a written summary of findings.
Train a scikit-learn model, evaluate it honestly, and ship a CLI or web endpoint for inference.
A working tool that solves a real problem — in your school, your club, your daily life.
A small REST API with documentation, tests, authentication, and a deployed demo.
§ IX · Getting Started
The setup is intentionally lightweight. If you can run a terminal command, you can begin the bootcamp today.
# 1. Clone the curriculum repository git clone https://github.com/CODE-CRUNCH-CLUB/C1-Code-Crunch-Convos.git cd C1-Code-Crunch-Convos # 2. Create a virtual environment python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate # macOS / Linux .venv\Scripts\activate # Windows # 3. Open the Week 1 README and begin reading code curriculum/week-01-python-foundations/README.md # 4. Push your first mini-project to your own GitHub by Sunday git push origin main
Need help installing Python or Git first? Visit the setup guides for macOS, Windows, Linux, and browser-only.
§ X · Why Open Source
Code Crunch Convos is released under the GNU General Public License v3. Anyone may use, copy, modify, and redistribute it — including for commercial teaching — provided derivative works remain under the same license and credit the original.
We made this choice deliberately. A curriculum that only opens up after payment is, in our view, no curriculum at all. Improvements come from the learners who pass through and give back: a fixed typo, a sharper explanation, a translation, a new exercise. That cycle of public improvement is what makes a course durable across years.
The tools we teach are open source. The platform we publish on is open source. The contributing guide invites you in. Read it, fork it, send a pull request.
§ XI · Frequently Asked
Yes. The entire curriculum is licensed under GPL-3.0 — no paid tier, no upsells, no required services. The only thing it costs you is time and effort.
Not by default — we are a community-built open curriculum, not an accredited institution. Your public GitHub portfolio of fifteen shipped projects is the credential that matters most to employers. Clubs or universities running this as a cohort may issue their own certificates.
Designed for ~36 hours/week × 15 weeks (~540 hours). Most self-paced learners take 6–12 months at part-time speed. Finishing matters more than speed.
Yes. Each week opens with a quiz — if you score above eighty percent, the topic is safe to skim. We recommend at least glancing at earlier weeks for any unfamiliar habits (especially Git and testing).
Please do. Fork the repository, adapt as needed, and — if your adaptation works well — open a pull request so others can learn from your improvements. See the contributing guide.
You specialize. Pick a deeper track: web (Django/FastAPI), data (more SQL + visualization), ML (deep learning), DevOps, or systems. Contribute to open source. Build more projects. Apply for roles. Mentor someone going through this curriculum.
Yes — for explanations, debugging help, and reviewing code you have written yourself. No — for generating solutions you do not understand. The shortcut is the price you pay later, in interviews you cannot pass and codebases you cannot maintain.
§ XII · Begin
Open the repository. Read Week 1. Push your first commit by Sunday.