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Flask Developer Track on JetBrains Academy
Flask is one of the most popular frameworks for web development in Python. It is also called a micro framework because it’s lightweight and lets you build web services with very few overheads. With the Flask Developer track, you will learn about this framework and advance your knowledge of Python by building your own web applications.
Note that this track is still in the early stages of testing. We would appreciate any feedback you have to share – it would help us improve the track and publicly release it sooner.
If you are new to JetBrains Academy, you can start a free 7-day trial and extend it by up to 2 months as you work on your first project! To do that, complete the first stage of your project within the first 7 days to have your trial extended by 1 month. If you finish your first project within that first month, you will have one more month added to your trial.
What you’ll learn
During this track, you’ll write simple programs, make them accessible from your browser, and configure advanced application settings to make the most of Flask. You’ll also get essential skills for working with web applications:
✅ Learn the difference between a monolithic application and an API, and develop both of them.
✅ Connect and use databases to store your application’s data.
✅ Integrate tools to facilitate working with HTML in your applications.
✅ Work with users, log them in, and store their sessions to make the user experience better.
✅ Learn and use best practices for web application architecture.
✅ Test your application depending on its type.
✅ Deploy your applications so that they are available to the public.
Apart from learning Flask itself, you will go through topics that are essential for any developer: git, command line, programming design principles, software development models, and multithreading.
Projects you’ll build
This track gives you access to more than 300 coding tasks and 200 educational topics! It offers 9 projects of different proficiency levels that you’ll create step by step in an interactive learning environment. Let’s take a look at a few of the projects:
- Honest Calculator (Easy): Working on this project, you’ll learn how to read flowcharts to hone your understanding of loops, conditions, and algorithms by building a simple calculator. Later on, this calculator will motivate users to do math themselves by becoming increasingly honest with them. For example, if they need to do tricky calculations with floats, the calculator will just solve it. However, if the equation is a sum of two integers like 2 + 3, it will suggest solving it themselves.
- Currency Converter (Medium): In this project, you’ll write a program that converts one currency into another quickly and efficiently. You will learn many Python concepts – basic types, variables, arithmetic operations, loops, and working with files. Also, you’ll get a taste of more advanced features like JSON format, caching, and how to work with the network so your currency converter program will use a third-party service.
- Memorization Tool (Hard): In this project, you are going to create a tool for memorizing lines, poems, speeches, and other text-based materials, so you don’t have to! You’ll work with the SQLAlchemy ORM and an SQLite database, and practice loops, lists, and various string methods.
- Weather App (Challenging): Work with the Flask library to implement a web application that will allow you to keep an eye on the weather. You will use Flask-SQLAlchemy to connect a database to your web application and work with a weather service API to get the current weather information from all over the world.
After you finish this track, you’ll receive a certificate of completion that you can add to your LinkedIn profile and resume. Don’t forget to add completed projects to your GitHub profile as well!
A career to pursue after track graduation
If you’re interested in starting your career as a Junior Backend engineer, this track will be right up your alley! Make sure to try our Python Core track as well to strengthen your knowledge in Python by writing automated tests and learning OOP (object-oriented programming) which is widely used in commercial development.
We hope you’ll enjoy studying Flask with us. If you have any questions or would like to share your feedback, feel free to leave a comment below or contact us at academy@jetbrains.com.
Keep learning!
Your JetBrains Academy team