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, community-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-WORLDWIDE/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.
§ XII · Begin
Open the repository. Read Week 1. Push your first commit by Sunday.