Computer Science Mentorship › Learning Paths

First Year

Your first year is about fundamentals and habits, not chasing frameworks. This path builds a real mental model of how programs and the web work, and the single most useful tool you'll use for the next four years: Git.

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Beginner6-8 hours6 stops

First year is where good habits are cheap to build and bad ones are cheap to avoid. Understand a few things deeply and you'll be far ahead of peers who memorised syntax without understanding.

1 Your First Program: Understanding Before Memorizing Guide · beginner
Why memorizing syntax is the slow road and understanding what each line does is the fast one — how to read your first programs so the knowledge sticks.
2 The Habits That Separate Top Students From the Rest Career Advice · beginner
The everyday habits — not raw talent — that actually separate students who thrive from those who scrape by, and how to build them starting in first year.
3 Why Git Matters Even as a Student Guide · beginner
Why learning Git in your first year — long before any job — is one of the highest-return things a student can do, and how it doubles as a portfolio you build automatically.
4 Git for a Real Website: The iamravi.com Workflow Guide · intermediate
A structured, practical course in Git and GitHub, taught through the actual workflow used to build and maintain a production Node.js site — not a shallow command dump.
5 How DNS Resolution Actually Works Guide · beginner
What actually happens between typing a hostname and getting an IP address back — the lookup chain, caching layers, and why DNS is so often the first suspect in an outage.
6 Asking for Technical Help Effectively Career Advice · beginner
How to ask a senior colleague for help in a way that gets you a fast, useful answer instead of a frustrated one — what to include, what to try first, and why 'it doesn't work' is the least useful sentence in tech.

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