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Professional Track · Year 3

Ship full-stack systems that real users depend on.

Sixteen weeks of working in real teams on real codebases. CI/CD, code review at depth, and the soft skills that turn coders into engineers.

Apply to Professional

Who it's for

You're a third-year student who has already shipped a few projects on your own. You know what a REST API is, you've fought with CSS and won, and you want the next level: working in a team, owning a feature from spec to deploy, and writing code that other engineers will read and trust.

The full-stack skill set

TypeScript fluency

Types as documentation, generics where they earn their keep, and when 'any' is the right answer.

React at depth

State management patterns, performance, suspense, and architecting a component library that scales.

Backends you can trust

REST and tRPC, authentication, authorisation, and the unglamorous art of input validation.

Databases for engineers

Schema design, indexes, RLS, migrations, and how to think in joins.

CI/CD pipelines

GitHub Actions, automated tests, preview deployments, and rollbacks that don't make you sweat.

Observability

Logs, metrics, traces. Knowing why production is broken before the customer tells you.

The 16-week curriculum

Weeks 1–4 · Onboarding & team rituals

Join a team of 4–6. Learn the codebase. Standups, retros, planning. Your first ticket is a one-line bug fix shipped through the full pipeline. The point isn't the line — it's the loop.

Weeks 5–10 · Owning a feature

You'll own a real feature end-to-end. Spec it with the product lead. Design the data model. Build the UI. Wire the backend. Add tests. Ship it. Then sit in the post-mortem when it breaks.

Weeks 11–14 · Going deeper

Pick a specialisation: performance, accessibility, infrastructure, or developer experience. Lead a small initiative inside your team that improves something measurable.

Weeks 15–16 · Job-readiness sprint

Mock interviews — system design, coding, behavioural. Resume and LinkedIn rebuild. Introductions to our hiring partners. Demo Day to a panel of CTOs.

16 wks
Programme length
15 hrs
Per week
78%
Job offers within 3 mo
R12k+
Avg starting salary uplift

Mentorship structure

Each Professional Track student is paired with two mentors: an AI mentor available 24/7 for code review, debugging help, and concept explanations, and a senior engineer from a partner company for weekly 1:1s on career direction, technical depth, and the things AI can't teach — judgement, taste, and knowing when to push back.

Tech stack you'll work in

TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Tailwind, Vite, and the rest of the modern web platform. We deliberately avoid hopping between frameworks — the goal is depth, not breadth. See the full stack documentation.

What you walk away with

  • Two production features shipped under your name in real codebases
  • A working knowledge of CI/CD, testing, and deployment that most graduates lack
  • A reference letter from a senior engineer at a partner company
  • Direct introductions to TechTalk's hiring partners
  • Eligibility for the Honours Track if you want to lead next year

Eligibility

You should have completed Foundation Track or have equivalent independent project experience. We assess this in a short technical conversation as part of the application — no algorithm whiteboard puzzles.