Once we had finalised Laravel Bootcamp as the first program under CodeTrek, the next step was to design the program itself. There were two important things to achieve with this program design.

• All subsequent programs can follow the framework that is an outcome of this program design.
• A crisp one week bootcamp that crunches the understanding of Laravel into a one week hands-on exercise. A program that reduces the entry load into a complex MVC framework and empowers self learning.

Finding our Hello World!

To start solving problems with software, we needed a problem to begin with. We came with up a problem statement that can be solved in a week’s time. It covered the basic workflow of any software. It comprised of an open to all form, and requiring a login to view the submissions. Also there was an additional form for the admin to publish information on the front page of the application. The admin could also modify the submissions received via the open form. And this was it. Very short use case, but covered all the important aspect of a software.

Laravel concepts to be introduced

The next step was to work on the Laravel concepts that we need to introduce to candidates. We wanted to introduce only the very necessary blocks of Laravel. This would pave a way for self learning and exploration later. We took inspiration from the way Laravel’s documentation has been compiled. It does not reveal every detail, but only the necessary one. On exploring the code base, one can find more details and functionality. For this exercise we relied on the Laravel’s core components and scaffolding. The thought behind was to build an understanding of how components work behind the scene, rather than touching a lot of components.

Planning the execution

One of the important value of the program was for it to wrap up in a week’s time. We developed plans for the different paces of candidates attending laravel bootcamp. Self reference guides were given to candidates to speed up learning. We also promoted continuous interactions to resolve confusions on the spot and enhance learning. Each day began with a hands on demo and ended with a group interaction session.

All our efforts bore fruit when we launched our first bootcamp and executed it successfully with over 10 candidates. You can read more about the program here.