Magebit Riga Coding Bootcamp 2022 | Highlights

Recapping our 4-week on-site coding program

The end of August has become truly significant for our company. After 4 weeks of intensive training, over 20 developers have successfully graduated from our open-call programming bootcamp for junior devs.

But let's not rush and take things one step at a time.

Why would we want to host a bootcamp?

Magebit sticks to the path of being a socially responsible business, actively participating in various charity, development, and voluntary initiatives. This year we wanted to raise the bar — and be a part of something that is more industry-specific.

As one of our company’s social goals for 2022 was to give back to society, we came up with the idea of a free coding bootcamp.

The tech training was committed to providing a positive impact on the lives of students, IT rookies, and developer wannabes.

By sharing our experience and passing our knowledge we wanted to empower young enthusiasts across Latvia to enter the thrilling world of eCommerce.

In close partnership with Riga Coding School, Magebit undertook to organize a great on-site, eCommerce-centric development bootcamp — here in Riga.

Under the hood of the bootcamp

The Magebit IT Bootcamp consisted of 4 energetic weeks packed with theory sessions and hands-on daily workshops.

To open career opportunities for our students, we aimed to provide an immersive coding experience. For this, we added Magebit guest lectures stuffed with real-life examples.

The bootcamp program covered almost every corner of the fascinating world of coding — in Web Development, Frontend, and Backend. The trainees learned developer skills in HTML, CSS, PHP, Git, and JavaScript.

Now, every bootcamper has these technologies ready in their toolbox.

More importantly, our instructors taught the constructive, positive mentality that is crucial for both parts of success — productivity and lifelong learning.

English was the working language of the program, to help interns gain the language confidence needed for real-life projects. That is an additional competitive edge in the job market our students grabbed during the bootcamp.

How it all started

In less than a week after announcing the bootcamp, we got over 70 applications from the future great IT minds. 25 ready-to-work interns with the best test-task results got enrolled.

On August 1, our bootcampers rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

But before diving deep into web development, every participant got a charged-for-success welcome kit from Magebit.

Immersing developers into every nook and cranny of eCommerce

The training program was, without any exaggeration, intense. Every day our students had 3 hours of theory combined with 5 hours of practical tasks. It’s fair to say that the bootcampers were way busier than Magebit full-timers.

Our main goal was to give students hands-on skills in eCommerce. As experts in digital shopping, we wanted to teach young developers how to build great online shops.

Basically, all the focus was on giving participants all the necessary knowledge for starting their career in web development — right after graduating from the program.

To ensure greater results and easier communication with instructors, we divided interns into 2 smaller groups. So every question got answered. Every confusion was cleared. And every task was explained the way it would never be a blocker again.

Our first open-call program was packed with value:

• Dozens of real-life cases & tasks
• Specific technologies & frameworks
• Best practices
• At-every-step code reviews
• Guest lectures by Project Managers, HRs, Junior QA, and developers.

Guest lectures by junior specialists at Magebit were a blast! Interns loved them as this was something that closely related to their path in IT.

To celebrate the hard work and skills learned during the week, every Friday (TGIF) ended up with mouth-watering pizzas and engaging board games. All the week-summering fun took part in the very heart of Magebit — the kitchen of our headquarters.

Why do all good things come to an end?

During the 4th final week, all the enrolled coders worked hard on their graduation project, getting ready to present what they’d learned during the tech training.

After 4 severe working weeks, 23 of go-to junior developers were awarded and certified (finally)! Some of the bootcampers went beyond battle-tested certifications. 4 out of 23 got hired and now work as a part of the Magebit team.

To dilute frequent straight-to-the-point code reviews, every week we organized ongoing prize-winning events and fun activities.

The lucky winners of the closing content got tickets for the Magebit Birthday celebration party and spent 2 amazing days with the whole Magebit family in Licisi.

What we learned & key takeaways

Perhaps one of the most important takeaways from hosting the bootcamp was the understanding that there is a great request among young people and students for tech learning experience of such a format.

The IT market today requires a huge number of tech specialists, while technologies are changing quite quickly. Rapid changes require new educational and learning approaches — packed with real-life cases, hands-on tasks, and more importantly taught by practitioners

All the graduates confirmed that the Magebit Coding Bootcamp was a huge success. With that feedback (and 4 successfully hired devs) we decide to make coding bootcamps recurring events in our social agenda.

When is the next coding bootcamp by Magebit?

We are planning to make next bootcamps even more engaging — and provide even more opportunities to as many IT talents as possible.

Follow us on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, to never miss the dates of the upcoming training sessions.