WPRiders Academy is one of our most significant contributions to the community this year, with respect to our core values. We made the decision to give some students free lessons in WordPress fundamentals and inner workings so they can become WordPress full-stack developers.
There were many candidates, but we only selected 8 to begin with because this was a free course and we wanted to be able to mentor each participant individually.
It was a journey that lasted three months and our colleague, Florin, taught them the basics of WordPress; from there they moved to more complex things like theme development and hooks, WooCommerce and hooks, Custom Post Types and Custom Fields, Taxonomies, WordPress Coding Standards, and other similar things.
For three months, three times a week for one hour, Florin teached them everything they had to know so that they can become WordPress developers. Due to the participants’ dispersed locations, the entire process was conducted online. The journey was challenging so only four students were left at the end of the course.
Congrats Valentina, Rares, Daniel and Flavius!
We held a graduation ceremony after the course was over so that our team could get to know the students. Each of the students prepared a special project, and our colleagues had inquiries for them.
Valentina was attracted to shades so she decided to apply neumorphism in a theme for her graduation project.
Rares created a food plugin. You can create a subscription for 5, 10 or 20 days and choose the menu based on your dietary needs: weight loss, muscle gain and so on.
Daniel wanted to do something related to his passion for gaming so he created a theme specially for the content creators, that is integrated with the YouTube API.
Flavius created a custom theme for transport companies that has a TomTom API integrated in order for customers to see in real-time where their package is. He is also our colleague, working as a QA Specialist.
Florin did a wonderful job working with the students, and we greatly appreciate his effort. He spent time with our students outside of regular working hours and dedicated his free time to completing the educational project.
Martin Luther King Jr. said: Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Florin, you are great!
The feedback received by participants is very appreciated and an encouragement to think about a second edition.
This is Valentina’s feedback:
Daniel had a nice feedback too:
Flavius summarised his experience below:
WPR Academy is a good example of what a well-thought Community project looks like: giving a free opportunity to a bunch of web development passionate people to learn and grow by sharing first-hand information from a great young developer. All this is being delivered in the best way of teaching: learning by doing.
After going through the first few lessons of the course, just after getting the fundamentals down, the journey felt a lot like a roller coaster so make sure you are ready and motivated enough for the challenges because they are not as easy as they seem at first. Just like the whole field of work, the whole process was intensive, full of ups and downs, of days in which everything went well from the first try and days on which issues and bug fixing took their toll.
Being part of this program has helped me develop my problem-solving skills, thinking in both logical and creative ways, and at the same time gaining valuable experience in the field. Throughout the program I had quite a few opportunities to be exposed to different scenarios and situations that required some out-of-the-box thinking and research, building things from scratch, or learning how to use already existing code as a starting point.
Graduating the course will leave you not only with enhanced skills and experience, or a fully working project that can help you showcase your knowledge and gain interviews with future employers, but also with a great lesson from the WPRiders team: “The success of the community is also your success, so try to inspire and help others as sharing together is growing together.”
