Lack of qualified developers
Our clients often face a lack of sufficiently qualified developers. As a general rule, good and competent specialists charge a price that not all clients are willing to pay. NetLS, as a company that aims to help businesses grow, also offers a solution to this problem. Thanks to the .NET Full-Stack Engineer Boot Camp educational center, junior developers are trained inspanidually for your project under the constant supervision of experienced professionals.
Boot Camp
To create a qualified specialist, you need a junior developer just starting. In order to have juniors in its "assortment of developers," NetLS grows them on its own through its educational program, the .NET Full Stack Engineer Boot Camp. This is a three-month, free internship where students start their careers in IT.
To ensure successful learning, the trainees received help from their mentors all the time. Among them were:
- Mentor: acted as a project manager;
- Project manager: was involved in launching the project and meeting deadlines;
- Technical adviser (.Net System Architect): Was involved in controlling the quality of the code and explaining best practices for developing IT solutions;
Under the guidance of a mentor, they studied the main aspects of OOP, including classes, inheritance, access modifiers, data types, interfaces, exceptions, working with collections, attributes, design patterns, and working with MSSQL databases and C#. The trainees also learned how to look for problematic code in a large project and how to solve possible problems.
Website development
After mastering the theoretical part of their studies, the students moved on to the practical part. One of the components of the internship was the development of a project for a real customer - a team of four promising students called INKVI. Having received a grant from Upshift, a global program of the United Nations Children's Fund, they decided to create a project that would solve problems in modern education, namely:
- lack of development in physics and math;
- lack of competition between students;
This project was the 2pnk educational platform, where students can solve problems and improve their knowledge.
The project, from start to finish, was led by the NetLS project manager. A roadmap with step-by-step stages was also drawn up to organize the work on the development of the website. It included:
- Discovery stage — to correctly distribute tasks and start the project, because a good start creates a good foundation (to do this, the project manager and mentor collected all possible client requirements for the project);
- Development stage — to develop the agreed functionality (the technical leader developed the project architecture based on the collected and structured requirements);
- Delivery stage — timely delivery and implementation of the commitments (product demonstrations took place every week, and at the end of the project, a release, and stable version of the website was released);
Since the clients did not have clear design desires and some other criteria, the project manager implemented the Agile methodology. Thanks to this, the team of interns demonstrated a demo version of the project to the clients every week. This allowed them to establish close communication and complete the project to the best expectations.
The mentor distributed tasks for the interns to the Back-end, Front-end, and testing, according to their capabilities. Thanks to the successful implementation of the technical work, the server side of the site works correctly, quickly, and efficiently. It was written using the object-oriented C# programming language, with AspNetCore MVC for web applications and Entity Framework for database access. The front end, which the user interacts with, was created using React, a JavaScript library for creating user interfaces. The front end was conveniently designed so that users could easily explore the site on their own.
The educational platform has been designed so that user data, historical changes, as well as all tasks and their results, are stored in a database. The platform has implemented the Claims-based authorization principle, where the decision to grant or deny access to any action is made by the administrator. It is the administrator who creates tasks and determines their timing and complexity. The administrator can edit user information and grant permission to use the platform.
The Boot Camp showed the result not only in the development of educational software while learning .NET, but also in the process of team building, its adaptation to a unique project, and going through all stages of development from start to finish. The results of the trainees' work, their potential after graduation, and the benefits for our clients in developing web solutions were also demonstrated.
Mentor Oleksandr Gutsenko on the general process of work:
At first, there was general training in C# and SOLID principles. Along with the theory, we used a lot of practice to better understand and validate the material. When I found out that the interns would have to complete a custom task, I made an inspanidual program to prepare them for the project. The interns started learning the JS REACT library. I taught them how to create a small WEB project that used such technologies as RazorPage, ApiController, JS Ajax, .NET Framework, Bearer Authentication, CSS, HTML, SQL, and REACT, which they studied through video tutorials. Later on, the project involved such things as a task scheduler (background IHostedService), singleton pattern, PDF to photo conversion technology for faster database performance and fewer queries, and a Stored Procedure was written for it. The interns learned how to create pull requests and resolve conflicts related to them. Veronika distinguished herself in the quick perception of information and its application, and she also wrote a stored procedure. Natalia proved herself well in HTML layout, finding and resolving bugs, both on the back and front end. Vasyl proved himself well in technologies such as react reducer, pdf to jpg, and .NET Framework. Volodymyr used Bearer Authentication in the project and developed the admin page for working with users.
Results
As a result of their hard work, NetLS Boot Camp interns developed a website quickly and efficiently, which satisfied the clients. They gained knowledge, practice in working on a real project, and the ability to work in a team, and at the end of the internship received special certificates of successful completion.
The clients, in turn, received a well-designed website that fully meets all their requirements. It was created by four developers specially trained for their project.
In the future, the best NetLS Boot Camp graduates will be able to be useful to our future customers. As Junior Developers, they will be involved in a team of qualified specialists and gain experience under their supervision. If the skills of our existing juniors do not meet the requirements of the next client, they have the opportunity to order an inspanidual Boot Camp. At Boot Camp the next candidates will be trained and engaged in the development of the provided project in the same way if it lasts more than one year.
According to this model, our clients were provided with engineers from previous Boot Camps. They have implemented projects in the telecom, finance, and healthcare industries. Thanks to our professional mentoring and inspanidual boot camp approach to learning programming in a C# course, the development team is cheaper due to the low cost of junior specialists' labor and becomes a rational solution for software development companies. If you don't have enough time, desire, or skills to manage all the processes yourself, our technical executives will complement your team and organize the process work. That's how the transition from an intern to a professional developer takes place at NetLS Boot Camp.