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Ever since Agiledrop’s original inception, a core mission of ours has been to support the local development community with events and other learning opportunities. It’s often difficult for beginners and/or developer enthusiasts without extensive experience to get their foot in the door, which hinders their growth as a developer and limits their career opportunities.
While there are a plethora of learning resources easily available online, often for free, those tend to be much less valuable than actually learning in a physical setting together with other beginner developers experiencing similar challenges, with dedicated experts that can offer individual mentorship – or easily provide solutions to the common challenges new developers are facing and can’t work through on their own.
To this end, we’ve established a number of practices specifically designed to support beginner developers and help them quickly get hands-on practical experience with typical challenges of web development, and enable them to start working on real-life projects, often involving business-critical systems and/or requiring high-level collaboration with esteemed clients.
Let’s go through these now 🚀
Hiring junior developers
One of our mottos is that technical skills can be much more easily learned than soft skills such as communication, proactiveness, solution orientedness, etc.
This is why we make it a point to hire beginner developers and give them a chance to gain professional development experience on real-life projects for important clients.
Onboarding and dedicated mentorship
Of course, beginner developers tend to need a bit more help to properly hone their skills. We provide streamlined onboarding and training programs for the main technologies we work with, under the guidance of skilled mentors, both for the front end and the back end.
Learning through working on internal tools
While onboarding may involve mock projects designed to get acquainted with the most typical features of the particular technology, this initial learning process actually often involves working on and tweaking our internal tools – such as our Dashboard app, our Intranet, and our AgileRadio – before transitioning to actual client projects.
Promoting collaboration & knowledge sharing
A major factor in the continued success of our training processes is our strong promotion of collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Senior developers and dev managers are encouraged to help newcomers as much as possible, while junior developers may actually also help out seniors with a particular problem they are just now learning and the senior doesn’t currently have it top of mind.
We even have a dedicated Slack channel intended specifically for our developers helping each other out – which, coincidentally also brings extra benefits to our clients since this collaboration leads to faster solutions than developers trying to solve problems solo.
On top of everything, we host regular internal AgileTalks where developers share their experiences with technology topics of their own choice which they have encountered and worked through.
Offering certification opportunities
A number of our developers have successfully completed certifications in the key technologies that we work & partner with. These include Acquia Certified Drupal Developers, as well Moodle Academy basic & advanced certifications.
Ok, so far, we’ve mostly discussed our support for our (junior) employees and the different initiatives to empower them to both bring unprecedented value to our clients while also growing professionally and personally.
But what about the broader local dev & tech community? Well, there are actually a plethora of ways in which we have and continue supporting our local developer community – let’s take a look at these next! ⚙
- Providing free Drupal courses: we’ve been offering free Drupal beginner training courses ever since 2017, with regularly great attendance & general satisfaction from attendees. It also often happens that we hire attendees of these courses who show exceptional aptitude as new junior team mates.
- Organizing PHP masterclasses: in addition to beginner courses, we’ve also organized several PHP masterclasses intended for more experienced PHP developers who want to advance their skills. In contrast with the beginner Drupal courses, these PHP masterclasses include several sessions over the course/that span across several days.
- Sponsoring and hosting meetups and other local events: we’ve been actively involved in the organization of local developer-focused events for more than a decade (before Agiledrop’s official foundation, actually!), beginning with the first Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in 2013. Since then, we’ve organized and hosted numerous local meetups for different technologies: several Drupal and PHP meetups, several Laravel meetups, a WordPress meetup, a few general developer meetups (with the most recent one taking place less than a week ago), a Ruby meetup, and even a release party for Drupal 10.
- Sponsoring and supporting other local technology-focused events, such as the EESTEC JobFair taking place annually at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Computer and Information Science. Throughout the years, our team members have also given sessions about important topics at different universities across the country, such as introducing Drupal to beginners and other more advanced Drupal/PHP topics, as well as a lecture about the importance of web accessibility at last year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day Slovenia.
In closing
Even before Agiledrop’s inception as a company, our (to-be) founders and earliest team mates have been avid supporters of local development communities.
We’re proud to say that we’ve not only sustained but in fact hugely upgraded this support throughout the years, with all Agiledrop team mates chipping in to make the experiences as great as possible for everybody. If you're interested in being a part of that yourself, feel free to learn more about becoming a member of our A-team.
We plan on continuing improving our support of the local development scene, of course, so you can expect more meetups, courses and other events coming up soon – stay tuned!
