Yanhad Coding Bootcamp

By Jameel Amir

To increase the Iraqi youth’s skills, expertise, knowledge, and employability, The Station hosted multiple bootcamps as part of the Yanhad program, starting from August till December, implemented by Expertise de France & FikraSpace, funded by the European Union and French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. The bootcamps focused on training young Iraqi’s with valuable skills that they could make use of, whether it’s to develop an app, build a business, or simply have a skillset valuable to employers.

Teaching someone a skill like coding and web development can open up a lot of opportunities in their lives, not only by the fact that their skills in the area increase, but also in terms of job prospects, especially in Iraq, where a large amount of private sector companies are actively looking for developers of all kinds.

The application form opened up on Facebook, and had over 200 applicants sign up over the period of 3 weeks. In the end, 18 participants were chosen, the percentage of acceptance was very slim this time because of social distancing measures. Applicants were chosen based on their pre-existing knowledge of basic coding concepts and their commitment and passion to learn.

One of the participants, Omar, was enrolled both in Yanhad’s coding bootcamp and its pre-incubation program. He noted that his newly-gained skills in coding had significantly helped him in bootstrapping his business, MaslehTech, an online Iraqi freelancer platform, and developing a minimum-viable-product for it.

By the end of the bootcamp, participants learned to design a website’s front-end and user interface, execute it, plan the backend, initialize servers, create and manage databases, tweak, debug, and test their web app, and finally upload it to the cloud. All training sessions involved practical projects afterwards and take-home assignments, in which the trainees made their own websites using techniques they learned to brush up on their knowledge.

Following the bootcamp, Wave Web Solutions, one of the startups in The Station’s coworking space and in their effort to expand the business, hired 2 of the participants at entry-level positions as web developers. 4 of the graduates also began their internships at Solo Creative Studios, and a participant was hired by Earthlink Telecoms.

Not only did the bootcamp teach participants a wide array of programming concepts and web development frameworks while having them develop countless projects and web apps, offering them a learning experience unmatched anywhere in Iraq, it also simplified the process for a lot of Iraqi companies and startups in the private sector looking to employ developers.

The Station is proud to be a center for creativity, innovation and development, facilitating trainings in various fields that serve to empower young Iraqi’s, and the amount of positive feedback we received by participants and the bootcamp’s results further prove the potential of similar programs in Iraq.