A Water-Proof Event
The Story of Baghdad’s First Web Development Bootcamp
The long process of looking for a decent job with a relatively high salary wasn’t an option for me, after spending all my savings in the U.S. Immediately I thought of something I love to do, which is teaching others things that I know about.
So I got the idea of TheWeek, a week-long intensive bootcamp teaching programming through live coding of an app for a specific use case.
While preparing for the event, I was wondering what was the best example app to clone for educational purposes, Instagram? Twitter? Or something similar. But we finally decided that rather than replicating something that already exists, it better to work on an idea that might be more relevant to the Iraqi market, and give our participants the possibility to continue developing it after the event, providing them with mentorship and training through office hours after the event.
The idea we settled on was to build an instant-offer app that send people the latest store campaigns and offers when they are in a nearby area.
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript were our languages of choice for the front-end and Parse for the backend service, because “learning two languages is a waste of time” and because most of Iraq’s challenges can be addressed with existing technologies only; that is, no innovation needed.
We started to get in touch with companies to secure a sponsorship that would cover expenses of our participants and our time. We agreed with a local payment company two weeks before the event, opened the registration for the event and 200 people registered. We chose 20 people and sent them invitations to confirm through filling out another form.
A day before the event the company pushed to postpone the event by one week due to the recent floods in Baghdad. Despite that 19 out of the 20 people invited had confirmed their attendance and that Marwan Ahmed, my partner in crime, was starting his new job the week after, the sponsor insisted on either postponing the event or canceling their sponsorship. At that point, they hadn’t even paid us for online ads that we had conducted on their behalf. Nonetheless, we thought never mind, we’ll continue with our plan without their sponsorship. We cared a lot about doing our best to deliver high quality results. Most importantly, we didn’t want to disappoint our participants who were eagerly looking forward to starting the Week. One of them had even said that he would come if it would rain stones, another had postponed his flight to participate, others had taken several days off work.
We started to look for another sponsor less than a day before the event to barely cover the cost of food and beverages after we had covered the cost of the first day from our own pockets. We managed to secure sponsorship from new a local airline, FlyBaghdad, and a law firm, Al-Nessor, and got to use the venue for free from our partner Sanad Peace Building.
Despite the fact that we ended up losing money on the Week instead of making it, it had a positive impact on myself and the team. We were also able to change the mindset of our final 17 participants and change the way they think about programming and business opportunities. Ultimately, only two people dropped out due to personal emergencies.
We hosted about 17 speakers and industry experts in person and through Skype, plus a special phone call from the U.S. Department of State promoting their GIST initiative. Our participants also got a 75% discount off company registration fees from our partners at Al-Nessor Law Firm.
Here is a few highlights of the event.
