As the Motoko Bootcamp finished only a few days ago, I am still full of excitement and would like to give you a short review. Motoko-Bootcamp was an event organized by Motoko School and Dfinity Community; you can read what the organizers said here.

More than 160 students worldwide participated in the first Bootcamp, and there were two levels of difficulties – beginner and intermediate. Both groups were given similar tasks to complete; there were just higher expectations for intermediate individuals. I liked that there was a space to learn for total beginners – even people who had never written a line of code.

Schedule

The whole Bootcamp had quite a tight schedule. It took place over one week and every day we had a lot of work to do. Each day we usually had two lectures and ten daily challenges to code, a team meeting and a developer session where we could discuss our problems with experienced IC developers. During all of that, we worked on our core project, which was the key part of the whole event.

I was a little worried at the beginning whether I could finish all of it as I am working full-time and wanted to cancel my registration at first. I decided to challenge myself, didn't sleep for a week and now I am very happy about it – I really learned a lot.

Lectures and dev mentors

A lot of great mentors and contributors in the IC community helped the organizers to create high-quality educative content. I tried to do some IC hacking on my own before the Bootcamp started and even though I have some experience with development, it was not easy for me to figure out how to implement things on the IC.

Attending lectures helped me to crystalize things. During the lectures, we were taken through many interesting topics such as how to interact with canisters, how to integrate them with the front end, and how to deploy our projects to the mainnet etc. Now I feel much more knowledgeable about how the whole network works.

For people who had a problem with some parts of their project, two developer sessions were scheduled each day. The week was loaded with opportunities to learn and ask specific questions.

Daily challenges

As mentioned, all of the students were given ten tasks every day to complete. These tasks were usually related to implementing some traditional coding exercises in Motoko. I instantly recalled the good old days at university. There was a lot of hacking around types, arrays, functions and objects. The difficulty slowly increased from simple tasks to more challenging ones.

The core-project

The core project was to develop an NFT minting app that allows you to mint your own NFT. We needed to involve some simple form of token payment (intermediate level). Otherwise, there were no more rules and then everything was up to our own creativity.

For example, I got an idea to create a DFINI∞SHIELDS NFT minter that allows anyone to choose their favorite colors and mint an SVG represented image of the shield with an infinity symbol. You can mint yours too, but I need to remind you – it has no economic value and is not integrated into an exchange. So far, almost 300 shields were minted. I love to see the creativity of people with all the beautiful color combinations:

Other students had very cool ideas too. I've seen a couple of NFT fishes swimming in a fish tank, for example, or a web game developed in Unity integrated with NFTs. I hope the organizers will reveal more interesting projects when announcing rewards.

Conclusion

If you missed the first Motoko Bootcamp the only thing I can recommend you is do not miss the next one. I am pretty sure there will be more Bootcamps in the future as the first one was very successful. I can't wait to see all of the new graduates coming up with their real projects that we are now able to make real.

In the end, I would like to thank the main organizers, Isaac Valadez and Sebastian Thuillier for the great effort they put into this event. Also, I would like to thank my team called Brutal Giraffes, especially Iri and Lopez. We had such great team spirit helping each other out. I believe that through this teamwork and camaraderie, we have helped to form a new wave of creativity on the Internet Computer.

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