Intro: What's inside this course?

Welcome to this course about the processes of creating a Laravel project. The goal here is not the code. It's about everything we need to do AROUND the code.

The idea was born from this YouTube comment:

Indeed, many courses are about how to code, but not too many describe the process "from start to finish", so we're trying to do it here.

On top of that, we're trying to simulate a situation of working in a team. This is exactly the skill you need to get a developer job: in most cases, you will get hired into an existing project/team and will need to deal with the process of how to commit/push/structure the code.

For demonstration, we're taking on a relatively small Laravel project for sending newsletters with just a few CRUDs:

The full description of the project is in the next lesson. When choosing the project, I had these requirements in mind:

• Small enough: so the course wouldn't be too big (students get bored/demotivated quickly)
• A realistic typical SaaS: with multi-tenancy (users see their data) but without payments (that would require a separate huge course)
• Using queues and 3rd party APIs: it would both require setting up extra things on local/staging/live servers and in the tests

The idea is that you would adopt the same process logic from this course for (much) bigger projects.

The overall plan is this:

• Turn the client's project description into a technical plan of action
• While coding, deal with GitHub: branches, issues, PRs
• Write proper automated tests along the way
• Automate the automation with CI/CD: use Laravel/PHP tools and GitHub Actions to auto-check

I divided the course into three sections by milestones:

• Goal 1: Zero to Staging. Show SOMETHING to the client for the first feedback loop
• Goal 2: Staging to Live. Launch the project after creating the remaining features
• Goal 3: Maintenance. "We're live - what's next"?

For now, at the end of November, we're launching the first section while working on the others and waiting for your ideas about what other questions we should cover. So, be active in the comments!

In the first lesson, we will examine the project description and transform it into "what we actually need to do," with the goal of asking questions and minimizing the risk of unpredictable features later.