How to Test Junior Laravel Developer Skills: Sample Project

While expanding my team and working with potential junior developers, I've come up with a few tasks to test their practical knowledge. There's not much value in quizzes or interviews - let them create one simple project. From start to finish.

So here's an example of such project, you can use it for your own needs.

We need to test basic Laravel skills, right? So the project should be simple, but at the same time touch majority of fundamentals. Also, it should be possible to do within a day or so - in some cases, you would even pay them for spending their time.

With that in mind, here's a project I came up with.

Adminpanel to manage companies

Basically, project to manage companies and their employees. Mini-CRM.

Basic Laravel Auth: ability to log in as administrator
Use database seeds to create first user with email admin@admin.com and password "password"
CRUD functionality (Create / Read / Update / Delete) for two menu items: Companies and Employees.
Companies DB table consists of these fields: Name (required), email, logo (minimum 100x100), website
Employees DB table consists of these fields: First name (required), last name (required), Company (foreign key to Companies), email, phone
Use database migrations to create those schemas above
Store companies logos in storage/app/public folder and make them accessible from public
Use basic Laravel resource controllers with default methods - index, create, store etc.
Use Laravel's validation function, using Request classes
Use Laravel's pagination for showing Companies/Employees list, 10 entries per page
Use Laravel's starter kit for auth and basic theme, but remove ability to register

Basically, that's it. With this simple exercise junior developer shows the skills in basic Laravel things:

MVC
Auth
CRUD and Resource Controllers
Eloquent and Relationships
Database migrations and seeds
Form Validation and Requests
File management
Basic front-end by Starter Kits
Pagination

Guess what - most of the basics web-applications will have these functions as core. There will be a lot more on top of that, but without these fundamentals you cannot move further.

So this task would actually test if the person can create simple projects. And then it's practice, practice, practice on more projects, each of them individual and adding more to their knowledge base.

From my own experience, different developers are "creative" in different code places - some don't use Resource controllers and put Route::get everywhere, some don't validate forms, some don't test their code properly etc. That's exactly the things you want to spot as early as possible.

Extra Task for "Advanced" Juniors

If you feel like this task is too small and simple, you can add these things on top:

Email notification: send email whenever new company is entered (use Mailgun or Mailtrap)
Make the project multi-language (using lang folder)
Basic testing with Pest/PHPUnit (I know some would argue it should be the basics, but I disagree)
Use a custom front-end theme

Do you agree with such task? What would you change or add to this?

And have you had any experience with giving similar tasks, what were your impressions?

James Cosntantino

1 year ago

Thank you sir Pov for helping Juniors like me wants to learn Laravel. Your articles, vids, and tweets are very helpul boosting my skills and confidence. More tutorials and tips to come!

👍 2

Povilas Korop

Thanks for the kind words, James!

Raj kumar Sardar

i'm very much thankful for your tips and tutorials @pov sir

damann8479

11 months ago

Hello, first thanks for you lot of courses. you make a very good job. i am a beginner. this in one day is not problem for me. but what is everything is still necessary to start work in a company?