On Sunday, Prosper Otemuyiwa, lead trainer and developer at Andela’s Lagos campus, released his latest project on Github — just one of thousands that he’s posted over the past four years. Called “Laravel Hackathon Starter Pack,” it’s a tool to help developers get up-and-running quickly with MVPs.
Within four days of posting, the project amassed over 500 stars on Github and boosted Prosper to number two on the top trending list of #PHP developers worldwide.
Let’s take a step back: This 23-year-old developer, based in Lagos, Nigeria, just surpassed Facebook — which is working with a market cap of more than $300 billion — on GitHub. That’s kind of a big deal.
But so is Prosper. As one of Andela’s lead trainers, he’s responsible for teaching new Andela recruits the technical skills they need to succeed as developers in fast-paced startup environments. Specializing in the PHP/Laravel stack, he also runs Andela’s two-week intensive bootcamps and heads up community development through open-source projects and local meetups.
So what’s all the fuss about? Hackathon Starter took Prosper a week to build, and now it’s being used by hundreds of developers all over the world to save time building MVPs, especially at hackathons where time is limited.
If you want to build (yet another) social networking app, for instance, you have to implement authentication, registration, and account management functionality, among other things. Maybe you also want to connect to Slack’s API for messaging or use Facebook for user authentication. Turns out, those things are rather tedious and time consuming — and a major roadblock for hackathon participants under a time crunch.
Bruno Skvorc on Twitter
Wow, pretty epic.. https://github.com/unicodeveloper/laravel-hackathon-starter … #sourcehunt #php
“By the time you implement these functionalities and test them to ensure they work properly, you will have spent at least two hours before you can get started on your idea,” Prosper says.
A lot of these common functionalities, though, are similar to set up across various applications. With Hackathon Starter, developers can bypass this process and get a basic MVP up and running within five minutes.
It’s also a helpful learning tool, Prosper points out. “If you want to build a project and its your first time, this will teach you how to go about adding things in — you can learn a lot from my source code.”
Prosper, who goes by @unicodeveloper (unicode is the standard that powers emoji, if you’re wondering), says this is all part of his mission to inspire young people to become developers.
“My end goal is to travel around the world and evangelize about new technologies and new ways of building things,” he says. “I want to inspire people to get into programming and to become great.”
Check out Hackathon Starter here and let Prosper know what you think.
