What the heck is Yelp Camp and why am I claiming it’s the best project ever?
đ§ 𧰠Today’s post is brought to you by Portfolio Surgery. Transform your portfolio projects today with five proven methods using real-world examples.
(One of the projects from this article is used in the course!)
If youâre a self-taught web developer, thereâs a good chance youâve heard of Udemy.com.
And if youâve heard of Udemy.com, youâve probably heard of The Web Developer Bootcamp by Colt Steele.
Love it or hate it, The Web Developer Bootcamp has helped kick-start thousands of web developer careers.

And thereâs an interesting little project inside this course that just might be the greatest web development project of all time.
Itâs called Yelp Camp.
Watch the video version of this article:
Iâm going to share four reasons why I think itâs the greatest web development project of all time.
A bold proclamation, no doubt!
The Web Developer Bootcamp is a video-based course on Udemy designed for complete beginners.

It has well over 600,000 students and clocks in at a soul-sucking 63 hours of on-demand video.
The idea is that this is the exact curriculum youâd get in a real-life coding bootcamp:
A bootcamp that costs anywhere between $10,000 and $25,000 (sometimes more).
The only difference is, with this Udemy course youâre alone and desperate while debugging your drum machine app. Also, there isnât a communal pantry filled with vegan cupcakes and LaCroix Pamplemousse fizzy water.

But the curriculum? The curriculum is the same.
Most people I know who bought this course do not finish it. Including myself… I got about 60% done before I hopped onto other courses. Iâve met exactly one person over the years who has cranked this thing out.
Itâs intense.
Itâs time-consuming.
And letâs face it, even with cute cat pics and dad jokes some of this stuff can be really freaking dry and demotivating.
Now mind you â there are other bootcamp courses on this site for ten bucks. Some of them are very good.
But this is the original. And it recently got updated (for example, there’s now ES6 but no more jQuery) so itâs experiencing a bit of a renaissance.
The capstone project in this course is called Yelp Camp.
You start working on it about halfway through the course.
Before that youâre learning HTML, lots of CSS, JavaScript basics â even some OOP with JavaScript.
You get some terminal practice, and you’re introduced to Node and NPM.
You also build some servers with Express, start exploring MongoDB…And then the YelpCamp bomb drops.

This right here, IMHO, is reason #1 why this is the greatest web development project of all time.
The build up is so methodical. Youâre spending a few weeks or even a couple of months learning about web development, learning the basics of programming, before you even hear the whispers of this project.
Youâre also building smaller stuff and smaller projects. For example, a drum machine, a candy museum site, a photo gallery and more.
And so developers are already getting a taste of the build process before they even start with Yelp Camp.
And by the time they get to it, itâs not this Oh Mah God! moment where you have no idea whatâs happening â youâve already had hundreds of hours of practice.
Remember, this course is 62 video hours.
There are lots of videos here that youâll probably watch a few times. A lot of your time is going to be spent with the video paused while you set up your developer environment, while you practice â that kind of stuff.
So by the time you hit this project, youâve gone through weeks or months of training. And rather than a complete shock, this project is largely a natural progression from the stuff youâve learned and built previously in the course.
Reason #2 I think Yelp Camp is best â is that this is just a CRUD app.

The idea of this app is not really mind-blowing, but at the same time itâs a novel idea.
Youâre building a full-stack, fully functional web application where people can submit campgrounds and users can review them.
And I know with these courses one of the challenges is to bring some cool projects to the table.
Nobody wants to learn how to create todo apps for four months of their life.
So thereâs a temptation a lot of times to get ridiculous with it like, in this course youâre going to build an alien abduction zapper that also makes toast!
This project is not like that. Itâs a plain olâ CRUD app, but itâs also interesting and relatable because weâre all familiar with review sites.
Weâre all familiar with logging in to leave a review.
But then youâre challenged to actually build it with all this functionality thatâs expected in a real-world version of this project.
Reason #3: community support.
With numbers like these (i.e. well over 600,000 students enrolled), there is somebody out there right at this moment with the same issues youâre having with this project.
Thereâs an official Discord, and by popular demand I even started a channel on my own Discord server for this course:

There are GitHub repos where you can check out how other people went about building the project.
Even developers who arenât familiar with this course or this project are oftentimes able to help you and keep you motivated.
Finally reason #4 I think Yelp Camp just might be the greatest web development project of all time?
Itâs easily customizable.
And this is where things start really getting interesting.
This whole Yelp Camp thing – the idea of a campground review site – itâs just a skin. You can do any theme. For example:
You can review dogs.
Shoes!
And music, too.
Seriously, it can be whatever you want.

And then you can switch out technologies, too.
As another example, I think MongoDB is one of the most overhyped technologies in recent memory (at least when it comes to web developer courses).
But you can dump it and slap on MySQL or PostgreSQL or MariaDB or what the heck ever.
I mean, youâre not reallllyyyyy slapping it on, but you know what I mean. Be gentle – you donât want to drop the columns!
But in the context of picking up developer skills?
In the context of developing those problem solving skills?
Going out on your own to customize any project is where so much real learning comes in.
The exploration, the curiosity, the questioning and experimentation.
The more you get away from these videos, the better. Because any time youâre watching a video, youâre being fed somebody elseâs problem solving process.
Now this isnât always a bad thing. Youâve got to start somewhere â but it’s important to put whatever video it is on pause and venture into the unknown.
The worst you can do is break something thatâs usually fixable! Just make sure you’re using version control.
But when you pause a video and say:
Wait, what happens if I try using a new JavaScript thing I learned today? What happens if I bust out some OOP and start working with inheritance and constructor functions?
Thatâs when youâre making progress, and thatâs when youâre one step closer to becoming an employable developer.
But back to YelpCamp.

You donât have to take this course to build this project. The code is all over GitHub, for example, if you want to take a crack at it.
And even though Iâve been detailing the virtues of Yelp Camp in this video, this project is not going to automatically make you a job-ready developer.
Itâs not going to automatically make you a junior developer.
No course can do that, not a single project can do that.
But Iâm just saying! Itâs a good project.
CRUD apps really get to the heart of software development, plus theyâre fun to design and build and customize.
When something is fun it just makes it so much easier to feel motivated when learning web development.
What do you all think: is Yelp Camp the greatest web development project of all time, or am I inhaling too many Node fumes?
Next up: