Codesmith

I stumbled upon the PTRI program while looking for a bootcamp and almost immediately fell in love with their block-driven approach and supportive community. I considered going to the on-site program in NYC, but like many people was not able to quit my... Read More job for months to do that.

The PTRI program is not easy, but the 3 hours a night are doable even if you work full-time. The instructors and other staff are top-notch - super supportive, responsive, and they make you feel like you belong.

The community is awesome, and Codesmith has been very successful at creating a tight-knit group, even though we're geographically far away from one another. So kudos to them!

I haven't gotten to the hiring portion yet, so I can't speak to the efficacy of it personally, but they have great outcomes, so I'm not too worried about my prospects.

Overall, if you are dedicated and hard working and want a challenge, I definitely recommend this program!

Codesmiths CS Prep program was helpful in giving me the exposure that I needed in order to help me understand the things that I had to improve on to become a better me. The best part of CSPrep was the group project. It was amazing building something from... Read More scratch and applying all the things that we learned in CS Prep in order to create a project that we were able to share with our CS Prep Cohort. If someone told me a few months ago that I would be able to complete something from scratch by coding it out, I would've never believed them, which is why I highly recommend everyone do CS Prep.

I came upon Codesmith during my months-long search for the most suitable bootcamp in NYC. What impressed me about CS, right off the bat at their open house, was the detail and clarity of their curriculum. While they also have the numbers to show for it,... Read More their presentation alone really painted a solidly structured picture of how students will learn during their 12-week intensive. I decided to take the JS for Beginners online course partially because I wanted a solid foundation to JavaScript, and learn better by interaction, but also because I wanted to get a sense of how Codesmith teaches: its language, its approach, etc.

I had a tremendously rewarding learning experience with JS for Beginners. Our instructor, Michelle, was patient, communicative, and receptive to our questions. The best part, in my opinion, was the amount of technical communication the short prep course taught me. It gave me a morsel of confidence to speak my code, literally, and feel comfortable with the syntax. This is a fantastic opportunity for those wanting to begin their coding journey. I cannot recommend JS For Beginners enough.

I just got an offer that I will be accepting as my first Software Engineer role outside of Codesmith and I'm still in shock at how things worked out the way it did! I was a student in the Software Engineering Immersive Program back in May-August and had... Read More the privilege of becoming a fellow from August-November.

Many people were sharing how the job search will be difficult around the time I end fellowship but I am here to say that if you put in the hard work, you can get a job regardless of the “best hiring” season. I am super thankful for the Codesmith community as I have made so many amazing life-long friends/engineers who are here to support me in my new journey, every step of the way. I can’t thank the staff enough for believing in me and giving me all the resources I need to succeed. Thank you Codesmith!

I graduated with a degree in Graphic Design but I felt unprepared for actually finding work/ furthering a career in Design in a meaningful and stable way. For that and several other reasons I decided give programming a go. I enrolled into two other programming... Read More schools before attending Codesmith (Call me nuts). Here are somethings I have to say...

1- Codesmith is one of a kind.
I don't think there are any other programs out there that can help an individual improve themselves and their careers at such a high caliber. In terms of Codesmith as an educational entity, I learned more valuable and practical things here than I did in most of my undergrad. In comparison to the programming schools I attended prior, Codesmith felt more like a Graduate/Masters Program. Which leads to the next point....

2- It's not easy (Seriously... its not).
When I initially saw the active hours of Mon-Sat 9am-8pm I thought about the commitment I was getting into. In total you may spend +1300 hours at Codesmith. You have to be serious about this. You will be introduced to CS/ Full-Stack concepts at an unnatural rate that will be juuust uncomfortable enough that you will feel challenged throughout the program. But you aren't expected to know everything. The thing to understand is your peers are there to learn too. No one is perfect. You just need to make sure that if you do decide to enroll into Codesmith, you go in with an open mind and are serious about learning. The Codesmith community will only cultivate you and let you grow as an engineer. This is something that Codesmith does quite well.

3- The Codesmith Bag of Goodies
Codesmith equips its students with things that I noticed others schools didn't. Some examples:

a) Being a student at the New York Campus has a likeness to working at a start up company. Both classes (Juniors and Seniors) share the same space. There is no "Classroom code along" and only a small portion of your day is devoted to lecture. Most of your time will be spent pair programming/ working at engineering problems. On top of that, your senior portion will have you working in close proximity with other engineers where you can practice things such as working in an AGILE environment, GitHub workflow, Brainstorming/Building an application from the ground up as a team. These start up elements can help grads both form opinions about these concepts AND adjust to environments of the start up companies that want to hire them.

b) Codesmith's hiring portion is on point. Your credibility as an engineer will be boosted by Codesmith's teaching style regarding your resume writing, self advocacy, proper salary negotiation and job searching techniques. I learned a great deal in this phase of the program.

c) The curriculum is well thought out. You are given things that will help you build a strong resume. Aside from the great amount of technologies you touch and your smaller projects, the production project you build over the course of several weeks is great experience. This larger scale project will get you though enough engineering challenges to allow you to formulate a mature engineering narrative that will help you when on the job search. And don't even get me started on the tech talk.

4- I am thankful
I'm someone who has struggled quite a bit with programming. But after devoting less than a year to focus on studies I am now working as an engineer with a salary that is 4x greater than I've ever earned before. So for that I am thankful.

There are a lot of things to consider about bootcamps, but one thing that can't be challenged about Codesmith is results. Less than six months ago I was working in SEO - yes, that's kind of web development but not as much as I'd like it to be when I'm... Read More on a job interview. As of last week I was hired into a mid-level engineering role. I have a BA in journalism with a concentration in Cinema Studies - yes, really - and a year of studying JS and other languages to my name. I owe my current position to the course at Codesmith.

There are cons to the program, as there are with anything that takes up 70+ hours of your week for 13 straight weeks. It's stressful and has a throw-you-in-the-deep-end mentality, but it works. Maybe that level of stress and commitment isn't' for you, that's something to consider, but it is also what leads to a most people landing mid-level positions. Some grads even get senior level roles, though those are rare without some kind of direct tech background prior to the course.

Pros:
The hiring program at the end is outstanding - they work with you until you finish negotiating
The course teaches students how to figure things out on their own
The community is incredibly supportive, both with work and emotionally
They create a fun environment to unwind with Thursday night drinks, ping pong tournaments, and relay races

Cons:
The people teaching the courses are sometimes recent grades - they know their stuff but it would be helpful to have a larger staff of experienced engineers. To be clear, there are experienced engineers on staff, it's just not everyone
The schedule is grueling. There is a good argument that this is what makes the course so effective, but there can be a mentality that working all night is the best way to show work ethic. For some, it reduces productivity and has other negative effects.
Some of the courses need to be updated for bugs. Only one caused a problem for my group, and it has likely been resolved, but it put a big delay on work.

The pros out weigh the cons, it's as simple as that. I think they are easy to overlook considering the outcomes and that no program will be perfect. If you want to work very hard to fast-track yourself into a role as an engineer, likely passing over entry-level, this is the course for you. I have recommend it to friends and family who are considering career changes. It has been an amazing experience.

Would highly recommend checking out their free courses in NYC, LA, and online. I went to several before joining and experienced engineers go to them along with people just getting into it. Get a feel for it for yourself.

Five years ago, I quit my job to go to a (different) web dev bootcamp. It got me my first developer job, but that experience doesn't compare to what I got out of Codesmith. Several years and two jobs later I found myself unable to find my next opportunity.... Read More I was over-qualified for Jr roles and under-qualified for Sr ones because even after my on the job experience, my actual core programming knowledge base was sorely lacking.
Codesmith changed that and I couldn't be more grateful. After three VERY difficult months I found myself in a VERY different place - I was more confident, had recent cutting edge projects under my belt, and finally felt deserving of a Senior title. Newly empowered I ventured back into the job market that just months earlier had been rejecting me repeatedly.
Codesmith kept supporting me with constant advice, and encouragement and now I have the job I've always wanted. To top it off, my salary is 81% higher than it was at my last job. I can't recommend this program highly enough.

I had a great experience with the CS Prep class from Codesmith. I attended Cohort 23 from Jan 6 to Jan 22. I'm expecting to take their Immersive program, and took the CS Prep course as it's recommended to learn what's needed in order to learn the skills... Read More and concepts required before entering their program. It also provided me the chance to try out Codesmith remotely, since I don't currently live in either New York City or LA.

My experience prior to the course had been self-learning through a book that had been highly rated by several websites, FreeCodeCamp, and YouTube videos. I also used CSX, which is the free lessons provided by Codesmith at csx.codesmith.io. The lessons provided good exercises and explained many of the basic concepts and keywords used by JavaScript. Only about 50% of CSX is necessary to be ready for CS Prep. Going into the class, I felt fully prepared to make the most of the class, having completed all of the CSX exercises.

I was a little anxious going into the class. I was unsure of how the lessons would go, considering I have never taken an online course. I was also initially nervous about the class size. My cohort had about ~35 participants, and I was worried I wouldn't receive individual attention should I have problems or questions.

These concerns were quickly relieved after the my experience on the first day. The instructor, David, alongside an assistant, Chris, did a great job of making sure everyone was involved and felt included. During the lessons, they rotated asking questions of everyone involved. They answered all the questions we had in the chatroom, and made sure that people were clear on everything they were teaching before moving on.

Each day was about 3-3.5 hours. Other than the first day, each class begins with a problem you tackle individually. The next portion deals with the previous day's problem, going over a couple of different ways of solving it. The next hour or so is instruction over a concept of JavaScript. After the lesson is over, we split into pairs and programmed together, splitting the time between being the "navigator" and "driver" roles. The navigator takes care of most of the conceptualizing, while the driver is the one actually writing the code, but there is always discussion about the best approach to take. Each days lessons were recorded and provided in the Slack channel everyday, as well as the slides from the presentation.

Speaking of the Slack channel, this is really where I think the course goes above and beyond. Alongside a general room, we were provided with a #pair-programming to find partners to practice outside of class, a #questions room for any code related questions, a #code-review room where we could post our solutions to the previous day's challenge (or really any code problem we tackled and wanted to share). We were also assigned a #tech-comm channel, which I'll describe below.

One of the five things Codesmith looks for in a student is technical communication. We were all required to record ourselves tackling a problem. Some of us chose easier challenges. and others tackled more difficult ones, but the key thing to do is to explain your thought process while going through the problem. Rather than think about issues silently (as we all so often do), we were encouraged to speak through our thinking, even if we are totally wrong about the approach. The instructors reviewed everyone's recordings (which is no small task for a class of 35).

The last day of the course, we presented a final project that groups of 4-5 worked on. It was very freeform, and it was great seeing all the different ideeas people had to show off their skills. My group worked on a JavaScript-themed text adventure with a Rock-Paper-Scissors combat system. I was proud of the work my team did, and how well it was received.

I had a great experience in the class. While I already studied some of the things taught prior to starting, it was great to go over them again and even stuff I thought I knew would be better explained. My cohort is still active weeks later, pairing up to continue learning JavaScript. I'd encourage anyone thinking about taking a dive into coding to give this class a shot.

If you are looking at Codesmith's Software Engineering Immersive Program, but feel that you are not quite ready yet, CS Prep might be exactly what you are looking for. I was in that position a few weeks ago, in which I was familiar with some Javascript... Read More fundamentals but did not feel that I could pass the entrance interviews due to a complete lack of technical communication. I had done coding challenges by myself, but never really had the chance to communicate this to anyone else.

I recently finished my CS Prep cohort at Codesmith after having dabbled in Javascript for a couple of months before starting. I worked through all of CSX - CodeSmith's own online free learning environment - to prepare myself for the concepts that would be covered in CS Prep. The focus within CS Prep lies heavily on technical communication. Examples of this are found in the daily opportunities to pair program, to pseudocode well during the problems, to share a video where you walk the viewer through a problem and when you work with your group on your final project. Those could sound like daunting tasks, but you get used to it quicker than you would think.

The lectures themselves followed a similar format each day. Typically we started with a problem of the day, then the instructor would walk through the problem of the previous day. After that, a new topic would be introduced and explained in-depth. Lastly, we would be assigned a pair programming partner, which allowed us to work through the problem sets related to that day's topic together. The use of technology (mostly done with Zoom and their own CSBin to write code) made for a seamless experience. The lectures require a lot of diagramming so that you get a deeper understanding of why the code is doing what it's doing. Students are called upon (students join with microphone and camera) to analyze the lines of code and to technically communicate what is happening. The instructors are extremely engaging and approachable.

My cohort consisted of about 30-35 students and we had an active slack channel going with the instructors actively participating as well. This way, there was always someone to answer your questions as you were working through your problems. A sidenote here is that I was unemployed, so I was able to spend a lot of hours daily to practice and to get the most out of the experience. However, there were many people that were doing this next to their studies/full-time work, and they still performed very well.

I am also happy to say that I got into the Software Engineering Immersive Program and will be starting in the NY March Cohort. I practised by myself before CS Prep and I probably would have gotten there in the end, but CS Prep helped accelerate the process and made everything much more enjoyable as well. If you are near either of the two Codesmith locations, you are also likely to run into other people from your CS Prep program if you visit the JavaScript the Hard Parts workshops, which is an additional benefit.

Overall - Nothing but good words for CS Prep and the instructors: David, Chris and JinSung. I came out with a much better understanding of JavaScript, am now able to communicate my thought process much more clearly, made some friends, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

My experience with CS Prep was a very interesting two weeks. The course features long lectures, which then breaks away for pair programming to help students solidify the knowledge. If you are interested in this program, you should be aware that much of... Read More the learning is self-directed. Codesmith and CSPrep does not involve much hand-holding.