devCodeCamp

I started at devCodeCamp during the last few months of my sixth year teaching public school music--May of 2022--with just enough experience learning Javascript to make me confident that I was ready to commit and learn more.The teaching profession had... Read More changed pretty dramatically with the outbreak of covid, and as result, I began looking for better ways to provide for my wife and two children. After a lot of research and soul searching, I had made the decision to go with devCodeCamp for four main reasons: 1) They had the most flexible timeline for completion out of all the camps I looked at. 2) Their price was quite reasonable, relative to other camps I had looked at. 3) They had a thorough and rigorous curriculum--including a devOps unit to help get projects deployed--many other camps didn’t offer devOps. 4) They had great reviews and great employment outcomes. When I started the bootcamp I was teaching, coordinating concerts, making lesson plans and carving out as much time as possible for Python and JavaScript. When I finished I was working as a QA and finding more and more connections between my work and what I learned in my bootcamp. As a graduate now looking back, I genuinely feel devCodeCamp was the right place for me. The content was challenging, rigorous and overwhelming at times, but every week I would get on a call with my instructors and they would help me untie the knots I inadvertently put in my code and get me back on the right track. I even received support during weekends on several occasions even though instructors had no obligation to help me till Monday. They were/are invested in their students. I was also extremely grateful for the flexible timeline that allowed me to continue to provide for my family and to learn at a pace that worked best for me. Sometimes I finished the unit and the assignments but felt that my grasp of the content was still somewhat nebulous so I would spend another week or so on that content cleaning up the code or doing the bonus project to make sure I really understood the content and was actually ready to move on to the next set of concepts. This flexibility combined with my instructors willingness to meet me where I was made a huge difference for me. In addition, building my capstone--a meal planning grocery list app--was probably the most fulfilling and challenging part of the experience. The process of sending a proposal, writing user stories, using a kanban workflow, and receiving weekly accountability really helped to set me up for success. I came away from the experience excited to build more applications and add more functionality to the one I had just built. My wife and I actually use my app for our grocery bi-weekly shopping. The career services unit has likewise been excellent. I landed a job as a QA early on in the bootcamp by networking, but I am still working toward landing a coding job and there are numerous things I wouldn’t have known about resumes, cover letters and LinkedIn if not for the well made content they provided. The few cons I can think of with devCodeCamp are that some of the video lectures are long and somewhat abstract until after you have done the project. You may want to either watch them after completing the assignments or review them after completing the projects so the information has more meaning. There may also be times where your instructor won’t know how to solve a problem or says not to worry about an error message because the overall application still works. My advice with that is to take such times as a challenge to dig deeper and learn something new about the software that even your instructor doesn’t know. Changing careers and learning to code is not for the faint of heart, but if you are sure you like coding, feel ready to be humbled, and are genuinely committed, devCodeCamp is a great place to do it.