DigitalCrafts

I attended DigitalCrafts' Sept 2018 - Jan 2019 Full-stack Immersive cohort in Atlanta, and it was the best career decision I could have made. After 20+ years in the telecom vendor industry, I was hungry for a career change. I dabbled for a couple of years... Read More with numerous online resources (edX, Coursera, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp, etc) but finally recognized I needed to attend a bootcamp with a strong, full-stack curriculum if I was going to feel confident enough to change jobs.

After researching several Atlanta-area in-person camps, as well as a few online options, I settled on DigitalCrafts because:
- the cost was reasonable compared to other in-person options,
- the Atlanta Tech Village (ATV) location was amazing and right in the heart of one of Atlanta's booming tech districts,
- the staff was incredibly friendly and helpful,
- the reviews from former students, as well as what I could see in their LinkedIn and GitHub accounts, were amazing, and
- the full-stack curriculum was heavily focused on JavaScript, and included very current topics such as React and AWS

All of the reasons that I chose DigitalCrafts proved to be true, and I never regretted my decision to attend. Being 47 years old, I was nervous that I would not fit in with the other students, most of whom where in their 20s and early 30s, but that was never an issue. There is a real sense of community, both inside the classroom, and throughout the ATV facility which is also home to many tech start-up companies. At the free lunch ATV provides on Fridays, you can sit with your fellow students, or grab a seat with a stranger and listen to them practice their elevator pitch for their startup (and maybe even get a job offer).

The reviews here are full of compliments about the instructors, and I whole-heartedly agree, so I won't repeat how amazing they are. DigitalCrafts does an excellent job finding experienced and knowledgeable people who know how to teach to serve as their instructors. Each cohort has a lead instructor and one or two teaching assistants and they all go above and beyond, frequently staying well after class and providing regular office hours to offer any extra help as needed. You not only learn how to be a full stack developer (with HTML, CSS, JS, and React on the front end, and Node, Express, PostgreSQL on the backend), but you also learn the important skill of deploying what you build on AWS cloud servers, which comes in handy when you want to quickly show an interviewer what you have created.

Lastly, the career services at DC exceeded my expectations. They stop short of guaranteeing you a job, but they do everything possible to put you in a position to succeed in your job search. There are frequent sessions where the importance of resumes, portfolios, GitHub, and LinkedIn are discussed, and the DC career services team works with you to build and improve each of them. Interviewing advice is offered regularly and you get to do a mock interview to practice your interview skills. We took a class trip to the office of a local web dev shop to see firsthand how their developers work in an agile team environment, and there were several guest speakers who came in later in the cohort to talk about job search and career advice for new developers. This all paid off for me (and several other classmates) as I had a successful interview, which led to a job offer during the final week of my cohort.

I am now enjoying the one week break from the end of my cohort to my first day at work as I start my new career as a software developer. I will be forever grateful to DigitalCrafts for helping to make that possible.