Makers Academy

To be honest I don’t have any cons, others may have but my experience at Makers was hands down the best experience of my life.

I wanted to make a change after 15 years in sales and it was a tough decision to make a change at this point in my life.

However, if you’re reading this and want to make a change in life and start a career in something you love you need Makers, amazing coach’s the best cohorts and the best time of your life....

You will learn industry standards, how to work through problems in a methodical way and everything you will need to enter the real world of code and start a new life doing something you love and live.

The time I spent at Makers was not easy. During the course there was a constant feeling of being on your back foot, falling behind or otherwise just not understanding anything. It was only after I completed the course did I see the real merit of what I had been taught. Makers doesn't just teach you how to code, It teaches you how to be a coder. From Soft skills, to team management, to understanding acceptance and rejection during the job hunt, Makers Academy has given me a well-rounded view of the industry and one that I hope will continue long into my career. The holistic approach to development is a wonderful bonus as well and all the coaches and staff are friendly and helpful. I can't recommend it enough!

I attended Makers Academy, London from April 2019 to June 2019, with the aim of changing my career from a solicitor to a software engineer. I finished the course on 21st June and was offered my first Software Developer role on 14th July :D It is without a doubt one of the best decisions I have ever made - believe the hype!

Pros:
- Good focus on soft skills that will serve you well in your career - agile working, working as a team, communication, feedback etc. These skills would be very difficult to self-teach.

- Friendly, welcoming and supportive environment. It felt like a second home in no time at all.

- Knowledgable, approachable coaches.

- In my experience, excellent post-course support from the careers team, who are dedicated to helping you find the right job for Y...

Pros:
- You'll learn a lot in a short amount of time
- Teaches you how to work in pairs and in a team
- Friendly environment
- Gives you the tools and the confidence to learn anything by yourself
- Very supportive post course with hiring partners coming by every month looking for junior developers

Cons:
- Very intense and time consuming
- I personally found the review/portfolio process at the end of the course quite challenging but can see the value of it

I have attended Makers Academy March-May 2019 and just received a job offer from a big tech consultancy.

I have been choosing between several bootcamps, both in the UK and abroad. In London, I was choosing between Makers and FlatIron. I have asked people from my network who are in tech development to evaluate both in terms of curriculum and pretty much everyone told me that both are great (although there is a difference in the syllabus).

I have chosen Makers because the vibe there was less 'corporate'. If you have experience working in tech companies, that will remind you of a cosy start-up and to be fair this is what I personally prefer.

There is a big focus on soft skills - eg they teach you how to effectively communicate within the team, how to give and receive feedback (...

Before joining Makers I went through a lot of reviews and watched several videos about Makers, and the positive ones were very positive, while the negative ones gave me the impression the the students were looking for someone to spoon feed them the knowledge and skills required to make it in this industry! Well, as a software developer you must know how to teach yourself and keep up with the ever evolving techs, and that's precisely what Makers teach you.

Now that I did decide to change my life and move from construction project manager in Dubai, to a software engineer, I completed Makers' bootcamp and landed my dream job with a very big and well established company, and all that is actually a reality only because of Makers.

Makers is an excellent academy equipped to transform you into someone new. Here they focused on the important industry aspects of working as a developer. The focus on principles like test driven design and object oriented design is by far one of the greatest pro's, as it teaches you what the industry expects and wants and only serves to make you ready for work.

Beyond this the style of teaching they offer is a fantastic adult oriented style focusing on independent learning and self responsibility of your own progress. This pushes you to be curious and jump down rabbit holes in the never ending quest for delicious knowledge.

I cannot thank the team at Makers enough not only for their time spent teaching , but also for the other support offered from the coaching team and the hard ...

Before I started the course I wasn't sure if I'd made the right decision in signing up. I already had several years experience working as a self-taught freelance web developer. Didn't I already know how to code? If I'd managed to get this far by teaching myself, couldn't I just carry on learning by reading books and tutorials?

I was totally wrong about this. The skills I learnt at Makers I never would have learnt on my own, and they're the professional skills which are valued highly by employers - how to work in a modern development team (Agile, Scrum, XP values), test-driven development, how to write code which is easy to maintain and extend, and how to be adaptable and pick up new technology quickly. Skills which are very important, and difficult or impossible to learn on your own....

Makers Academy works hard at maintaining a supportive environment that encourages personal and professional development. The primary focus is teaching you how to solve your own problems and show you what a developer looks like. They place an emphasis on pair programming and agile software development which allows knowledge sharing amongst students. Personally, I found this the most rewarding part of the course - just by having someone to discuss the problem with made it easier to solve. Prior to Makers I held a non-technical management role but this wasn't a hinderance for me. Within 16 weeks I had obtained valuable skills that landed me my first developer job.

PROS
*Excellent use of paired programming and agile development
*Great community - You're a Maker for life and the alum...

Makers provided an excellent bootcamp, that enabled developers like myself (with no coding experience) to be able to go off and make valuable contributions to their tech company. The curriculum provided, covered a wide range of topics that allowed you to be exposed to a range of best practices ,key development concepts and programming languages. The support given by the coaches are of a high quality and they are very supportive and patient. Not only are you supported on a technical level but also on an emotional level by the Student Support Coach.
Cohorts need to be more diverse and inclusive however, and include more females and more people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Makers is an amazing 12 week bootcamp that teaches you so much about coding. I would highly recommend it if you are thinking of making the move. You get support when you need it and the curriculum is well thought out to teach you certain skills. You will be in awe of how much you can learn in such a short amount of time at Makers and it is the best thing I have every done. To go from not having much coding knowledge to producing a group project in less than 2 weeks is unbelievable.

The only thing that I found slightly difficult to adjust to is in Makers you make a lot of your projects from scratch and they are very small projects but once you are at your company you are working on much larger code bases and finding your way around legacy code can be a bit difficult to grasp.

The Makers Academy bootcamp was amazing. I started with absolutely no coding experience, but in just 12 weeks I am comfortable writing programs in various languages. Makers Academy had a very clear structured course, and offered lots of additional reading and practice outside of their course. The coaches were very supportive and always happy to help with any problems we were having. The environment at Makers was great too, it was very relaxed and strongly encouraged self-learning to enable us to continue learning after we finished the bootcamp and moved into a work environment. I would definitely recommend Makers Academy as a place to learn how to code to anyone looking to make the move into software development.

My background
Before Makers I had no coding / STEM background. I studied Fine Art at university and before that my A-levels were Philosophy, PE and Art.

Pre-Makers
I started coding on my own for a few months - Codecademy, The Odin Project etc. - to see if I could do it and if I enjoyed it. I found that I loved it (and was not terrible at it) so started looking for a course. I chose Makers on the basis of people I knew doing the course and enjoying it, Makers' teaching ethos and also their work on increasing diversity in tech. And maybe also the misc. good vibes that seemed to come with pretty much all the material that surrounds them. After doing most of the recommended prep materials and submitting my cover letter I was asked to come in for a pairing interview. After a brief chat...

Me:
I came to Makers with a non-technical background after teaching abroad for a couple of years, but otherwise having no graduate experience. I'd tried some online courses but only picked up basics, and didn't seem qualified for anything. I got a job offer in my fourth week after the course, with a company who had hired Makers grads before.

Course Pros:
- 1 month pre-course gets everyone familiar with basic tools like command line and git, as well as basic Ruby programming
- Solo weekend projects consolidate and build on what was learned during the week
- Intensive, you will learn a huge range of techs needed to make you full-stack in the first half of the course, and apply it in group projects in the second half
- Largely self-directed learning and group projects so that you l...

I was a professional developer before having children but found returning to tech almost impossible.
Recruiters didn't know what to do with me and my skill set seemed to be out of date.
16 weeks at Makers taught me about all of the current practices and 2 languages I hadn't used before.
That is the vanilla answer but the broader experience was considerably more enriching.
During the 12 weeks on site, I learned many things.
I learned more about self-teaching than either of my degrees, more about working in teams than I ever had working in teams and how important self-care is.
By the end of the course, I felt confident re-entering the tech world and secured several offers within two weeks of completion.

Pros
- Working and learning with lots of people everyday. Pairing is great
- Great atmosphere in the building
- Some of the coaches are the best
- I really enjoyed everyday learning new things and solving problems
- Ping pong table, who dosen't like a break playing ping pong

Cons
- Questions often responded to with questions
- Very intense, lots of hard work including at weekends. Although probably the same as most bootcamps.
- Ping pong table too busy needs another

If you want to change your career, learn coding and get a job as a Junior Developer, Makers Academy will sort you out.

Pros:
- You learn pair-programming and how to effectively work in a team.
- You will work in an agile environment.
- You learn Test Driven Development and good code practices.
- Access to some brilliant coaches.
- Super friendly atmosphere and you will make friends quickly.
- 'Job Guarantee' simply if you don't get a job within 6 months after the course you'll get your fees back. I was offered a job after 1 month and some of my colleagues even earlier.
- 'Hiring Partners' each month there is an internal careers fair. Employers attending are well known and established companies as well as small start ups you probably never heard of. All of them are happy to ...

Makers Academy teaches the principles behind good code through the act of coding. The course structure changes incrementally as each cohort gives feedback on the last week of work in a friendly group setting, as a result the curriculum is very polished. 12 weeks is not enough to learn all there is to software development, instead of trying to teach you everything Makers tries to teach you the fundamentals and good practices. These are universal across the software development discipline, wether you're writing JavaScript or C++. The curriculum touches on a lot of subjects in an effort to make you aware of what is out there, the philosophy here is that if you know something exists you can learn about it. This can be a bit overwhelming and lead to a feeling of falling behind as everyone w...

TLDR: I went from a secondary school science teacher to a programmer. I would not have been able to do it without the help of attending Makers.

Pros:
- Type of learning: Makers teaches you how to learn, in the sense that you are fully responsible for how much time you put in.
- Process of thinking : Makers teaches you the fundamentals of how to pick up languages at lightning pace, ways of thinking around problems and to think
like programmer in general.
- Best practices: At Makers, we learn about test driven development and always use this to build our code. This is something I had not even heard of prior to
Makers and companies in the tech industry more than ever are searching us golden nuggets.
- Supportive environment: Makers is the friendliest work environment I ...

The Makers environment is one in which you are expected to be in control of your own learning. There is no one chasing you up, there is no hand holding. But there is a lot of support when you need it. I loved the environment of Makers academy - I think I thrived by being in a structured learning situation where you have the freedom to explore, make mistakes and choose your path. Being surrounded by people on the same journey as you is super inspiring, and there's an energy and drive like nowhere else I've ever studied.

The coaching team has some truly excellent teachers with a real depth of knowledge. They spend their time answering your questions with more questions, which is really effective when they lead you in right direction. The course structure is varied and the focus is less...