| | Matt Hinea | Viking is great. The course material is top-notch. I bring techniques I learned at Viking to my job as a full-stack developer almost every day. My coworkers, all of whom have CS degrees, who stopped accepting applications from code school grads just days after mine came in, have told me that I'm "full of useful tricks" (most of which I learned at Viking, and the rest of which I only learned after learning how to learn at Viking). I actually logged back into my Viking account today to brush up on Ruby on Rails testing, because we're rolling out a new application at work and switching to RSpec, and because the content and writing is so much better than anything else I can find on the internet. There's enough info in the Viking courses to keep you busy for well over a year, which is generous, since the immersive course is only 4 months or so, but it's great to keep coming back to. I can't speak to the quality of students of every cohort, but I can say that my cohort (Summer 2016) was jam-packed with brilliant, kind, and all-around lovely people, all of whom I really admired. Pair-programming for 6-8 hours a day meant that I was able to sustain myself for the duration of the admittedly heavy course load, because it felt like I was socializing the entire time I was learning. Erik, Viking's founder, is a really stand-up guy, and a terrific person to have in your Gmail contacts for life, and the instructors I worked with (Kit, Chris, Andur) were all basically perfect at their jobs as well. I have weirdly fond memories of going through the immersive program at Viking, weird only because despite the course being so time-consuming, technically challenging, and entirely remote, it was also lots of fun. All that in combination with their job hunt support and payment plan makes me think you'd be hard pressed to name a non-traditional CS program that could even compete. |
