| | Matt Collins | I am writing my review a bit late but felt it necessary due to some of the comments I'm seeing, so I wanted to be sure to tell of my experience with the course. I took BOTH the Full-Stack course as well as the introductory course online. The way they set up the classroom cameras and interacted with the online students, I didn't feel as hindered as I thought I might. With that said, I will say if you DO have the opportunity to be in person, do it. Access to resources, etc. will be a lot easier, but don't stress too much if online is your only option. No bootcamp is perfect, but I felt that Coder Camps did a good job preparing me for my first professional development role. I was one of the earlier class groups in coder camps (I think their 7th). Stephen Walther (Who was our instructor) is a fantastic resource that came directly from the Microsoft .NET team. If you're going to learn .NET, there really is no better person to learn it from. However! I do think it is important to mention that during my time there, Stephen Walther was listed as our instructor, yet was only in a few classes a week to supervise and SOMETIMES teach. Luckily, our other teacher was experienced enough to teach the concepts well. Stephen was also always readily available if we ever needed to reach out for help. The most important thing I can tell someone is that BOOTCAMPS ARE HARD. FREAKIN' HARD. Anyone who thinks they can work AND do a bootcamp...you're wrong and you will fail. This will easily demand 50+ hours a week of your time to stay up to pace with the speed of the class and course material. My head turned to mush many times due to the information overload.
As for the class itself - the language stack they teach is RIGHT on par with what you can expect to see in the real world. The majority of homework assignments and class labs assist the material very well. I feel that something they could improve on would be to incorporate more 'terminology' explanations into their coding classes. While it's important to code, code, code, many of my initial interviews for junior positions were based on terminology (Classes (Base vs Abstract / Static vs Void), OOP Principles, Data types, RESTful terms, etc) in which I struggled with briefly after graduation. While I could visually understand those terms, being able to articulate them well in an interview setting was something I had to spend extra time to understand.
Shortly after graduation, I did receive an offer as junior .NET Developer for a great startup company. The interview process was building an entire form application from scratch with validation and then being able to explain my work. So while there are things that Coder Camps can do to improve themselves, I 100% believe they can and will prepare you for a development position. Many of my classmates and I got development jobs within the first few months after graduation. The ones that didn't were the ones that half-assed their time in class and never participated properly in ANY of the labs or homework projects.
Finally is Job support: This is another area that I think Coder Camps can improve in (And maybe they already have) - A big gripe that myself and other classmates had was the post-finals assistance (or lack thereof). After giving our final group presentation to the audience (Which ended up just being potential students and not recruiters like we were told) the class sort of just....ended. After we signed off - that was it. No Goodbyes, no thank yous, just a "Have a good night" and us online students were left on skype wondering "Now what?" I was never reached out to by any faculty to discuss resume's or gameplans and was left to fend for myself in the job market. And yes, of course I could have proactively reached out to SOMEONE at CoderCamps and I"m sure they would have helped, but I just figured SOME automated assistance or direction would have taken place after the course was over.
TL;DR
Do I think it's worth it: YES
Are you prepared for jobs: YES (But it takes work)
Can they Improve: YES
Am I happy I did it?: 100% the best life-changing choice I've ever made |
