| | Jake | For perspective, began in November 2015 and am now nearly finished with the curriculum.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the Flatiron School's Learn Verified Program. The platform of learn.co itself is great. From day one, everything you are doing with your time is real, actual work. You always work in a real dev environment, and push all your code to Github. I view this as a mandatory feature for any program that claims to prepare you for a job though.
I could rave about how the course material was a good mix of clear, concise, and fun, or how the specific technologies covered are relevant for today's market. However, what I believe to be one of the strongest features to Flatiron is the overarching sequence and manner in which they guide you through learning programming skills. This is hard to explain if you don't have much coding experience. The Flatiron curriculum is very thoughtfully crafted in a way which has you cementing together fundamental blocks of your knowledge that you only realize after you have already built them. More succinctly, it's wax on, wax off. More concretely I mean that they have you manually build out various technologies in detail by hand, before introducing you to an existing technology or framework (dynamic ORM before ActiveRecord, Sinatra before Rails, etc). Going about it in this manner really ensures that their students will have a firm understanding of what these technologies do and why they do it. I am much more interested in gaining a thorough understanding of how to use a framework well than simply being able to crank out apps and material without that underlying basis. More complete understanding is better for you in the long run.
I have found that help has been quickly within reach anytime it was truly needed. The staff has been extremely responsive, and genuinely make every possible effort to give their students anything that will help them succeed. The live assessments are very valuable as well. Every time I have learned an extreme amount of information very quickly. You are given perspective not only on the work that you have done, but for overall project design decisions, code patterns, and often pushed to expand your work in ways that you'd never have thought to.
Now nearing the end of the coursework, I am feeling very confident in my ability to build increasingly powerful and complex applications. It's important to remember that a bootcamp is just a beginning. If you are genuinely changing careers into software development as I am, the learning does not stop after any bootcamp. There is a limit to the amount of material that you will learn in any bootcamp, but I don't think there's anything I feel was lacking from Flatiron. I am highly confident in my ability to find work upon graduation, and will hopefully update with results in the near future. |
