Bitmaker General Assembly

In Februaruy 2016 I decided that I wanted learn how to code. I looked into bootcamps and found out they cost upwards of $10, 000. I thought to myself, SCAM. Why would I pay that for 9 weeks it cannot be worth that much. There are so many online resources, I can do this on my own. I went hard on codecademy and treehouse for a month and slowly started doing it less and less as I got busy with other things in life. 

In June 2016 I got laid off from my work and had to figure out what my next move was. A friend was selling his car for $9000 and my wife and I thought maybe we should buy it and drive for Uber while working on her business and raising our 2 year old. It would have given us immediate income with a flexible schedule.

But then I really looked into Bitmaker's 9 week web dev bootcamp. I went and visited the place and that really changed my point of view. It's not just a classroom. The space is laid out in a way that makes you want to spend 8-10 hours a day there. After much debate, my wife and I decided that this was a better way to invest our money. 

On the first day I already knew it was worth it. The 9 weeks went by in a flash and by the end I was completely shocked at how much I had actually learned on a deep level. ***The best value of the course for me was being surrounded by 30 other students who were just as serious as I was about learning this skill. We spent countless hours together helping each other work through problems and develop our skills.*** Where I had given up learning on my own, I now had the support to carry on when things got difficult. The teachers were amazing and they felt more like comrads than a typical professor. They really want you to succeed and give their all to make that happen for each student. 

Now a month out I have had a few opportunities for work but decided that I wanted to deep dive into learning React.js before hoping into employment. Going to Bitmaker got me to the point where now I feel confident to continue learning anything I want. It helped me learn to stick with problems longer. When I browse the web I now have that feeling of hey I know how they did this. 

I am confident that learning this skill will make me back my $10,000 and so much more over the long run. I highly recommond this for anyone who is looking to take the skill of coding to a professional level.

I had my eye on Bitmaker ever since I read about them in the Star back in 2012 and as soon as I had the opportunity to attend I jumped at the chance. And I'm very happy I did! The program was tough - there were a few tears - but the skills and drive instilled in my by the instructors have literally turned my life around. 

Make no mistake, learning about web development in general is not easy. But it is accessible. And my experience at Bitmaker allowed me to build on a rudimentary understanding and add new skills to my resume. 

I know that a lot of people may look down on learning Rails vs a pure Javascript platform but I'm happy to have been introduced to this world via Rails. It's a very user friendly experience as a beginner and it allows you to learn the full path of building and deploying an actual project in the real world. Javascript and its many libraries and frameworks can be learned though hard study and practise, something that only 9ish weeks cannot give you. But learning the web back to front gives you a much better idea of how everything fits together without having to worry about compilers or configs or semicolons oh my! 

Bitmaker was definitely the right choice for me, and if you're a take charge kind of person who loves to tackle new problems head on I think it would be a great fit for you too!

Just finished week 4.

If you have a can-do attitude, you'll do great. If you are a self-starter, you'll do great. If you love to meet new people, and are not scared of asking for help, you'll do great. If you have the mental fortitude for going through complex materials day after day, you'll do great.

If you think that you can "pay and play", this is not for you. If you think your money will oblige them to give you a job, this is not for you. If you have a negative attitude, likes to complain and make excuses, this is not for you. If you are afraid to ask for help and don't like to "bother" others, this is not for you. If you take yourself too seriously, this is not for you.

If you read this far, you'll notice that pre-existing technical background has not been mentioned. We currently have a paramedic, pipe-line designer, flight attendant, councilor to special needs kids, designer, English teacher and a bunch of others in our class.

This has opened a field for me that used to be alien, and now is endlessly fascinating.

Going to Bitmaker has been one of the best decisions I have made. Over the 9 week course I was amazed at the what I learned and how far I progressed.

Prior to Bitmaker I took couple of course at a local college in web development (it just covered basic HTML and CSS), but felt these courses really lacked in real life application. Bitmaker helped me to start to develop the skills to become a full time web developer.

The instructors and staff are exceptional. There is always an instructor available to help trouble shoot code, or provided some extra explanation about new concepts. Bitmaker also offer great interview and career prep and help you get started on your job hunt. 

I started this course not knowing a thing about Web Development. I hadn't written a single line of code. I come from a design background and the Ruby on Rails Web Development course was the only course available at the time. It was one of the most challenging things I've ever done. The 9 weeks for me was an intense crash course but there was support from all the instructors and TAs everyday. Every time anyone’s computer started acting up there was always someone willing to sit down and take the time to help figure out what the problem was. I met so many talented people who were generous with their time and I’ve made some great friends in the Bitmaker community.

The only thing, I would have liked to have had more time with Javascript but all the topics had to be pretty compressed. Now they have the Frontend Course so that probably solves the lack of JS . Pair programming is great, you learn how to work with other people which really helps me now at my current job. 

They really do go out of their way to try and help with the job search after you're all done. I was lucky enough to get my current job through Bitmaker. I work as a UI & UX designer and do mainly frontend dev. I don't do any backend dev but this course helped me understand what's required on the backend in order to plan for the frontend and the users. 

I work as a Graphic and Web Designer in a small marketing company.  We have to be very versatile and have many skillsets since we are a small department of a big company.  My Front-End Developments skills were pretty intermediate but I was looking to become faster and work cleaner.  So I recently took the Front-End Web Development night course at Bitmaker in Toronto to advance my skill sets and discover new resources to assist in my job. I had minimal expectations as my understanding of HTML/CSS was already very advanced.  The first 2 weeks were a little redundant for me, but after the first 2 weeks, I was learning tricks and skills that I didn't even know existed.  In 12 short weeks I went from a novice to a professional.  The professors were extremely helpful, and even stayed till 11pm one night to diagnose a computer issue for me.  The course is very demanding, since there is so much information to learn and cover in 12 short weeks.  I spent a good chunk of time on weekends doing reading and drills to make sure my skills advanced to where I needed to be for the following week.  I wouldn't recommend this course to anyone who is unwilling to do this homework/studying as you wont take anything away from the course.  This course is definitely for people with serious interest in Front-End, and not just hobbyist.  If I had to list a complaint, my only complaint would be that some of the students didn't take the course as serious as me. I was there for work and was trying to absorb as much information as possible.  However, I found many students wouldn't do the homework, or drills/reading, and wouldnt be at the level they needed to be at for the following class.  This would then slow down the class getting all the students up to speed.  Not really a Bitmaker issue though.  Overall, I am fully satisified with my experience.  I would love to take more courses at Bitmaker.  

Having a background in marketing and online ad buys, I was concerned this class would be too general for me. I appreciate that there was still a lot to learn! The most important thing to take away from this course is the case study focus - build a campaign and bring it with you each week. That will allow you to tweak the ad sets and copy under the guidance of a true expert. Instead, we were working on a live brand (but not one I had experience in knowing the audience or copy). So it was relevant for the practice, but not as useful to my daily life as working on my own brand would have been. Overall, the connections to the instructor, guest presenters and inside information of how campaigns are truly run was incredibly valuable and worth taking even if you have a background in online ad campaigns.