Bloom Institute of Technology

Often in the software development and engineering field, I have found it important to find resources that allow me to become a better developer. I have often looked for the right education platform that worked at the pace I do. High volume is important to retention, the more you do it the more you learn, at least that is what I believe. Lambda School goes through an intense course of learning that even an experienced developer can appreciate. It take many years to get great, Lambda School can help you push your limits and teach you the skills you will need to know to be able to develop efficient well thought out applications using some of today's more popular languages and frameworks.  

The fact that Lambda presents an opportunity to people who other wise would not have this type of option says a lot for what type of company it is. There is no hidden rules, hidden fees, "whats the catches" or anything of that sort. It is pure opportunity. If you want to be a better programmer they will make that happen. With anything else in life it is still about how much you put in. There is no magic wand to automatically make you amazing at development. but there is a school with instructors who spend an insane amount of hours to make it as easy as possible for you. I have gotten quite a few job offers and they started coming well before I graduated as I have not even graduated yet. The full stack side is amazing and throws you in the deep end but also throws you a float to make sure you don't drown. The instructors are amazing and it is literally the best thing I have done. I am able to talk to anyone with questions or etc about the school. 

OK, so I don't want this to just be a rant and rave about the other bootcamp I attended (and paid $10,000 for), but Lambda School was seriously 1,000,000 times better.

The instructors were experts and very approachable. In the other program I couldn't even talk to instructors.

Luis was awesome, Ryan was helpful, Sean was great if not a little standoffish, and Beej and Aaron are clearly incredibly smart.

I had help instantly whenever I needed it.

The curriculum was hard, but much more in depth. 

When I talk to students form other bootcamps I'm blown away by how little they know compared to how much Lambda School students do. Maybe it's that other bootcamps are all that bad, maybe it's that Lambda School's extra time and curriculum makes a huge difference, but I see Lambda School students graduating and getting jobs within days.

It's not perfect, of course, there were some communication issues around scheduling, but all in all it was a phenomenal experience, and one that I can't recommend enough.

As for my job search, I got a couple of offers quickly, but I'm still on the lookout, because I didn't love either of those comapnies.

I didn’t have any experience in programming or advanced computing whatsoever. And, my sole intention in joining lambdaschool was to become a programmer and get a job. I did not research anything about the bootcamps, and joined lambdaschool because it was online and cost effective.

Now, I am glad that I joined lambdaschool but I immediately regretted after the first class. It was way too fast for me. And, I think almost all of the coding bootcamps are paced like that to cover everything in three months. Anyone who has no background in programming is going to have hard time going into these courses, and lambdaschool is no different. Don’t be afraid to ask, instructors are amazing. They will answer anything and repeat any time you want.

I eventually caught up, but I had to work a lot to barely catch up. But, I am glad that I was able to catch up and thankful for wonderful instructors who helped me, and Austen for the support. 

I have been an anti-bootcamp person for a while.  (I have a fair share of friends that have taken them and came out not much better than they went in).  I was doing the normal FCC/Udemy courses and just not making it anywhere.  Have a problem?  Go google it and have a sparatic understanding of the question or get little to no answer at all and just randomly copy and past stackoverflow posts until your tests pass or code does what you want.  This is the overwhelming issue with self learning or these "pre recorded" video courses wether they are on Udemy, MOOC's, Udacity and even some of the expensive online bootcamps are just recordings being played back for you.

Then comes Lambda School, I took their free mini javascript bootcamp and was pretty impressed with the content.  Then they let us know about the upcoming Bootcamp and I was kind of interested and kind of not cuz it's still a relatively expensive bootcamp (I took the PT bootcamp as I have a full time job) but figured i'd fill out the form and see what they said/emailed/talked about.  Got a phone call from Austen and it wasn't just "Hey, do you have X amount of money??.  You do?  Awesome you are in the bootcamp".  We talked and he asked why I was interested, what my previous experience was, how the mini camp series was.  They actually made sure I was a good fit for the bootcamp they aren't just cashing checks and spitting students through the course.  I signed up and they gave me pre course work to be ready for the course 3 weeks later.

I took the PT bootcamp so it was mon - thur 6pm - 9pm and sat 9am - 6pm   I only bring this in because when i'm talking about what was being taught at the different stages it will vary if you do the FT or PT stuff.

Now I have no personal experience with any other bootcamp but from what my friends have told me/complained about with other bootcamps I knew I made a good choice right out of the gates.  We started with Data Structures, Hash Tables, Linked Lists, Graphs, Binary Trees and lookups.  Now this was tough and really challenged my brain but these were things that my friends were being asked about in their interviews and had no knowledge of from their $15k bootcamps.  Immediately i'm thinking awesome this is a great start.  Then we start ramping up and going over how to use these data structures, manipulate and do various other things that we will need through out the course.  The other amazing thing was there were coding challanges at the beginning of every class.  Really helped to drive home the ideas from the first week (as you can't learn all of that stuff and remember it from just a week or 2).  Then we go over React and the basics, followed with Routing and then we dive into Redux and Redux-thunk.  Now this in my opinion was almost worth the whole admission amount in and of itself.  I could not wrap my head around Redux or Redux-thunk.  I have had this same problem before and no course, article or anything else really cleared it up for me.  Since these are live classes not pre recorded I DM'd Ben and we got on a google hangout and we took 15 mins, LITERALLY 15 mins and I was able to ask direct questions and get direct answer and I was able to wrap my head around how to layout the actions, reducers and store which was HUGE.  Not waisting a day or 2 trying to tie multiple articles together to try and usually only gain an entry level understanding if that, was SOOOOOO amazing and SOOOOO worth it to just ask and be taught.  Along the way we were building a front end project with React to connect all of the pieces together.

Then we jumped over to node and the backend.  This again was a super huge benefit to have Ben the instructor right there and he even had some guest instructors teaching stuff which was awesome too (usually people in the field).  A decent amount of those guest speakers are not instructors with Ben so you will get that benefit along the way.  There isn't a whole lot for me to go in here but it was awesome to build backend servers with node, express, mongoDB and mySQL.  Along the way we continued to build a backend server and keep on building through out the weeks we were learning this.  After we had a lot of GET/POST requests working and doing various things for us we went over how authentication works.  Encrypting passwords and the right way to store the encryptions (not the passwords) and how to check if someone was authenticated and provide limited access depending on that, which we used web tokens to keep track.

The last month for us was putting all of the previous stuff together to see how you put the front end and back end together (which this again was another HUGE mind blown situation).  All of the other courses I have seen or taken were either FE (react/angular/vue) or the BE (node, express, templating language) and I never understood how the pieces fit together and that opened my eyes SOOO much.  After that you will never look at site the same again!  This time was really really cool cuz we were doing out own thing with minimal instruction (compared to the rest of the courses) or Ben would do a video, let us know what it was gonna be about then let us choose to watch or not.  This was awesome because the instructor was available for more one on one time and helping along the way.

Also for what it's worth I interviewed and received an offer 2 days after the course end while I was back home.  I was able to negioate an above average salary for both that area and the area I actually live in.  The fact that I could speak to CS style questions (hash tables, binary searches, linked lists and things like that) put me according to the interviewer "above the other people interviewing" and allowed me to negotiate a higher salary.

Here is the big thing, can you learn the same things and end up with the same salary as I was offered for free??  Yes you can but I have been trying for a 1.5 with FCC and various other courses and NEVER got close, let alone the CS stuff that is really hard to wrap your head around.  The money spent was the best investment in myself I have ever made.  I got direct access to the instructor during the lectures, a direct path to learning, a great bunch of class mates and an environment mean to help you learn.  Lambda School has free options know which make this an even BETTER option if you are willing to apply yourself and work with the team at Lambda School.

I hope this was helpful and if you are serious about becoming a "developer" I think this is a great option as the knowledge taught will put you more on the software developer side of things which in most areas equates to better pay/options.

 

I started this bootcamp as a senior business data analyst making $109,000, and graduated as a senior software developer making $140,400. It was the most difficult and best investment I've ever made in myself. My background and skillset before starting the program was in data analytics, data engineering and data science. I chose to complete this course because I wanted to gain the skills and acumen needed to deliver end to end, data-driven applications. This was definitely the right place to go - cheaper than a 4 year degree, and with more hands on practice. I also really enjoyed the the pace - since you only have 18 months to complete the course, there is slight pressure to move quickly, but not too much that you can't slow down and self-pace when you need to. Since I was working full time during the course, I was only able to complete lectures and classwork on the weekends - and I mean ALL weekend. Literally all I did for 12 months on Saturdays and Sundays was code from morning to evening. The curriculum is project-based, so you are ALWAYS hands on coding. I loved it because I felt it helped me learn new concepts at a very rapid pace. My learning assistant and career coaches were super responsive and supportive, my classmates were collaborative, and not only did I gain a software development skillset, but I am now a better data engineer. 

A note on tuition - I got a little creative to pay for mine. I found credit cards with high cash back rewards, and used them to pay tuition in 3 upfront installments (because I really didn't want to pay the high loan interest), then paid back the credit cards. Doing it this way saved me about $3,000 on tuition, and boosted my credit score. I would highly recommend if you can swing it. 

If you are considering this course - be prepared that you will not be handheld, and there will be very difficult moments, but it is 100% worth it.
Just remember to breathe, and believe in yourself. 
You can do hard things. Best of luck! 

Thank you BloomTech! 
PS - this is not a sponsored review haha. I just had a really great experience.

I was a front-end developer when I joined Lambda school hoping to learn some back-end development technologies and to find a better and higher paying job. Now I am a frontend developer (with a possibility to move to full stack) at a big tech company with a salary of over $100,000.
I am for the most part happy and satisfied with the curriculum, the materials and the teachers. The school gives students free and easy access to lots of premium tools which I really liked. The teachers and TAs were helpful and available to help and to answer questions. There was some confusions and changes during my cohort, but it got settled after a while.
I found the backend and CS units the most useful of all units. The labs were probably my favorite part of the school as they imitated real job projects, yet it was the part that lots of students didn't pay enough attention to and didn't do enough work. If you decide to join the school, definitely opt in the longer program. You will learn so many useful stuff, and you will not regret the decision.

Now getting to the downsides of the schools: 
One main reason I joined lambda was their advertisements on how they help students find and land a job. Lambda helped me learn and understand data structure and algorithms that are important to pass interviews, however I was completely on my own during the job search. The help the school gives during the job search is mostly focused towards inexperienced developers, and not on someone who already has some experience. The opportunities that the school suggests to the students are mostly for junior developers with the average salary of $50,000. I was earning more than that before joining Lambda school, and of course I was aiming for even higher salary. Surprisingly, Lambda leaves experience developers on their own while it can make more money when they land in high paying jobs. I was lucky that I was getting reached out by recruiters themselves, as I did not get even one interview with help from Lambda. I am very disappointed with the amount of help I received during the job search from Lambda school.