Coder Foundry

...for a year to write this. Not because I didn't know what to say, but because I needed to take a step back and decide how to best go about it. I see all the good reviews, and I'm genuinely happy to see all the success stories of other people. I'm sure that this process worked for them, and, given their circumstances, it was well worth it. My experience, however, was one of the worst of my life. It isn't about the program or how good or bad it is overall for me...it's about MY experience, along with the other 5 people in my "class". The talk up on this program was great; Natosha made everything sound wonderful. And at the beginning, things seemed great. But as time wore on, and we realized what was going on, things went swirling down the toilet in brilliant fashion. After being offered a transfer to the Charlotte, NC location (which my brother and I only took because it was 9 minutes from where we lived, instead of 2 hours away like the Kernersville class we drove to daily for 6 weeks without missing a single day), we started at our new location and on our FIRST day, the instructor wasn't present. Coder Foundry leadership apologized with pizza and promised to have someone there the next day to fill in. Antonio, our director of education, filled in for two days and those two days were the best days of class, because it felt like we actually learned something from someone who knew what they were talking about. Once our main instructor, Eric, finally arrived and took over teaching, everything went zooming downhill. We spent days teaching ourselves how to work through problems we encountered and hardly ever had any "learning" time that included lessons from our so called instructor. Whether he lacked the knowledge, or just stopped giving a crap, I'm not sure. Either way, our class suffered because of it. About 8 weeks into this $16,000 program, and after struggling to figure things out on our own, we were informed that Coder Foundry was filing for bankruptcy, and that, although there would be a "teach out", the school would be closing its doors for good after our class was over. When that news surfaced, the prior lack of leadership in the classroom dropped from chilling to sub-zero. We were left to finish projects that we had no instruction on by ourselves, while our instructor took phone interviews of his own. I understand the need to find a job on his part, due to the circumstances, but I don't understand management AND instructors leaving the 6 us of in the cold, regardless of what was going on. Before the course started, we were promised many things, including resumes, headshots, job placement, and support for our projects under the schools azure account until we graduated. the only satisfactory thing we received were the headshots, and we had to consistently bother Natosha for them. The resumes came in, 4 weeks after they were promised, and they were terrible. The job placement was an outright lie, and IF there was any truth behind it, the jobs in question would require us to move hundreds of miles away. But again, those jobs would have been welcomed, had the job placement aspect of the tuition be fulfilled. The school shut their azure account down, and all of our databases and project necessities were terminated without us being informed and given any time to find other avenues. No certificates were given for our participation and completion of the course, and our instructor didn't show most of the last week of class. My brother and I elected not to go to the last two days of class. What was the point? We had seen what they were about, and they didn't care about our needs. When we did finally get in touch with the founder, Bobby Davis, he offered to "teach" us for the day so we would have some know how. We obliged this offered, and sat through an all day meeting, telling him our issues and concerns about how the program played out, and then were asked a series of basic questions that played on how much the program "taught" us. We were flat out told, after requesting a refund on our tuition based on the grounds that we received NOTHING of what we were promised, that no refunds would be issued and there was nothing that could be done about it. Not one of the management team would step up and take responsibility for not checking in with us and seeing how the class was going, nor would they take responsibility for betraying our trust and not delivering the things they had promised. We paid a very large sum of money to better our future and begin a career, and all we received were bank-breaking student loans and turned backs when we brought our issues to the attention of the management of Coder Foundry. What may be worse than anything is the fact that, after bankruptcy, the "shutting down of the school", and all of their broken promises, the school stayed open (last I checked, they were still having open houses for new potential students) and I'm still paying my student loans with no new knowledge and nothing to show for the time I spent there. I can't speak for everyone in my class, but we have all agreed on multiple occasions that what we were promised and what we received are nowhere close to matching up. As previously stated, this is MY experience with this school. I came into this program with the highest hopes and a mind ready to learn, and left with a dejected morale and a huge debt. My recommendation doesn't matter in the slightest, because there is always going to be someone to come in and clean up the messes left behind by bad management. That's what a marketing director and/or assistant is for. So whatever representative for CF reads this, don't bother responding to this review unless you have $16,000 for both my brother and myself for reimbursement purposes.

Coder Foundry is very much a web development bootcamp on the Microsoft stack and it's the real deal. At my cohort the absolute most time spent in "lecture" was about 40 minutes per week, but usually closer to twenty. Most weeks there was no lecture at all. This is absolutely nothing like school. All the experience we got was hands on. The immersive course starts from basic HTML and Javascript exercises then quickly moves into one or two sites in HTML and CSS. We did a small C# desktop application to learn C# before moving into full website development with ASP.NET, HTML/CSS templates, Entity Framework, C#'s MVC framework and backed by a SQL database. All the websites are cloud hosted. From then on you continue to build website after website until the end of the course. The sites take two to three weeks to build and you do everything yourself. 

My instructor was phenominal. Some of the instructors are CF graduates, but don't let that worry you. They're not just the best graduates from their cohort, they also have years of industry experience and are super qualified to be teaching.

I landed a job before the end of my cohort. Coder Foundry helps you build a stellar resume and helps you a lot with finding jobs. Every Monday there's practice interviews so by the time you're in real interviews you're going to be super prepared. With the portfolio you'll have built by the end and all the skills and experience you've acquired from building the websites from the ground up, companies will be eager to sweep you up. 

You definitely get more than you put in. If you put in a lot of time, care, and effort into your projects you're going to come out as a very good developer. 

I went into Coder Foundry wanting to get a bigger end-to-end picture of full-stack web development utilizing MVC (Microsoft's preferred design pattern), and they definitely delivered. In a relatively short 18 weeks I was able to touch on a much wider array than I expected, and the skills and experience gained were enough to give me confidence in obtaining three job offers within a week of graduation, and a fourth which was not available for a few months that they lined up for me and I'm now enjoying as it turns out it was the perfect and much-more-suitable job than what I found. The instructors do not leave any question unanswered, and are willing to help even outside of "business hours". Prior students and current students collaborate during - and even after, e.g. TODAY I had five (co-owner included) huddle around on Slack messaging to help me tackle a little-more sophisticated coding question I had at my current job ... what a blessing, and even my employer was impressed by them!

I like that the project assignments were real-world situations and each project was build upon the prior projects to solidify the learning. Concurrently, we were made to find the solutions through our own devices more and more with less and less spoon-feeding from the instructors. I learnt a lot in a short time under this regimen.

I did not consider their job placement services as very important to me when I came in. I was going to take charge of my own placement. But looking back now, I am very appreciative of it. Towards the end of the course when I should have started my own job search, well, I was swamped with trying to complete assignments and my portfolio. All the interviews I've gotten thus far have been through Coder Foundry's contacts. 1/3 of my class had job offers before we graduated, and another 1/3 had job offers the first week after graduation. I'm thankful they were working to place me when I was too busy to do it myself.

Bobby and Antonio were great presenters and instructors for this one day immersion into Microsoft Xamarin tool for cross-platform mobile application development. 

This was my first time in the Coder Foundry facilities and I was totally impressed. I can see how comfortable it would be to attend one of their longer Full-stack development courses. I left feeling confident that any training time spent with the Coder Foundry team and at the their facilities would be time and money well spent. 

As an added bonus, the Coder Foundry team conveys a passion for software development that is infectious and encouraging. They appear to take genuine joy from helping you to reach your full potential by helping you learn the skills that will grow your career and your success as a software developer. 

I look forward to the next DevDays or similar event that Coder Foundry decides to host.