Coding Dojo

I attended from April 2020 to August 2020 and had a good experience! The instructors are very knowledgeable and are very willing to help you whenever you need. They make things fun! It's very fast paced and a lot of hard work but it's worth it. You definitely get what you put into it, so if you don't show up or do all the readings and assignments you may not do as well as you'd like. Only complaint was having a guidance counselor for getting into the process claim to be there for me, but blocked me and ghosted me the second I got my loan figured out. Other than that, the instructors are amazing. 

As a recent graduate of the Coding Dojo i highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning the basics of web development or wanting to switch career paths into the tech field of computer programming. They teach 3 full stacks which will vary depending on your local and what languages companies are using in your area. I did the 14 week online course due to the imprecations of the current pandemic, while it seemed daunting at first i settled into a nice routine after the first couple of weeks. The teachers and teacher assistant's are readily available to help you at times where you feel stuck. Overall I enjoyed my experience greatly and will be further pursing more knowledge of the subject matter and hopefully a career in the field.

As a recent grad of CodingDojo, this was a great tool to get me up and running with full-stack development within 3 1/2 months. Coming into the program with little experience, the course takes on a generalist approach to three full-stacks. I took Python, MERN, and Java, and each stack gets you up and running building a web app from end-to-end as fast as possible, and from there on, the sky is the limit for what you can do with fundamental groundwork they give you. I was able to leave the program with 3 full portfolio projects that, with the aid of the curriculum and guidance from the instructors, I was able to build far past what I thought would be possible for myself in with only a month of work per-stack.

Coming out of this, I feel well prepared not only for a job in the industry, but also to continue to refine my own skills based on the groundwork already established.

I took the online part-time Python full-stack course at Coding Dojo, and just graduated last week. 
I had a great learning experience through their portal and with the help of the instructors. I originally took the course to learn python for scripting in audio/visual control applications for customization. I looked around at other boot camps and settled on Coding Dojo because of their pricing, and their live teaching; many of the other camps simply gave you access to their learning portal. I had some experience with code academy, so the first few weeks of html and css were more or less review and expanding on what I knew. Michael Taylor was an amazing asset through and bumps or misunderstandings I had throughout this part of the course. Once we hit python, I had some trouble switching gears so quickly, but again, Michael was available to help where the lines weren't connecting. We then spent a month on Python and Django, getting exposure to the back-end programming. This is where things started to click more for me. All the free online courses I'd taken were solidified in my mind during this month 
I really liked the one on one meetings, where I could compile a list of things to discuss, and then go through my list with the instructor. Their Mattermost channel also had TAs available much of the time, if I ran into anything in the moment. Drew and Matthew were great at pushing me to understand the issue instead of just giving me the answer.
When we got to the last month, focusing on Projects and Algorithms, we switched instructors to Matthew, who was also very helpful. The change of mind going from one language to another was the hardest part. 
We did a solo webpage project and a group one in the span of 5 weeks, which made me learn a lot of new techniques, including Bootstrap and Bulma. I think the most valuable thing I learned through this whole thing, is how to learn in this field. Much of the content can be learned from the programming languages documentation, and this camp allowed me to be in a position to understand how to do that, and what the gears of a website look like and do. 
Even though I tried to get at least 20 hours a week in of studying and practicing, I got closer to 15 most weeks, which was enough to get me to pass, but now I'm going to go over all the optional material and reinforce everything I've learned. They give you access to the portal for another 6 months after graduating.
The only cons were that, I came across a couple areas in the curriculum that weren't super up to date, but I know they were updating things while my camp was going on, so hopefully that's fixed. I also wish you had access to the platform for longer after graduation, since the price for the course is pretty high, but I'll get as much as I can out of these remaining months that I have access. 
I feel like you definitely need to be a proactive learner to get the most out of this program. Having the Coding Dojo team there to guide and answer questions along the way were extremely helpful. 

This was a fairly intense 4-month online course that combines teacher instruction along with self-teaching. The program is well put together and the more you put into it the more you get out of it. Not being on campus, you are expected to figure some things out on your own but they have a good system for reaching out to instructors, TA's, and other students for help. The instructors are great and make sure you know they are there to help with as many 1 on 1 meetings that you need to get you through. They follow up with a great Career Services department that is very proactive in preparing you to look for a job. I would definitely recommend Coding Dojo to anyone interested in getting into programming.  

Great experience and awesome curriculum and material for start learning to programming. Before starting with Coding Dojo I had a bear knowledge of front-end and backend programming languages. Although I have worked on tech companies before, I didn't know how to build a web page from scratch.  After this experience, now I got tools to work as a freelance developer knowing where to start with the overwhelming documentation that is on Internet about many programming technologies. Additionally the support and orientation of instructors have been really valuable for my learning process. For sure I recommend this Academy to anyone who one to pursue a career change.

When it came to learning all about software development, I do believe that they did a good job in training and helping you learn the basics to grow from there. Where the company completely drops you is when you are ready to graduate and move out. I have spent over a year looking and painstakingly getting rejected from jobs and internships that were highly suitable for my needs. The career counselor was fired a month into my cohort, and there was no replacement until it was too late. I was promised I would be in contact with other career coaches from the company, and so far all of them have not helped. No one was able to truly help me get a leg into the field, and have to take another course and pay more money in order to still want my future to move forward. I highly do not recommend people utilize this company as their bootcamp unless they truly help you in finding a job. 

Well, they've continued to email me asking me to write a review, be careful what you wish for.

I attended to change careers, I have my bachelor's degree worked in my field for a while, but have always wanted to get into programming and wasn't satisfied working in my field. My experience will differ from other bootcamp locations because I attended one much smaller than the Silicone Valley, Bay area, Seattle locations. So the positive side is our teacher to student ratio was actually pretty good. With that said I'll start from the beginning of my experience and yes it's long but thorough (at minimum read final thoughts or point 10 at worst).

The interview went well it was your typical interview, I heard back not too long later I was "accepted" into the program. Of course, I was excited and ready to get started, then the start date was pushed back a few months, which made sense because it was the holiday season and not a big deal because it gave me more time to read/study. 

HTML/CSS

The first couple weeks are super basic HTML/CSS, use bootstrap it'll take of mobile for you and the exam for it is just replicating a static site, easy enough. However, there was not a focus on actually designing for mobile or design considerations and I'll chalk that up to the fact it's not a frontend/design bootcamp. Something I can go and learn on my own, but they could have talked about Flexbox and/or Grid. They do go over the basics of computers and how they work, so that's a plus for non-tech humans.

PYTHON

The first full-stack is Python, Flask, SQL - your backend, frontend, database respectfully. Our instructor was fantastic, quite knowledgeable, and you could tell she enjoyed teaching in general. So, she would be a fantastic instructor teaching anything even if she had zero knowledge of the subject. She also happened to be the person who created and wrote the Python section of the platform, which is why it was the best full-stack section of the platform (more on this later). 

Unfortunately the majority of our class did not pass the Python stack, part of the downside to a small class (despite our instructor) is not having as many people to help others get through the parts they're struggling or stuck on. Those that did not pass still came into campus and continued to work on Python as they were backlogged to the next class starting Python.

C#/.NET

The next stack we had a new instructor for Microsoft's C# ASP.NET core. Admittedly I butted heads a little with the next instructor they brought in. It got off to a rough start because the first day of learning this new stack was putting the remaining students together to do some bs assignment and figure it out. Working in teams is nothing new, however, I'd prefer to first read and learn some on my own, so I can contribute to the team and not struggle on an incredibly easy (in hindsight) assignment. I think it was 2.5 -3 hours for an assignment that according to the platform should take 20 minutes and we still hadn't figured it out. So that seemed like a giant waste of time especially with the number of assignments they ask you to do. Now the biggest gripe I have is the platform itself. 

Let me remind everyone still reading, this program costs $12K. And the platform, which I would as a student imagine it being similar to a college textbook full of all the knowledge you need to be successful in the program. Picture holding said college textbook, now randomly start ripping out chapters and pages until about half of it is left, and that is what your money buys for their platform content. 

If you want to learn C#, I suggest reading Microsoft's documentation and going through their tutorials because what little was in the platform seemed like it was plucked right off the documentation, or take an online course.

MEAN

This is MongoDB (database), ExpressJS/Nodejs (backend), Angular (frontend). I won't beat a dead horse, the same thing as C# take a college textbook and rip out half the information and there's your learning platform.

JOB ASSISTANCE

I will talk about this from the perspective of myself and our entire class including those that didn't originally get through Python and graduated later. For those of us that graduated on-time they brought in a really great career mentor, he helped with resume writing and gave us really great advice overall. 

Dojo brought in 4-5 different companies to interview with and I came to find out one company showed up sort of as a favor/community building because they had zero intention of hiring anyone from a bootcamp or any junior developers. Which, I'm totally cool with if I know that's the case and I can treat it like a practice interview just don't bs me. There was another company that had one guy working remotely at our location (again kind of a dead-end). One company never showed up, but I won't put that on Dojo.

The good news was I actually landed an apprenticeship, but I know they hired me because of my prior experience and education and I just so happened to finish this programming course. They didn't even work in any of the languages we learned for the position I was hired. My other friend landed his job going outside of Dojo and leveraging his connections with the company that wasn't hiring any junior developers. The other graduate took a little longer to find a job and it ended up being with someone he met there starting their own thing. 

As for those with us originally and graduated later, they had a different mentor come in and from hearsay was awful enough they brought in the guy who helped us. They had I believe 2 interviews and this was weeks after they graduated. One graduate went to another bootcamp because he was tired of the bs from Dojo. As of now and as far as I know, every single one of them is still looking for a developer job 9 months afterward.

FINAL THOUGHTS

1) It is exactly like a college course, you have assignments and you have an exam for each stack. I understand the point, but please explain how this is different than your "tYpiCAl EdUcATiOn" other than the amount of time I need to put in? The cost is pretty on point with a semester of college, so they got that right lol.

2) Not teaching the languages our city is hiring for - supposedly they do research on the area and teach the languages in demand in your local area. Most of the jobs in my area are for Java, C, C++, weirdly the languages CS majors learn and we didn't hmmm. And a company out here, Intuit, recently started adding at the top of their developer roles something like ****Computer Science degree required****.

3) Data dump anyone? Yes, it's cool to learn a lot of different languages, but I would have rather spent half the time and money learning one full-stack well. Not 1 in 3 weeks because the 4th week (if you pass the exam) is project week. Not a single one of us ever put together a project the entire course. I started one once and realized I bit off more than I could chew. 

4) The instructors after Python stack had the knowledge of the coding dojo platform and no real-world experience from my recollection. Some questions I asked, were answered but didn't really address my coding problem. Or it was "Why don't you look it up and tell me what you find?"...so you're telling me you have no clue?

5) A huge disconnect on defining what we learned e.g. yeah you learned jQuery, while maybe not widely used anymore, we used it once maybe twice. It's like telling someone you're a nurse because you've taken someone's vitals signs a few times.

6) Not making Git a mandatory section to learn, it was provided optionally and it's really easy to learn, but it should have been mandatory.

7) Data Structures, algorithms are every morning, but there is a huge disconnect between different data structures: what they are, how they work, and how they are implemented in real code. We did go over every data structure, but because of the pace you touched on it 1-3 times throughout the course (again Data Dump) and more complex ones are naturally towards the end. Perhaps my own fault, but the morning algorithms seemed more like an exercise in whiteboard interviewing and not understanding the data structure itself.

8) Did I mention Data Dump? Because of how shallow the knowledge of the platform was and how fast-paced I started taking a few courses on Udemy in the same languages we "learned". And the depth of these online courses is uncomparable.

9) Their platform is straight garbage, every stack's beginning assignments are struggling to learn these concepts and being excited you finally figured it out. Then roughly the 2nd week you learn, oh that's not how you actually do it. I'm sorry come again?! Why if we start with zero knowledge do you start by teaching us the wrong way to do something? Pretty sure we're all capable of learning the concepts while doing it the right way from the beginning...just a thought.

10) Straight from their site "On a national scale, our alumni land a job in 180 days after graduating,"

Sure sounds a lot better than "On a national scale, our alumni land a job in 6 Months!!"

I'd wager 10x the $12,000 Coding Dojo tuition the least tech-savvy human could, in 6 months learn one full-stack, have more portfolio projects and land a job in their city taking online courses.

Cost-benefit-ratio: Let’s say you take one course each for database, backend, and frontend and another tying them all together and you pay full price for each course 150$ (relatively typical cost, courses on sale can be as cheap as 10$-20$). 4 x 150$ = 600$

600$ v. 12,000$ (more in most areas now) = 11,400$ in your pocket, you’re welcome!
Take a few more online courses, why not take another 5 courses, now you only saved 10,650$ bummer lol.

Coding Dojo is an excellent resource to level-up your knowledge for full-stack software development. It empowers your to learn how to build software from scratch and deploy it live on the web. The on-site experience consist of daily morning algorithms and three intensive Full-Stacks, which helps you learn popular in-demand coding languages, frameworks, databases, and technical skills to help you break into the industry or level-up and learn coding hands on. The instructors are top notch with industry and boot camp experience to guide, challenge, and mentor you through the process. I would recommend  Coding Dojo to anyone who wants to learn software development hands on and upgrade their coding skills.!