Code Fellows

Quality education. Most people get jobs fairly quickly afterwards, but I have met quite a few graduates from different programs that are failing to find anything. So I would say that Code Fellows will give you the resume to get interviews, but it's up to you to get the job from there. Read less

I really enjoyed my time at Code Fellows! This is a great course for any one who wants to learn how to build a website and learn JavaScript. It does not go in too much detail but it gives you the foundations to keep learning on your own or take one of the Development Accelerators. The curriculum is good and you learn a lot and get the foundations for things you might have trouble learning on you own. The two books for the class are about 50$ total. Which is a lot less than most universities. The instructor I had was very fun and helpful. He had a passionate drive which was obvious. You also get as much help as you need the whole day which is great. The class is rather expensive for one month of learning so be cautious if you are coming in with little money. I would take the foundations 1 course for 500$ and you learn a decent amount and then try to self study until you have enough for the development accelerator.  I am planning on taking one! Be weary if you live outside downtown seattle and don't have a good bussing option to SLU because parking is expensive and traffic is horrible. You can always bus to westlake and walk faster than taking a second bus or trolley. 

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I attented Code Fellows near it's infancy. While the Job Gaurantee initially attracted me to the camp, it does provide a great incentive for the school to invest in all the students success. The camp not only provided a good basis in technical skills but also intensive career advice. The instructors and speakers were every bit as supportive as they were informative. The amount of speakers provided a great variety of insight and the time spent with the mentors and instructors provided the deeper more personal advice. 

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This course sets you up to be a full stack python developer. We covered everything form data structures and algorithms to deployment and web development. Assignments included building a pyramid blog app that acted as a daily learning journal, a django app that was build for image sharing. Other small assignments covered building everything from a linked list to graph traversal and dijkstras algorithm to find the shortest path along with sorting algorithms. The instructure and TA's were all very knowledgible and were willing and able to drop anything at any time to help you when you got stuck. 

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The JavaScript dev accelerator was a great experience, it changed my life and was the best educational experience I've ever had.

I attended Foundations I in June 2014, Foundations II in July, and the Full Stack JavaScript Development Accelerator from August-September 2014. I am now employed full time as a software engineer at Expedia in Bellevue, WA.

I'm normally a do it yourself-er when it comes to learning new stuff, and I had been learning on my own for years before I attended the accelerator. What the accelerator gave me was a lot of things I couldn't get on my own:

• access to knowledgable teachers and TAs
• an instant network of peers
• exposure to technologies I wouldn't have discovered on my own
• team project experience as a developer
• my resume in the hands of CF's 40+ employer partners

This program is for students who have already been self-teaching for some time and already understand the fundamentals. You will continue self-teaching in the accelerator, just at a much faster pace and greater intensity.

To prospective students I recommend the JavaScript Road Trip on codeschool.com and setting up a website and/or Wordpress blog on some $5-month shared hosting (and you can re-use that same hosting later for your professional portfolio site). Build as much "real stuff" as you can - codeschool is only good for an introduction to the concept. Actually getting something working and available online is much, much more challenging. If you enjoy these things, though, you will probably enjoy the accelerator. 

The accelerator is INTENSE and HARD (which is good, considering what it costs). Plan on being there every single day. People who missed a day missed a lot and fell behind. You will get a fresh dump of homework daily. It will be difficult to keep your head above water. You will have to fight through frustrating problems, work on the bus ride home and all the way until bedtime just to keep up, and stop socializing and playing video games and whatever else you do for fun for the 8 weeks you are in it. If this sounds horrible to you, you will probably not enjoy the accelerator.

If you're still eager to start, don't worry about which language to go with - there's no "one right choice", and you'll learn new languages on the job. Start coding now, in anything. It's a long journey (for me, it was about 8 months from the first day of Foundations I to the first day of my new job) but it is absolutely worth it if you have the drive and the discipline. (And the money.)

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Bootcamp brings me from a piece of white paper to a real web developer, and to a foreign student like me, the instructors are clear and loud speakers without any accent. I think we should cut off some of the afternoon self-study time and try to learn more even though instructors answered all the questions. 

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My overall experience with the Code Fellows web development bootcamp was very positive. I gave the curriculum three stars because for the amount of pre-work they have you do before you get there, I felt like the curriculum should have been harder and perhaps taught at a faster pace.

I was in the first cohort offered in Portland, so things were a bit rough around the edges at the start. Week one was fairly disorganized and slow going, and I questioned whether I'd made the right decision. But the wonderful staff at Code Fellows are very concerned about making your experience as great as possible, and things really started to take off after that. We completed several projects during the course which were good enough to include in a portfolio.

Like most things in life however, you will get results from this course which correspond directly to the level of commitment and effort you are willing to put into it. You don't actually need Code Fellows to learn the topics covered in the curriculum. The value that Code Fellows provides is the structure and interaction that comes with being in a classroom, working with other students, and being guided by industry veterans whose knowledge and experience far exceeds yours.

Throughout the course, Jordana (our campus manager) regularly presented us with info on meetups and other tech industry gatherings in the local area. If you decide to take one of these courses, I highly recommend attending as many of these as you can. You'll soon discover that developing soft skills and making connections is just as valuable (if not more so) than the actual coding skills you are learning.

 

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I recently wrapped up the iOS dev accelerator and felt like the overall experience was pretty weak give the high cost. In hindsight, I likely would have gone to another program and simply done a web dev accelerator, but I wanted to do iOS. If you are really looking to get into iOS then this is really the only option for newbies in the area, which is unfortunate. The team at CF is great, but you really don't get much instruction - you basically sit in a room with other people and work on the homework. 

 

 

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I attended the 8 weeks iOS accerelator bootcamp. The beginning weeks were fabulous and challenging, but the excitement soon fizzled out towards the end. Although they claimed it was a 8 weeks course but the actual lesson time were much much lesser. Among these 8 weeks, 2 weeks were used on team app development (2 different apps), the final week was mostly interview mock test, and there was NO lesson on every Friday too, so all in all it was only 5-week lessons. The instructors were very good, the lesson was given in the morning at 9 o'clock till noon time, the afternoon was merely self/group practising. It would be so much better if it was a FULL 8 weeks course and they offered lessons in the afternoon. 

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Summary

After attending Code Fellows to learn front-end web development, numerous friends have asked me questions like "How was it?" and "Would you recommend it?" My response differs depending on the person's prior experience and interests, but here's a high-level review to help with these inquiries.

 

 

The world of web development is one giant rabbit hole that requires continual learning, admitting you're wrong, and progress as the industry continues to evolve and shift. That aside:

The Decision to Attend

I would absolutely recommend Code Fellows, but it comes with a variety of variables/caveats that are different for everyone. Mainly: cost, ability to sacrifice the time, potential unemployment after completion, etc.

For me, I wanted a career change, so I knew it would be an up-front investment that would be repaid upon finding a job. The job guarantee, as well as local press and quality of leadership, made my decision to jump into Code Fellows feel safer to me.

Curriculum & Classwork

Coming into the program only having tought myself basic HTML and CSS, almost everything at Code Fellows was new knowledge. That said, Dale Sande pushed us to learn in-depth, production-level code, and it was a crash course on best practices in the industry. Our class focused on the interaction of design and development with a heavy emphasis on modular reusable CSS using Sass, semantic HTML, and web standards. Out of everything today's "front end developers" are expected to know, I do think the class fell slightly short on JavaScript and its many modern frameworks, but you can only do so much in two months.

I put in a lot of hours during that time to absorb as much as I could, but the learning still has only just begun—after graduating, it's time to really apply everything, put it to practice, and gain repetition.

Learning

What I will say is I never could have learned so much so fast on my own, and there's also a great support network of classmates and instructors both in class and after graduating. The small class sizes and tight-knit group made it easy to get help and share learning experiences very quickly, and nobody felt alone. After Code Fellows, people continue to work on projects, share job search experiences, and more. It was awesome to have this while we were all looking for something new and entering a new industry.  

Job Placement

I did start a contract at a small startup after only one month and solidified a position at a larger firm two months later—both of these came through personal referrals, which helps immensely. All this said, there are still students in my class that don't have a full-time job yet (after four or five months as of this writing). Regardless of the quality of our training, it's not easy to convince companies hiring that we are suddenly "experts" that can solve their problems right away. A lot of people still want proof like projects and work we've done.

TL;DR

If you have the desire, the money, the drive to learn (and keep learning), and you can afford a few months of life without making any money to fully jump into something, Code Fellows is a high quality school offering a lot of potential growth. It was quite literally a life- and career-altering decision for me, and I'm thankful I got the opportunity to attend.

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I took the iOS Boot Camp (now called the iOS Development Accelerator) in January/February 2014 and I can say without a doubt Code Fellows is the best educational experience I have ever had. I started learning how to code on my own 6 months prior to Code Fellows and landed an iOS dev position a month after the program ended. The best thing about Code Fellows is the pace and environment. Being surrounded by a class full of students on the same interests as you to bounce ideas off is invaluable. You will leave the development accelerator as an employable dev and make a great group of friends in the process.

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I completed my 401 course a few months ago. The curriculum was rigorous, as expected from a bootcamp. I excelled in the course, achieving a 98.9% score, and passed my whiteboard interview on the very first attempt, which led me to join the Career Accelerator program. Up to that point, everything seemed promising.  But shortly after all my instructors lost their jobs, and the head of job recruitment was let go. The Career Accelerator program is a JOKE! They added us to a Slack channel and sent out weekly forms asking where we had applied that week and whether we received any callbacks. That was the extent of their career assistance. For veterans, the program is free, but I paid over $13,000 and can confidently say it was not worth it. Not a single person from my cohort got a job or any assistance from Code Fellows. Please get a degree from college and stay away from codeFellows. Read less

Code Fellows charges high-end boot camp prices without the results, curriculum, or staffing to match. Even the people who were getting paid to attend (CF accepts multiple forms of veteran education benefits) regretted attending the CF software engineering program. I would recommend staying away from Code Fellows entirely. 

Most instructors didn't seem to have training in how to lead a class through the material, which made it feel like the instructors were always ill-prepared & short on time. Especially later on in 401 (the main courses), this program felt like watching an unprepared person talk to themself as they tried to go through the CF curriculum; this resulted in failing to include the class in instruction, not providing answers to questions, and frequently not even finishing the instruction for the day during class time. The material itself felt thrown together & stale; like someone just googled the topic for each day and picked the first result, rather than curating the material to fit the needs of the students (this was further amplified by regularly running into dead links and outdated material).
Two out of our three instructors had no industry experience. These instructors were better at teaching, and covered beginning material (HTML, CSS, JS), but they didn't always understand the material, and frequently didn't have time to provide answers to questions that came up during class. I had hoped some of this would be addressed once students broke into cohorts with a more specific focus, but that time never came, and a common theme in the program was students/TAs completely lacking the foundational fundamentals to build further understanding.

The instructor (401) that did have some experience worked one job after graduating CF, and then became an instructor after their role switched to hybrid from remote. This instructor was hostile with students who pointed out an error or alternate solution during lecture. When they couldn't get a library to work, they would say it was due to a bug, rather than their lack of understanding. Whenever they couldn't answer a question, they would either say there is no time for it, or that they'd come back to it later (it became a running joke because they never came back to these questions). The worst part of this program was having an instructor who still didn't understand that part of the job is learning how to find the answer, not getting upset that someone asked you something that made you feel uncertain. Nothing was done when the cohort tried to talk to the program about the problems with this instructor, and students stopped raising concerns due to fear of retaliation. In this final portion of our program we had 60% of our cohort drop within the first month. This was not surprising at all, and a lot of the students voiced to each other that they felt like the program was a cash grab. When a dialogue was opened to address some of the concerns, the instructor and admin staff were very confrontational. Time was set aside in class to explain why people were wrong about specific concerns in their "anonymous feedback surveys"; a common phrase thrown around by CF staff was that you "just aren't embracing a growth mindset". This was easily one of the most toxic work/education environments I've ever experienced.

Along with all of the above, the TAs were terrible providing useful input and very limited in availability. Despite being alumni, they didn't understand the difference between var/let/const, and were typically no help outside of telling you to write whatever code worked in their version of the assignment, rather than troubleshooting and explaining the refactor. TAs are paid ~$15-20/hr, need to stay below 30hrs a week, and work within a priority system that more often than not meant they were not available for students when they were requested. When this lack of availability was presented to the school, one of the lead instructors told people that you could pay $30/hr if you needed help outside of your cohort assigned time. Not having available TAs is insane for a program that costs $20k, and even crazier when the instructors think people should be paying an additional $30/hr to be properly taught something that the instructors failed at teaching. The TAs lack of learning, training, and availability all felt like a continuance of the school caring more about their bottom line than creating a suitable learning environment for the cost.

A good remote or self-paced program would be much more beneficial than Code Fellows. For the same price, you could even hire a good tutor to take you through the sticking points each week, while checking on your progress. If Code Fellows is your only option (in-person situation), then I'd take the time to ask questions about your specific instructors (there are some who are enthusiastic & seem to have a passion for the material/teaching), and ask to speak to some of their recent students who have been hired and/or sit in for a class.I do think boot camps work for some people, but not all boot camps care to create a curriculum, update it continually, and spend the time/money to hire & train capable staff; spending six months at the wrong place is an easy way to waste time/money, while also being turned off from the industry. Read less

In this school you are going to learn something new every week but you are not going to use everything you learn throughout the whole course some lessons are more of intros to things so you know they are out there so sometimes you will have to do a lot of research on your own depending on what you are interested in Read less

Our course material has typos, unclear directions, and still needs so much work before it’s ready for students. The curriculum does NOT prepare you for a job. They gloss over one new thing a day and you’re expected to put that in your resume as a skill. The class lecture is supposed to be 3 hours long, sometimes it is 1 hour. You would expect much more from a $25,000 course. Your “career” assignments consist of watching 45 minute YouTube videos that are 3 years old, and they call it “partner power hour”. Tech is always changing, but they don’t value their students enough to give them relevant material. You are also expected to give free in-depth feedback weekly, and for each new course. Please, especially veterans, do not waste your VETTEC benefit here. I made a grave mistake choosing this course.   Read less

I recently completed the Code Fellow Bootcamp course, and unfortunately, I was very disappointed with my experience. One of the biggest issues I encountered was the complete lack of communication from the staff. There were times when I had important questions or concerns that went unanswered for days, if not weeks.


In addition to the lack of communication, there was a severe lack of ownership taken by the instructors and staff. When I encountered issues, instead of working with me to find a solution, they brushed me off. It was frustrating and demotivating, to say the least.


To make matters worse, there were several instances where I tried to reach out via phone call or email, and my attempts were completely ignored. It was incredibly frustrating to feel like I was being ignored, especially since I had invested so much time and money into the course.


Overall, I would not recommend the Code Fellow Bootcamp course. The lack of communication, ownership, and responsiveness made it a very frustrating experience, and I feel like I did not get my money's worth. If you are considering a bootcamp course, I would recommend looking elsewhere. Read less

Code Fellows gave me a place that facilitated material and provided accountability. The instructors and the teaching assistants shared their wealth of knowledge and gave room to grow and learn. Java 401 was challenging to learn a new language but extremely rewarding. I believe java laid a great foundation for software development. Read less

Overall the courses and instructors are fleshed out and get the job done. Looking forward to job searching and implementing teachings and habits instilled by Code Fellows. Ryan Gallaway is a phenomenal instructor and really is there for the students. TA's are extremely helpful, especially Katharine Swilley & Justin Hamerly. Read less