Coding Dojo

I did the full-time Fullstack Web Development program at Coding Dojo. They weren't kidding when they said that the program will take most of your time during the three months you're enrolled. I really enjoyed the courses and I feel like they were able to help me understand the foundation of the programming languages I signed up for. I also have some portfolio projects thanks to Project Week. It was great to see people with different backgrounds come together and learn from the very beginning. It was a little too fast paced though. Because you move on from a language right away and start a new one, it's not surprising that you can forget what you've learned previously. There were also some things in the curriculum I wish they would've taught (and not optional) such as deployment. All in all, I definitely enjoyed my time at Coding Dojo. Is it worth the money? I'm not sure, but the possibilities you have after completing the program are endless.

Where to start... The course overall isn't terrible, but the implementation and teachers are. The TAs barely know enough to teach (one couldn't unzip an exam and failed it, another couldn't explain why port 80 is HTTP).

The coursework is severely lacking. They consistently tell students they aren't providing all the information they need to succeed, and that students should find info themselves. Which would be ok if it weren't literally every single class / assignment. You end up wondering why you're paying them $14,000 to get told "use Google" every day. Although, in light of explanation skills of the teaching staff, Google *is* a better education, and you should wonder why you're paying $14,000.

They also teach old tech. Such as Python with Django instead of Flask. MEAN/MERN stacks that only work if you're deploying on 1 server, but not if you're using micro services or auto-scaling, etc.

Overall, I would say potential applicants are better off grabbing 4-5 courses from Udemy, and find a few projects on Google to complete. Which is somewhat sad because they *almost* hit the mark at Coding Dojo, but missed it just enough to miss it completely.

Overall, it is a great program to help you go from knowing nothing about coding to building a fully functional website/app from database to backend to frontend and deploying it on the web. It is very draining and hard but if you are serious about learning computer programming then the difficulty and pace should not be an issue. 

Be prepared to drop a lot of responsibilities in your life for 14 weeks as you will be coding for at least 8 hours a day if not more. Class is from 9am-5pm and I typically coded for 9-11 hours. I was still able to relax, socialize, and do some chores but for the most part I would have to drop those things to get a little more studying in or to finish the harder or more complex assignments. But it was so satisfying to debug and figure out a challenging problem and completing a functioning website! If you know you wouldn't like being stuck on a problem or

There are holes in the program such as wanting practice problems/material for algos and the instructional material needing more videos/clearer descriptions of code/examples/solutions but it gets the job done and they seem like they are always trying to add/improve to the material as things become more relevant. My least favorite part was morning algorithms that were done in group settings. The lack of lecture beforehand frustrated me (I didn't even know where to start some mornings) and most people don't want to cooperate with each other. Probably because they don't know what to do either. 

The Student Support/Career Services are also great in my opinion. I have heard/read that others do not like it but I think it is justified. They won't hand you a job and won't do the work for you. It is up to you to set up your portfolio and resume. And after to send your apps. But you have a counselor that helps with workshops, tips, and edits for each of these! They do mock interviews as well. 

I tried to give as much information as I could! Overall I am very happy to have chosen Coding Dojo and feel that I have the tools to progress to a proficient coder!

Pros:
-Instructors (and some TAs) are fantastic. This may vary but I only disliked one who did not treat a personal situation of mine correctly.
-Curriculum gives you the tools and skills you need. But you do have to do additional work on top of it to master.
-Pacing if fast but if you put the time in it's not too bad! Just try to keep on pace or within an assignment behind. I recommend being a day to half day ahead
-Career services will help if you use them!

Cons:
-Tuition is expensive
-Algos in the morning are awful unless the instructor does a mini lecture and/or your group is good and talks!
-If you don't have a group you may struggle. 
-No practice problems. Just assignments that build off each other and get more complex. 
-Material on website
-If you have a lot of outside responsibilities full-time may not be best option for you. 

I cannot recommend classes at the Dojo highly enough. I was really worried that I might have trouble building a sense of community with my instructors and peers, since I was taking the classes strictly online and the live zooms were optional. I shouldn't have worried at all! My instructors were so personable and made it easy to feel connected, and my classmates felt like real friends! I loved the ability to connect with LGBTQIA+ and female-specific affinity groups using the Coding Dojo discord server, and never felt like I was lost without someone to turn to.

I also want to give a shoutout to the Career Services guidance I got along the way. It was helpful to have specific, actionable feedback on ways to make myself marketable, and their advice really works! Since the halfway point of the program, recruiters have been reaching out to me pretty regularly to discuss different job openings in the tech field. Plus, my CSM was really approachable and friendly, and I never felt silly asking for guidance.

General description
I'm currently a student with 1 week left taking the python stack. I'm pretty ADHD, so I naturally struggle when it comes to studying, but when I bring myself to actually study, the material rocks. It's pretty straight forward. It's set up in a way to give you the basics, and introduce some more advanced (yet still basic) concepts of how you can write your code differently, and overall just better. The reason they set it up this way is so that you will be forced to learn how to teach yourself, because if you want to be a real programmer in the real world doing real things, you HAVE to learn what your information resources are that you can call upon whenever you get stuck/run into a problem. The more you run into stuff like that the more it becomes like clockwork. You understand what to type in your search engines, how to look up examples, the actual MDS for the languages themselves, youtube, google, stack overflow, other websites. It kind of sucks at first being thrown into the chaos all at once but you're not left to drown. They have a basic 20 minute rule system:
Struggle with it for 20 minutes on your own... after that ask a fellow class mate, maybe work on it together (Which is great because on a real team of developers you'll need to be communicating and explaining what your code is, why you're doing it the way you are..{8 times out of ten just while you're explaining your issue and what your code is doing you see why it isn't broken and can fix it right there}.) If you're still struggling after that you have a discord room with plenty of TA's to help you solve your problem, and if it's during hours your teacher is there to help you as well... even after hours the teachers have gotten back to me so... pretty solid system. You just have to learn to not be prideful and set a timer so you don't spend an entire day trying to solve one problem... as fun as it can be, especially when you're having progress... You're still going to end up with a very similar answer... question is, do you want to take 20 minutes, or 6 hours? It's all on you to make big boy/girl decisions.

I was able to apply and win a scholarship from their program so that helped out with tuition. They have pretty straightforward tuition loans through a 3rd party bank but it's like they are in control of the loan so if they need to update it then that's fine. Basically you have 6 months after you graduate before interest comes in and the interest is HIGH... but if you start paying that off as priority just as the minimum payments due each month then it'll probably cost you total about 22-25 thousand dollars once that's all paid for. Otherwise If you're like me and just get stuff paid off ASAP depending on the job you land after you could have that paid off at like 18-20k USD... heck maybe even closer to 16k USD... Just depends on your situation.

Word of advice. Don't be working a job or doing anything else if you're doing the full time program or I promise you you won't make it. This is your job, this is your education... this is ALL you do. But if you're some person with lots of experience in programming then you probably could pull that off. I had a bit of experience, and I know I couldn't do it If I had other responsibilities.

For Job Support it seems pretty good and I haven't used it yet so i just put 3 stars because I honestly don't know. If I can update this review later I'll change that to whatever I actually experienced.

Pros?
- Teaches you how to work in a group
- Teaches you latest industry standards and programming software/languages being used by the majority of jobs hiring. They're constantly updating their curriculum, and in some cases remove entire curriculums and replace it with another framework (i.e. django, or flask) or programming language as the business side of this necessary education changes.. so you can trust what you're learning is actually what you'll be using!
- You'll learn how to learn any language or framework you're faced with in the future, and as scary as that sounds... in this field people at the same company will be learning new languages or software or frameworks etc. once a year... but the languages are pretty interchangeable... the concept never really changes of what you have to do, but the syntax does... so it's much easier to learn another programming language than it would be to learn your 2nd or 3rd spoken language (English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, whatever). After you get one language down you could learn to write the same program in python, except in C# or Javascript in the same day... maybe 2 or 3 if it's a much larger project. Better than taking another 4 months or year.
I honestly could go on and on about all the pros of this camp.


Cons?
I honestly can't think of any. I can promise you however that your experience will be determined by your motivation to learn this stuff. If you don't care about programing or full stack development or have no real interest or purpose for why you're learning it... to suddenly be thrown into a program that requires you to be studying 70-80 hours a week is going to suck for you.
If you don't know how to study, or haven't studied anything for  like 10+ years, and your brain isn't used to having to learn so much in such little time, you are going to struggle because the brain is just like a muscle.. you use certain parts of it for different things... learning something like programming is going to make you mentally tired if you're not used to it.
All I can say is if you're committed and know this is the field you want to work in (which honestly there are over 155 different job fields so take your pick and hop around... it's all programming in the end.). For me personally I want to get into video game development, and this is a stepping stone in that direction but I don't want to go spend 4-6 years at a university before I go apply for a job... This is one way to do that.
Also if you learn how to learn this stuff and where to look it up there's litterally nothing to stop you from having an idea... building that idea on your computer... and then turning that into a marketable product or business, which resolves my other goal: I WANT TO OWN MY OWN BUSINESS. And if you factor in how much overhead the average business has compared to a programmer business? You have the cost of your computer.... and whatever other software or services you want to purchase related to your field... But then in any other business you have to rent or own a building, hire employees, pay for all their equipment they use, all the machines or devices required to manufacture whatever it is you're manufacturing... We're talking Millions of dollars just to start. I bought a new computer with all the parts I'll need to make a pretty decent video game for roughly $4,000 USD. That includes my computer, my monitors, my desk, my chair, and the standing treadmill under my desk when I want to move the chair away and walk while I work. You tell me which has the greater risk? Then If I make one program that 100,000's of millions of people around the world need and they all paid whatever it's worth... 1 dollar... well you got 100 million dollars, and after you pay whatever platform you launched it on  and any other employees working for you on the project.. if you're the only business owner getting all the remaining profits after taxes, you're still walking away with 60-80 million of that 100 million.
Then if it threatens some major corporation with a monopoly on the market you either stay and competed or sell it to them for $500,000 million USD.
All you have to do is STUDY... and APPLY, and there's nothing more rewarding than seeing the exact thing you just learned, applied to your idea, and immediately seeing result to the question, "why is it important I learn/do this?" You're not going to get that at a university that simply forces you to replicate programs... it'll help you on your way no doubt, but when it comes to real world experience and applying what you learned for your future employer... This bootcamp does that!
Hardly a con eh?

Coding Dojo really breaks down the borders into understandable concepts. With huge libraries of topics ranging from data structures to deploying your application. With different  a wide range of programs, Coding Dojo had the right program for me working in the day time and attending classes in the evening. Attentive instructors during lectures who always have an open door policy to schedule 1-on-1 time for specifics questions or code reviews. Coding dojo also has dedicated instructional assistants available to give you that boost or to look over your code when you hit a wall. I really felt like my experience was wonderful from great instructors Zack Pieper, Michael Taylor, Sal, Devon Newsom, thank you so so much!

The learning platform is informative and the instructors are well knowledged. Your progress is definitely on you though, it is tough work and a big investment but with the right mentality and work ethic Coding Dojo can teach you what you came to learn. The journey isn't over after you finish the course, and they stress that. This is a life change that you decided to do and they do their best in preparing you before the course, during the course and after the course.  You learn a lot from the boot camp to get you started and there's plenty more to learn after.

 I strongly recommend Coding Dojo. From top to bottom, the students feel well taken care of with resources, instruction, assistance, and career services. From the day I showed interest to the day I graduated, any email for support that I sent received a quick personal response. The learning platform is relevant and updated frequently to make sure the content is accurate and helpful. The assignments and exams are fair and challenging, and there are challenges to ensure that your learning can go above and beyond the bare minimum.
The courses are challenging, even to someone with some coding experience. You can always ask either a TA or instructor for help, but it is encouraged to problem solve for twenty minutes before reaching out. I took the Python, C# and MERN stacks, all different from each other, and was challenged and learned a lot from each. I can now say confidently that I can build a full stack website from scratch in any of these three languages.
Although this is not a knock on Coding Dojo at all, because of Covid our schooling had to be entirely on Zoom, Discord, and the learning platform. Once again, this is hardly a con because I always felt I could reach out for help, perhaps more so than if classes were in person. 
 

After 3 years of employment with my company I ran into a red flag with my background check. I listed Coding Dojo as education and experience. Cause of the pandemic Chicago Dojo decided to disconnect their phone lines and not be reachable except for email. I tried to avoid an issue by requesting a phone number instead of email. Corporate Dojo also does not have a phone line, but only email. With $15K tuition, they can't afford a phone line? Corporate Dojo is in Seattle and I have never been to Seattle. They decided to tell me employer that I never worked there, and I never claimed I worked in Seattle Dojo. Without informing me. From local Chicago Dojo, all I needed was a casual statement saying that yes I did attend between these dates to have valid experience and education. They would not even do this. I explained that after 3 years of employment, this is not the time to get on a high pedestal/soap box about my request. They drew an imaginary line and refused to help. For a place that isn't FAFSA eligible and non-accredited this ridiculous. They risked my job on semantics and lost.

Clarification on the program. It is not a 14 week program. You have 3 3-week stacks with a project week at the end. You start out with the 2-week fundamentals stack. If you pace yourself for a 4-week program you will not be able to join then contribute to a project. You will need to rush and be eligibile for a project team.
It really needs to be a 17-week program. They raised their tuition but kept the 11-week program.

During my time there, one instructor did not know how to use Git, and lost a whole days assignment trying to "fix" a Git issue. 10-hours of work gone, and he just walked away.
Another instructor got fired ( I notice a trend here, Coding Dojo likes to get people fired) In the middle of a stack!
Even though this is a "bootcamp," during Thanksgiving week there was no enforcement or expectations about coding. We have no vacations and are paying for full time. It's a "bootcamp." Yet our project week was lost because the instructors/boss decided this was okay. There were no classes on Thurs/Fri yet we didn't get our days moved into next week.
I should get a weeks worth of money back.
Last stack the online program was totally unprepared! The cirriculum had no way to tie the back and front end together. The concepts were foreign to each other and no way to connect them. They should have suspended classes if they did not have the material. After 3 wasted days, one instructor explained it in 20 MINUTES!
The 4 A-Grade (black belt) students with prior coding experience could not figure it out. They said Google changed their stack and it's too new. Then give everyone a refund, suspend classes, or get your crap together.
Same thing that happened at Thanksgiving happened again, except for Christmas and New Years. How is this a 'bootcamp.' Either enforce rules, or start the cohort one week ahead to avoid multiple holiday conflicts. 

Would you want to go to a vocational training program that gets you released after 3 years of employment? Think about that before you pay your money to attend. They do not have your back after they take your cash.