DevPoint Labs

Before getting into the details as to why, let me first say that DevPoint Labs executed an outstanding learning experience. I have taken many technical training courses over the past decade and the part-time ReactJS course has been the best overall experience.

Now for some of the details as to why the DPL course excells. First and foremost is the competency of the instructors, Dave and Jake, who are both very knowledgable and most important are able to transfer that knowledge in a systematic and progressive approach. And they love this stuff and love to teach, which is contageous.

Of course this is a "bootcamp" which means information is coming at a very fast pace and there is a huge responsibility on the student to keep up with the pace. If you don't hit the class prepared by doing the pre-course assignments or have an equivilent knowledge then you are already playing catch up. You need to know some Javascript for sure.

I really liked how the instructors would take brief surveys at points through the course to get indicatiors of how the students were keeping up and where we wanted to go. My cohort wanted to have some additional time with React Native training, so Dave adjusted the course material over a weekend to adjust and fit the need.

I appreciated the fact that the instructors and staff weren't just trying to check off a few boxex and say that they taught us the concepts on the course list, but were intent on giving us the best possible learning experience with the content we wanted where possible.

In addition to the technical stuff, I really enjoyed working in various teams as we were given projects to complete through the course and eventually for the capstone project. And the teacher assistants were a huge help in getting past many of the challenges.

This was a huge challenge having to work full-time and then go straight to school until 9pm for four days a week (and a couple Saturdays) during the three months. It was awesome though and would do it all again.  

Thanks DPL, it was great!

-Rick

DevPoint Labs provides a structured, logical, and meaningful 11 week bootcamp course. I was surprised at how much I learned and was able to do on my own in a short amount of time. You definitely get what you put into this course! It was challengin,but there is so much help and assistance available to help you through your journey in the course. The instructors are very knowledgable and patient in their approach to teaching, and the TA's are always happy to help! 

DevPoint Labs has built a positive and encouraging learning environment, and I'm very happy to be a part of the alumni. I would absolutley recommend DevPoint Labs to anyone who is looking to make a change! 

DevPoint Labs full-stack Ruby on Rails course is taught by two amazing coders and teachers.  That is a hard combination to come by, and Jake Source and Dave Jungst do a fantastic job of bringing you from zero to coding hero in a little less than 12 weeks.  It's intense and not for people who are not serious about changing their career paths. Despite the difficulty level, I garuntee that if you do take each day seriously and try your best anyone, I repeat, ANYONE, can come out on top.  I took the class in from February - April 2016 and my life has only improved as a result of the new skills I learned at DevPoint.  As an individual I am able to take a more analytical approach to problem-solving, and as an employee I have the skills needed to compete in a changing workforce.  If you are looking to change your career without the traditional 4 year degree, DevPoint is for you!

I had a really incredible (and really difficult) time doing the full-time Ruby on Rails course.  If you are not expecting the course to be difficult, challenging, make-you-question-everything, this might not be the best fit for you.  If you think it will be worth the rewards you reap, then you're right!  I cannot believe how much I have learned and absorbed over the last 11 weeks.  And don't let the difficult part hold you back because DPL offers tons of support not only through teachers, TAs, and other staff, but also a wonderful network of alumni.  Dave and Jake are both incredible instructors and great complements to each other in their coding and teaching styles.  I look forward to remaining a part of this community.

No, you won't be able to retain every single thing you learn so quickly, but I'd guess what I did learn in 11 weeks would have taken me three or four years to learn on my own,  floundering around with online courses. Without DevPoint I wouldn't have gotten the big picture of how it all works together.

I left with a good concept of how to learn whatever coding skills I might need at a new job and something you can't put a price on- confidence. I did the evening course and there are two instructors. They are both very talented. They never got stumped or seemed like they were winging it. On top of that, it was obvious that they loved what they were doing.

Very positive and supportive environment. Plus the networking during and after the course really makes the difference in connecting you with a job after the course. Definitely recommend doing this over trying to do it on your own. Lots of diversity in age and gender in my cohort- don't be intimidated!! ;)

I completed the After Hours Full-Stack JavaScript course at DevPointLabs. DPL has opened my mind to a complete new world and community that I wish I could have been part of earlier. The eleven week's were challenging, it has been one of the toughest thing's that I have ever done. I had to put in a lot of extra time and made a lot of sacrifices. It was hard, overwhelming but the knowledge that came from completing the course has re-directed my career path.

I would highly recommend DevPointLabs to anyone interested in becoming a developer. Dave and the whole staff are amazing. They are there help you along every single step. I am glad I had the opportunity to attend DevPointLabs and would not hesitate to go back.

I just completed the full-time Rails course at DPL and had a wonderful experience. I went into the course with only knowledge of HTML/CSS and found the course challenging and very rewarding. As I was thinking about making the decision to take the course I was worried that I may not be able to do well as logical concepts like math have always been difficult for me. Don't even worry about that. If programming interests you and/or you are tired of not knowing what to do with your life/career then I highly recommend DevPoint Labs. It isn't easy by any means. There were days the content felt so overwhelming I wanted to just give up and cry. However, I never gave up and just pushed through.

You will get what you put into it. I can honestly say I averaged 70+ hours a week and I absolutely do not regret it. If anything I regret not coding more!  I have now graduated and I feel like I have the foundation needed to get out there and get myself hired. 

The staff is amazing. The instructors are extremely qualified and teach the content very well. The TAs are awesome, happy to help, and are a great resource. The community at DevPoint Labs is incredible too. Tons of alumni are there to mentor and help however they can. If you ever get stuck, and you will... a lot, there are always people there to help you figure it out. 

Honestly, going to DevPoint Labs was one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life. It has given me a career path, friends, and a constant challenge. I highly recommend DPL to anyone wanting to learn programming.  

I really loved my time at dev point labs. I had tried to learn JS on my own and kept hitting roadblocks. My understanding is now far beyond where I would've have gotten to own my own. The course is hard and you will get out of it what you put into it. 

I was able to learn from (instructors) and with (students) some crazy smart taleneted people and build great projects. Dave was a great instructor, while the course and cirriculm moves fast he was always wililng to give insight on where to go to learn more and go over topics learned in class. In reality you find out that it's hard and frustrating to learn to code in such a short time you really have to practice, practice and practice more to pick it up. 

I gave five stars for experience, instructors and cirriculm and an NA for job assistance. I came into the course happily employed so I didn't participate in any of the job assistance activites. So I can't speak on the job assistance aspect.

I will say that going through the course has made me way better at my job as a SEO Product Owner. I've nerver found working with developers more rewarding. In that sense it has defintey helped my career. I also am working on my own application that I intend to complete all the front end and back end dev for, which is something I would have never been able to do before the course. I still gave NA for job assistance becuase I think my job feedback is probably not relevant to what most prospective students are looking for.

If you are thinking about dev point I highly reccomened and advise to make a time committment, to attend all the classes and do homework, do good prep work before cohort and don't get discouraged when it gets difficult. You will be successful if you work at it and you will be very glad you did!

I went into DevPoint Labs' Immersive Afterhouse FullStack JavaScript course in the winter of 2016 having almost no experience coding. I had done some minor QA and UAT working in my previous job, but nothing prepared me for what I was about to get into. In retrospect, I wish that I had devoted two to three months of preparing for the course than just jumping into it the way that I did. The course was killer. I had a blast but it was filled with sleepless nights and a lot of frustration. The instruction was awesome however, I do wish that there would have been text material to study from and more guided tutorials to SLOWLY take us through some of the basics so that we could have a solid base before moving on to some of the more advanced frameworks and libraries. Having had no experience in coding whatsoever, I was pleased to be able to tackle building responsive and beautiful apps with the skill set that I learned.

This being said though I do wish that I would have had more of a base for learning the actual context and meaning behind a lot of the syntax in JavaScript. I am one of those people that need to do things over and over again in order for them to stick so sometimes the speed at which we covered the material was really intense for me. 

The only downer for the course that I would have to bring up is the Job Assistance factor. I had a lot of help on putting my resume together but when it came to getting ready to apply and prepping for interviews, I have to say in the most constructive and honest way possible that we really didn't cover interview prep all that well. Looking good on paper is one thing but being able to answer interview questions intelligibly and confidently is vital to scoring a job in web development. Interviewers will probe your knowledge of libraries, frameworks, and how you interpret basic syntax to make sure you really understand and that you aren't just copying and pasting code from the web. They will question you relentlessly to find any weakness..it's not something you can bullshit your way through.  You can't google your way out of an interview. 

Overall Experience

First off this should be a 4 1/2 star review for overall experience but they don't do 1/2 stars. I loved my experience at DevPoint Labs, I will say that learning style can be rough for some people. If you need to learn how to program for less money than a traditional computer science degree, this is definitely the place you should attend. 

Instructors

I had 3 different instructors during my 11 week course at DPL. All of which gave me a different perspective on how things can be done. I've stayed in contact with almost all the professors that I had. All the instructors that taught me were more than willing to provide help with any issues I had, this includes real problems, like balancing an grueling work load and spending time with loved ones. 

Curriculum

DPL does a wonderful job of teaching the bleeding edge of the tech world, which is great, albeit a double edge sword. This is an 11 week course, so obviously they can't teach everything. I would love to see a stronger push into the foundations of the course, I was in the FULL stack rails course, and going into my first job I was lacking some more basic understanding of Ruby, and even javascript. That being said, if you dive into this course and do extra coding in your spare time you can make up for this. 

Job Assistance

As far as job assistance goes, DPL excells at this. They do everything they can to help each student fullfill their goals, if that student wants to be a developer within a year, that's what they help them achieve. I actually got my first job from being on the DPL alumni forum, and I can guarantee that I wouldn't have heard about it without being part of their amazing community. The school will give a series of mock interviews that will help the students prep for the real world, which helped me immensely. 

DevPoint Labs is an excellent program set up to really get your career started in the technical world. Its been invaluable to me and I'd highly recommend it to just about anyone. I say "just about" anyone because it's not for anyone. This course takes a lot of hard work, and if you're not willing to put the work in, then you shouldn't bother coming. When I attended, I went to class from 9 to 5. I spent every minute trying to absorb all of the information that we're given. After I went home I coded some more. I finished every homework assignment and built every program we were challenged to build. As a result, I leared the skills I needed.

The instructors are amazing. I had a bunch of different instructors when I attended and I learned great things from all of them. These instructors are super bright. During projects including the capstone, if I was ever stuck on an error that I couldn't figure out, it wouldn't take long for the instructors to see what I was doing wrong and help me fix it.

The DevPoint community is really set up to help you succeed at finding a job after graduation. It's all about networking and meeting people in the Dev community. If that doesn't intrest you, then I'd reconsider your coming to DevPoint. This company will help you to find the job that you need, but they're not going to do all the work for you.

I am super grateful for the opportunity I had to go to DevPoint. In a year and a half, after knowing barely anything about coding or html/css, I'm at close to a 6-digit salary and loving my job. It hasn't been an easy road, but if you're willing to put in the hard work it will pay off.

Some things DevPoint can improve:

Their TA's weren't very helpful to me. It seemed that no matter how often I went to a TA for help,  they couldn't help me solve my problem. They did however provide good walls to bounce my ideas off of, and I ended up just figuring out most problems on my own.

The DevPoint guys really want each student to succeed, but as time of graduation approaches they really focus in on those students who are most likely to move on faster in their career. They set up special interviews with a select number of students in the course (I wasn't one of those because I was planning on getting a part-time job to continue my formal education at college) to meet with a future employer. I felt like it was unfair that they were excluding me from that opportunity. I ended up getting that employers contact info from another student in the cohort, applied and got the position. (Like I've been saying, its set up to make you succeed, but YOU have to make it happen. It's not just going to happen upon you.)

Despite these flaws, I give DevPoint Labs 5 stars because if I had the chance to do everything again, I definitely would. I've refered lots of friends and family. Great job DevPoint, and thank you for the wonderful opportunities!

I just can't thank DevPoint Labs enough for the opportunity to attend their great bootcamp. With the skills I learned at DevPoint I was able to secure a junior software engineer position less than a month from graduating. If you have the drive and passion, then DevPoint's proven curriculum and instructions will prepare you for your first job in the tech industry. Another factor to consider is the amazing community DevPoint has created, from the meetups to hosted chat you can always find a helping hand with any industry questions you may encounter. There is no doubt that I would not be where I am at today if it weren't for taking the plunge and enrolling in DevPoint's full-stack course. Thanks to everyone at DevPoint. 

• I wanted skills that could elevate my career —I had no experience in coding
• I find coding fun, challenging, and satisfying —DevPoint has taught me how to think like a developer
• DevPoint came highly recommended from a friend who is a graduate and currently working as a Software Engineer
• Curriculum is challenging and current
• Instructors are invested in the curriculum
• Access to a network of DevPoint Alumni working in the field

Go in prepared to push yourself every day for 11 weeks and you will see yourself grow beyond measure.

I had been teaching myself HTML/CSS/Javascript for over a year before looking into a bootcamp. I can tell you that when i started attending, my development capabilities absolutely skyrocketed. The inside tools and tips you learn by attending are invaluable.

My experience with DevPoint Labs could not have been any better than it was. They have always been amazing at bringing talented people in to teach and mentor their students. The environment at DPL is so uplifting and inspriing. Even when i go back to mentor a hackathon I am always leaving with an amazing feeling – wanting to build something awesome.