Flatiron School

Flatiron School's free Bootcamp Prep, for me, was a great refresher for HTML, CSS, and Javascript and completely taught me everything I now know about Ruby. The Javascript and Ruby portions went over the basics, but also included lots of practice problems to solve, so you can start feeling more comfortable and confident when looking at functions and data structures. To me it seemed like a lot of this prep was learning and getting comfortable with Ruby, going into debugging, loops, classes, and a lot of projects. I was hesitant to learn Ruby at first, but after constantly using it and learning more about it, I've come to really enjoy thinking in Ruby. It's fun! 

I also found that Flatiron's support system is incrediable. If you need help on a problem, you can simply ask a question in the chatbox and someone will answer, usually in less than 5 minutes at any time of day. I was never left hanging whenever I needed assistance. Compared to other bootcamps that I applied to, I can honestly say that Flatiron School has the fastest and most reliable response rates (including with email). 

After completing this course I really felt I came a long way from when I started and I'm happy to report that was accepted into Flatiron School's bootcamp!

If you are unsure which bootcamp to attend or even just starting out with coding, I definitely recommend this prep course. There's no time limit, it's free, and I found it to be challenging, fun, and worth every second.

I will be starting the immersive in-person software engineering in a few weeks, and I feel that the preparatory work on the Learn.co website was extremely helpful. The instructions were really easy to follow especially for a novice programmer like me. I believe that anyone who maybe in the same place as me would be able to benefit from the style of teaching provided in the bootcamp prep and prework. 

Another feature of their website that I found useful was the help option in case you may have any question to what you are learning. The web site posts your question in the community, and either an expert would be there or another student who may know the answer would be able to respond to your question. I often use this feature and help other students because the best way to solidify what I learned is to apply it by helping or teaching someone.

There are so many other features that I was able to try in this web site, such as forming a study group. It's great that you can form a community also.

I am really excited to start the immersive program soon. Thank you for the help and all the resources that Flatiron has given me to prepare for the coursework! Cheers!

I was shocked and delighted by the quality of Flatiron's free bootcamp prep curriculum. Having initially tried once or twice to find some free, online introductions to front-end programming, I had become used to platforms that--despite making big promises up front--only offered confusing, unhelpful, or overwhelming lessons that left me in the dark without any sense of progress made. Flatiron's bootcamp prep could not have been more different: evenly-paced, comprehensive, and with skill-testing labs at regular intervals to put your education into practice.

Even more impressive was the constant availability of Flatiron instructors & experts, even for the free bootcamp prep students like myself. On maybe five or six different occassions throughout the dozens and dozens of hours of online material, I found myself needing help from someone more capable than myself. Using Flatiron's built-in chat interface, I was always able to get truly immediate assistance from programming experts, who could help point out a mistake or make a suggestion to get me back on track.

After completing the bootcamp prep, I was successfully admitted to all of the rigorously competitive programs to which I applied. I could not recommend Flatiron's bootamp prep more, especially for people like myself, who both wanted to see if programming was for them while--in the process--becoming a much better candidate for more advanced and thorough programming coursework.

The bootcamp prep was essential in helping me understand the basics of important coding languages like Javascript. I was pleased to find that the admissions portion was directly tied to the bootcamp prep, and went over the same concepts covered in the prep course. 

I prepared a lot for my technical interview and was also pleased to find it was such an educational experience. My interviewer seemed genuinely interested in seeing how well I understood the code, and pointing out where I might improve.

If you're looking at applying to bootcamp programs, this should be one of them.

I recently graduated from Access Labs (Flatiron School x WeWork) and found that the course was incredible. As someone who was self-teaching, and had prior exposure to coding through Computer Science, and my own curiosity when I worked in IT as a Network Engineer, I found that it helped me focus in on what I needed to know, and learn. The entire course was structured with an evolving curriculum, and the instructors and assistants were very knowledgeable. The space, and community provided an excellent insight into what should be pursued in regards to a work environment. I also feel that the structure is similar to a work environment which is great because it breaks up the feel of a course. With all that said, I firmly believe that this school has taught me a lot. I knew very little from self-learning over the course of a year. Now I can confidently trouble shoot issues, refactor code, and create an application from the ground up by breaking it down into smaller pieces and deploying it online. 

I've been taking dev courses here and there but was getting nowhere without consistent practice. Then I decided to get serious and took Flatiron School Bootcamp - online program. I was a bit skeptical, to be honest. But decided to go with it because it was month-to-month and I could cancel any month. Soon enough I was writing my first project from scratch. I think Flatiron has a very strong curriculum. It is built in a smart way of pushing you towards learning how to learn in the first place. I would totally recommend checking it out, especially since they have free prep-course to get a feel of the learning platform.

The prep work is a great introduction into Python because it's segmented by topics, and those topics are segmented to give your brain a break. And it's nice that all the topics build upon one another. For those coming from a not-so-technical background, this prep work is great because they explain the math concepts very well. And for those coming from a math background and/or little coding background this prep work is definitely doable and maybe even easy for you! 

I would suggest that the prep work be edited a bit - towards the end I found a couple of small errors that might confuse the person taking the prep work. 

My first and only experience with coding was through a past mentorship with my company, which helped me 'get my feet wet' and left me wanting to pursue web development. I found Flatiron's online program, which was perfect for my schedule and received the Women Take Tech scholarship to join the program. I always felt pushed during the program, yet supported- but not in a 'hand holding' way. You'll definietly get pushed into the deep end a lot, which mimics real world development! 
I haven't completed the program (just have the React module left) and was lucky enough to already be starting a job in web development. The coding structure and amazing support from coaches, fellow students, and the career prep team made my experience at Flatiron wonderful and I would definitely recommend taking the leap if you're already considering. 

The bootcamp prep course is perhaps the most complete and wellrounded free online curriculum I've found in terms of the learning environment they've created. That being said, there are some gaps in their content and overall, the whole experience could be polished more for it to really shine. It is mainly self-led reading and labs. This means you can do it all on your own time, but it also means that there is limited interaction with typical "instructors".

Tools software developers use are well integrated into your learning, quietly exposing and teaching you how to use:

• Github
• Atom
• the command prompt
• Chrome's "inspect"
• Test Driven Develpoment

The community of instructors/helpers and students are well integrated into your learning environment. You can always ask questions and join in discussions with other students right from the lesson you're curently working on. You will only see questions asked on topics up to the last lesson you've completed. Anybody can also schedule study group sessions for a more structured learning space/time. With these systems in place, I've found little need to go to their Slack community for much of anything.

This curriculum is still being worked on though (perhaps slowly), so there are some things to watch out for.

Content:

• This is a bootcamp prep course geared at people who have had little experience in programming. More experienced programmers with minimal web experience may not get much but an overview of Ruby, HTML/CSS/JS and TDD.
• Complete beginners may have some troubles going through the content on their own but that's what the community integration is for. 
• There are some gaps in their content. For example, they may mention having talked about one thing but never have. It'll be up to you to look it up. They also tell you that a certain attribute is depricated so you should use a newer one, but they won't mention that it's not possible to pass future lessons using this newer one.
• Their lessons have some broken tests, incorrect information, are from a previous iteration, etc. This can be annoying and stop you in your tracks if you are a beginner. These lessons are open source though, which is awesome. That means you and other students can contribute / fix things in their lessons and start using Github in a way more often used in actual open source projects. After noticing multiple things that could be fixed however, I've slowed down making issues and PRs on them. It does not seem that they keep a very active eye on their repos or update it too often.

Support:

• Their question and answer system is overall very good and well integrated. Their helpers are very responsive your question typically resolved within a few minutes. This is only during working hours though. As I live in the middle of the Pacific ocean, questions I ask in the middle of the day typically won't get answered until the next day.
• Most helpers seem to be going through or have just completed the course as well, so their knowledge might be limited. They do have more technical people on staff, but they can be harder to get ahold of or get answers from.

Learn IDE 3:

Learn.co provides an IDE for all their lessons. You can either do it on their web IDE or download their desktop version, Learn IDE 3. These were some issues that came up with the local version. Overall though, the IDE is pretty well done, amazingly integrated with Github.. Scarily integrated with Github 

• It clobbers your ~/.atom. You'd think they'd move its settings elsewhere if they went through the trouble of making it a separate app. They say it creates a backup, but that was not the case for me. Backup your ~/.atom before installing to be safe. If you've never used Atom, this is not a concern.
• Often takes 2-3 tries to open up the lesson.
• Often times you'll have work done on a lesson when you accidentally disconnect or close the IDE. The next time you open up that lesson, your work is often lost.
• Has a different set of Git Credentials than your global config? This usually is no problem unless you have your "Keep my email address private" setting turned in Github. Not sure if they keep your credentials on-server though..
• Scarily integrated with Github. You give them access to reading, writing, and creating new repos under your name, reading and updating your user data, reading and writing SSH and GPG keys. Wow.

As a whole, if I were to recommend something to people wanting to really commit to learning programming, I would point them to something like https://github.com/ossu/computer-science instead; a list of also free, but more comprehensive and complete lectures from reputable universities. These materials of course would require a higher level of commitment than this convenient, relatively content-concentrated beginner bootcamp prep

The admissions process at Flatiron was seamless - I really enjoyed talking with both of my interviewers (the first is a simple meet and greet, the second is a technical interview). I am brand-new to coding but after following the technical track for JavaScript, I felt that I was well prepared for the technical interview. The learn.co courses are of two types - purely informational, and coding labs. I feel that the information excels at explaining the basics - if you are brand-new, like me, you do not need to worry about jumping into something that might be over your head. Everything is explained very explicitly - not just the coding methods themselves, but even the programs and files that you use to do the labs, and how they work together. The labs begin simply enough, then quickly become more challenging - Flatiron uses a TDD (Test-Driven Development) philosophy (which they will explain at length - so don't worry if you don't know what that is) that I believe perfectly sets you up to be able to understand the labs and how to be successful. There is online support that is extremely helpful if you get stuck. I have been extremely pleased with my experience with Flatiron so far. 

The enrolment/application process was smooth - the admissions team and interview instructors were helpful and friendly. I chose to do the interview and technical work in JavaScript. The Learn.co course is good enough, but perhaps could be better for someone brand new to coding like myself. The pacing for me personally was a little inconsistent, and the fact that certain lessons involve uninterupted blocks of text makes it a bit more difficult to absorb information compared to other online introductory courses (for example, Codecademy, which I had more success with). The IDE specific to the course is also a bit clunky compared to some alternatives (which in some cases make it easier to experiment with bits of code and have more 'instant' feedback), although it is helpful for getting (somewhat) familiar with Github/'IDE's (?). Overall though, a good experience, and with excellent external support. 

The experience itself is fine but would have been made far better if the Learn IDE worked properly. I use VS code and am acclimated to making things work together but this was a little sad. I understand there could be some bugs but I had to use the in browser option because they are essentially between builds and the atom build had a bunch of conflicts and issues. I would recommend everyone use either a repl.it on the side to test smaller parts of their code and to change the Learn IDE settings to in browser.

That being said, the instructors are responsive, the community is fun and generous with their time and knowledge, the incremental lessons are also quite helpful. I would also like an multi-level percentage breakdown of how much has been completed but only the course you're in provides that on the dashboard.

Picking Flatiron Full Stack Web Development course was an easy choice.  I was working full-time and planned to study online, I liked their bootcamp Prep Course, they offered job search support and the payment schedule was flexible - you pay $1500 a month up to $12k, after that it's free. So if you're able to finish the course in 4 months, your tab is only $6k. Plus they offer $1500 merit scholarships to 25 motivated students each month.
 
The structure of the course is pretty straightforward. You learn a new topic and in the next lesson you pass the test which usually consists of writing a function or fixing a broken code.  At the end of each module you build a project that will be part of your portfolio when you go searching for a job. There are tons of videos and webinars, 24 hr online support plus you can always schedule a session with an instructor.  Luckily for me I could find answers to most of my questions on StackOverflow so I didn't really use their support system. At some point I was even thinking that I chose the wrong program -  you can get the same course for $150 a month but without instructor's support (there is still a community-based help). That,  however, would have been a mistake as I realized later. 
 
I think the main feature is their post-graduation support. I was assigned a career coach to touch base weekly. She helped me build a resume, a cover letter, gave me tons of advice on how to speak to recruiters and employers and provided moral support all the way though my job search.  In addition to that Flatiron has a resourceful Business Development team who provide you with leads you won't find online. I wouldn't be able to find my job without those guys. I received tons of rejections, even though I made it to the last round of interviews at some companies. After almost 4 months I got an offer which was way above my best expectations. So I don't regret for a second it took that course, it's a life changer!