Founders and Coders

After a masters in Art History, I was unhappy about where my career was going. I found out about the school and joined Founders and Coders a couple of months later and honestly could say it was one of my best life choices. I've met lots of lovely people; the work is challenging and creative;  my career looks much more promising. I have found that the collaborative way of teaching suits me very well. I have learnt so much in the last few months. In addition, I have been given the opportunity to work with amazing clients such as Breast Cancer Care and other reputible charities so early on in my career as a developer. I would highly recommend. 

In no particular order: - A rounded introduction to fullstack development - A modern syllabus (ES6, Node, Hapi, React, etc) - Supportive environment and mentors - Encourages resourcefulness, self-directed and peer-supported learning - Regular feedback sessions to shape and tailor aspects of the course to each cohort - High entry requirements, very selective - Lots of external speakers from industry on a variety of topics - Social enterprise which encourages engagement with third sector - FREE

What susrpised me about Founders and Coders was that at its core, the key to its success was a group of people in a room commiting to learning together. It's so simple but deceptively powerful.

It was one of the hardest, most intense experiences of my life, Founders and Coders doesn't hold you hand, it teaches you how to learn.

I learnt more in 16 weeks than I did in 3 years, met some extremely talented people who I want to continute working with and am really excited about my future in software development. 

It's hard to believe how much I have learned on the course when I think back to how little I knew before starting. Having finished the course, I feel comfortable setting up a full-stack, fully functional web-app - frontend, backend, database, and any of a number of powerful modern frameworks.... I remember before the course, I barely knew how to make a simple static web-page. 

The fact is that Founders & Coders is an incredibly effective way of learning the skills you need to start a real career in software development. IT WORKS as a way of gaining an incredible amount of knowledge and experience in a very short amount of time. It's also amazing fun, thanks to the people teaching and running the course, as well as the close ties you build with your fellow students.

I can't really think of many cons. The fact that the course is free means that it gets a lot of applicants, and so you have to put substantial time and effort into learning the prerequisites before you actually start the course. Another possible con is that you can't expect to have your hand held. The course relies on self-learning and peer-learning, and the instruction you receive from the teachers is limited to the essentials - this means that you get out of the course what you put in.

As far as getting jobs goes, I think Founders & Coders offers more help than many other bootcamps. They have a great system in place to get graduates paid freelance work after you finish the course - this lets you gain experience and build a portfolio to show to recruiters in the future. If you're thinking about applying, I can't recommend it enough.

This is full-stack javascript boot camp with a twist - there are no tuition fees and no teachers. This is a model based on peer learning combined with excellent support and structure - the ideal environment in which to develop the practical skills needed for coding. Stay at the forefront of cutting-edge technology, learn with and from some of the smartest people you'll ever meet, begin working for real clients, use your newly-acquired skills to make a real difference to people lives..... too good to be true? I can assure you it isn't. It's happening right now so get involved!

A life changing full stack JavaScript web development course! Working collaboratively and learning from my peers, whilst teaching everything I learnt to them, was such a brilliant way to supercharge my development skills. If you're thinking of doing this, just do it. Speakers such as Stephen Fowler (Tech lead at Guardian) Twitter, Bithound and ITV gave us a real grounding in the web development industry. What's more, this place is a real social enterprise and believes education should be free! No fees! I couldn't believe it but it was such an honour to be a part of this incredible organisation.

This is a fantastic coding school, it genuinely feels like a cooperative. The tutors are always happy to give guidance, but also give you the support you need to let you teach yourself. The curriculum is constantly adapting to the views and needs of the students. You are encouraged from early on in the course to branch out and go to lots of tech meet ups and hackathons, this gives you a well rounded view of the London tech industry and teaches you how to promote your developer skills.
Go for it :)

I can safely say that the Founders & Coders Boot camp, has been a thoroughly enjoyable, challenging and rewarding experience.  Coming from a back ground in sales, whilst pursuing various online routes to learning how to build websites I became dis-enfranchised with being the lone ranger sitting at home. After attending the Monday evening meet-up sessions  I began to take on the pre-requisites for the Bootcamp after getting a feel for the environment I knew it was something that I wanted to be a part of.  The course itself consisted of weekley tasked based learning in the form collaborative projects. Whilst the course is taught free of tuition there was no compromise on the quality provided. Throughout Founders & Coders we were encouraged to participate in pair programming and help one another to overcome every task.  We had speakers from a broad spectrum of renowned organisations and potential employers such as , The Guardian, Twitter and The BBC.  

 Whilst the curriculum is vast and the pace fast it certainly lives up to the 'Boot camp' label. Even if you come away with 50% of the knowledge that is provided to you it's a worthwhile experience. Fantastic way to spend 4 months  highly worth it !!!

When I was learning on my own, after six months of coding I managed to make a website about football scores with three differently sized boxes and a button that randomly generated the football scores because I couldn't figure out how to actually get the real football scores. 

 

After six weeks of Founders & Coders, my team and I have created a working blog from scratch, a soundcloud playlist app, a wordsearch app with autocomplete search and dictionary definitions, a version of twitter (ours distinguished itself by allowing 141 characters), and most recently a working version of instagram. I'm not even slightly exaggerating. 

 

That's six weeks' worth of projects. In the ninth week, we'll move out of the classroom and start working on projects for clients. Where else could you imagine that after eight weeks of training, you'll be in a position to deliver genuine value to someone else's business? 

 

Through a mixture of expert instruction and collaboration with our peers, we've made faster progress that I ever dreamed was possible. I couldn't recommend Founders & Coders more to anyone who wants to devote a helluvalotta effort, with the guarantee that they'll get out of it what they put into it. 

Well, as f&c are famous for their social commitment (more on this later), let me join Mattia with a late #meToo post. Sorry for the lateness, but I have to admit I procrastinated too much, not having much time and trying not to follow too much the endless amount of discussion and polemics it created.

Let's get straight to the point: my experience was BAD, as I think was the case with most people, despite the very positive reviews that were written (or rather marshalled?) here. Not many, if you think how many "professionals" nominally were sent to the market by f&c; or if you consider that the first one is from the son of the "founder of founders and coders", as he proudly likes to declare, although he preferred *for some reason* not to use his father surname here. He uses it without a problem when he gives interviews (in one they even present him as a "founder of founders and coders" himself) or when he gets good contracts on some of the partner company which are instead far from taking all the past students in. And that is one of the first problems I would like to address: f&c does NOT help you much to land a job, as they seem to currently prefer to enrol middle-class people [Mattia addressed this point in one of the meetings - so surprise they didn't call him for further projects!] who might stay for a long while either out of the market or working for peanuts in DWYL not-so-complex and not-so-well-managed projects. But, after all, and here I go in reverse to another problem, that is a good amount of alumni can expect, not having been trained properly due to the scarcity (some cohort might say "absence") of PROPER mentors. Having people who just graduated teach the next cohort on paper sounds really cool, but in fact it tends to be more disastrous than anything else: most of the alumni, as per requirements (often bent, but I will talk also about the selections), do not have a single day of professional experience and expecting them to magically become good enough to mentor others at the end of the course is plainly absurd. Don't get me wrong, I have met former alumni who were really good, and given the selection rate it does not surprise, but if we talk about fresh mentors, it is a hit&miss with many, many more misses than anything else. Well, more misses is good for the gender quotas, isn't it :D? Speaking of which, I am sorry to confirm Mattia's impression: if half of the attention that was given to ideological propaganda was instead addressed to better developing training and curriculum, well, in that case f&c might be a much better job. It is also true that the kind of divisive, mysandrist and sometimes even violent sentences and speeches he reports are not only unsanctioned, but often even encouraged. To the point that one of the people who were in Mattia's cohort and that maybe spent more time making propaganda than learning to code was even promoted to mentor for multiple cohorts as an UX designers. Despite: * not having a single hour of professional experience before; * not having a solid grasp of the core concepts of UX; * acting in a confrontational (or, let's be honest, fairly childish) way every time that an objection is raised; * not even showing up for lessons in the morning, with a wide set of excuses; * trying to co-run the "coding for women" meetup and having caused a good amount of embarrassment, being consistently unable to solve even white katas despite being among the "veteran" alumni; * a massive negative feedback from past cohorts, including even the meekest students, who were fed up with wasting so many days to learn UX (which, incidentally, is not even so meaningful in a cramped bootcamp to become fullstack devs). As f&c is definitely a meritocratic environment, the same person has even been put in charge of the UX for some DWYL project and of the selection of new candidates. Basically on congeniality level, as "attitude is the most important part, learning to code is easy". Shame the easy path never seems to allure much... There are constant rumours about this being a reward for helping set up the camps in Israel, but I would not indulge in gossip, letting everybody draw their own conclusions. Speaking of Israel: the greed underlying the nominally altruistic spirit of f&c went more or less public since they started to run even less organised meetups, but still claiming success after success via twitter and other channels. A shame a cohort, for example, ended up with less than the initial number of "surviving" members, including 2 natives dropping out, as apparently they were selected so well that they had serious trouble in properly understanding English. Of course, the fact that having locals there would have brought more government money must not have been an element of pressure.   Anyway, bottom-line: I would not recommend it, as you either get to waste time or, if you are a good, autonomous learner, you might have a better time just going on coursera, treehouse or wherever you wish to learn how to be a real developer.   No ideology, no pressure to be part of a community (which does not accept you so much as soon as you even start to politely dissent on minor points) and no amateurism.   Again, sorry for all the good, competent and/or dedicated people who did a lot of good, but the current indisputable system and philosophy will just push more of them away and make f&c a less and less decent training ground.