The Firehose Project

I graduated from Firehose over two years ago, and I've been working full time as a software engineer ever since. I worked as hard as I could during my time at Firehose and I left with a job within a month after graduating. I've seen how much the program has grown since then, offering students new, updated materials and additional sections. I loved my time at Firehose, I still keep in touch with my mentor and I'm active in the community to encourage others. I was intimidated when joining and thinking I'd have a hard time adjusting to working on complicated problems, but by the time I was ready for mentor sessions on a freelance project my questions had turned from "how do I do this?" to "is there a way I could refactor this to be better?" I've been doing great at my job ever since graduating. I've routinely been told that I'm knowledgable beyond the years of my experience. The only two things I have to thank for those compliments are my time at Firehose and the hard work I put in while learning here!

The Firehose Project is a great way to learn code! You learn by building apps, which is something you lack if you try learning code on your own, and it makes what you're learning immediately relevant. I especially love that they also teach algorithms, one of the unique features of the Firehose Project. I come from a math background, and I was thrilled to find I could put my problem-solving skills to use!

They also have plenty of support.  Everytime I've left a question for a lesson, I've gotten a response within an hour! You also have a mentor, and Ken and Marco hold weekly office hour sessions.  They are great about getting every question answered even if we go over on time occasionally. 

When I first started the bootcamp at Firehose, I was a little skiddish about the quality of training I was about to receive. I mean, come on, nothing for free is usually worth anything, right? Not the case with Firehose; I have learned more in just a day with their bootcamp than I did an entire semester of Intro to Programming. That says and means a lot!

​I loved the first portion of the bootcamp as it hit every learning skill imaginable. I was listening to Ken, then watching him do what he was explaining and of course hands on myself. I would recommend that for the other portions of the bootcamp. If not all the way through, at least every two or three classes.

​I highly recommend the Firehose bootcamp. I believe my first attempt into programming pushed me away, but this is drawing me back into it.

 

 

I'm currently in the third track and so far, the course has been great! The first track/prep made learning Ruby basics smooth and easy. Moreover, Ruby is easier to learn, if you've learned other languages such as JavaScript. After the prep track, you instantly jump into building your first web app, which is awesome. It exposes you to the fundamentals of what it takes to build your own web app. I'm looking forward to whatever else I am going to learn moving forward. Moreover, the instructors and my mentor have been really helpful and quick in responding to my questions. I highly recommend firehose to anyone who wants to become a software developer or even is interested in building web apps!

*Note* (This is a modern take on my 2015 review from Quora. I am a 2014 alumni from The Firehose Project camp)

The year is 2017, and navigating between the plethora of coding bootcamps can feel as nerve-racking as settling on a programming language. Some prestigious camps promise a virtually guaranteed job and an alluring 6 figure salary upon graduation, but these programs often cost the tuition of a full year of a state college and require complete devotion and relocation for a period of 3-5 months. For those that can not afford this luxury, the online bootcamp serves as a comparable experience as an intensive period focused on learning and growing your programming skills. After much research and investigation, I settled upon the fantastic Firehose Project online bootcamp, and shortly upon graduating in 2014 (3 months) I secured a job in a field that not only challenges me but brings excitement to work.

Now as a more seasoned developer I have been interviews for final round positions from top tier tech giants like Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet (basically Google + partners). Make no mistake, the journey only begins as a graduate of a coding bootcamp, and I put in lots of personal hours and a few full time positions to get where I am today.

You want to be selective and find one that dedicates personal time to honing in on the craft, to pair you with proven professionals that can wade through the intimidating language of tech and dispell myths that you have to be some super genius or mathematical prodigy to excel in this industry. FAR from it. What stood out to me about TFP is the weekly pairing sessions you'd get with a proven professional from the industry. You are the director here, and you can really focus on whatever deficiency or issue you're facing to your hearts content. One week can be about esoteric algorithms, the next about closures, the following modern javascript. Truly you are the master of your own destiny in these sessions, and from my experience and what I've heard from others TFP brings a staff of EXCELLENT mentors to the table. This is 1 on 1 training, not lecture style like most camps, and it makes a world of difference.

Dedication is truly the most important factor to excelling in the programming world and in a bootcamp too, and programming requires so little prerequisite knowledge basically anyone can join the industry, even those without college degrees or anyone looking for a career change that pays handsomely over time.

Now to describe a bit about what to expect from The Firehose Project. The camp lasts three month and is intensive as you should expect, but an intensity that has the power to change your life for the better. To say I simply learned a marketable skill set would be to completely ignore the true gains from the program. One of the unique benefits of the program is the pairing of a seasoned mentor who has ample history in working within the industry. 10 sessions of 1 hour length on whatever topic you wish to pry open, and these mentors are some of the best in the industry. My sessions ranged from improving my resume and helping with job searching to thinking through complex algorithms to tackling coding katas (small isolated coding problems to expand upon a core concept in the programming language), and this is only a sample of topics covered. I learned much more than the basics of Ruby, Rails, and Javascript with my mentor, and was able to discover my true passion within web development thanks to his help, which by the way is Front End Development.

In addition to the topnotch mentorship, the community and educational experience is really second to none. Beginners will learn the ins and outs of Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and Ruby, and be able to start building interesting web applications within days of starting the program. The curriculum is very oriented to project building backed by a VERY active slack community that chimes in with helping new students uncover their issues. People share resources, articles they read, supplimentary courses they purchased daily on slack channels, and this only amplifies the base knowledge provided by the core curriculum. Truly the gains are about as limitless as the time you have to study and learn.

The program really exceeded my expectations, and I think is the best value on the market for a coding camp, but you must prepare yourself to truly absorb and live the life of a programmer for these 3 months. I put in the hard work, and the program prepared me well for my current job as a Front End React Specialist in the PNW. As with any educational pursuit, you get what you invest in the program. I would recommend that in addition to all the great resources provided within the program to also explore some of the popular books on programming in Javascript and React. These two areas are EXPLODING in popularity and will make you that much more competitive in the job search. These helped me reinforce ideas and clarify certain aspects that remained murky during my ascent to hirable programmer.



The Firehose Project was the best investment I’ve made in my life, and I am in debt to the people and community that make it so special. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone on the fence, and please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

I've been a student with theFirehoseProject and I highly recommend them. Marco and Ken are the founders but are also among the most dedicated and enthusiastic teachers I have ever had (in any subject at any type of school). 

Their method of teaching programming is the only one that has worked for me. I've tried stuff like Treehouse, Codeacademy, and even in-person classes at Startup Institute, and I would always hit a "wall" where it seemed like the difficulty of coding all of the sudden just ramped up exponentially. 

However, learning with theFirehoseProject made everything flow naturally and seamlessly - and anything I didn't get, they took as long as needed to make sure I understood it. You can tell they really care about what they're doing, and the students that they teach.

Pros:

• Reasonable pacing (often a problem with bootcamps)
• Flexibility to pause and explore outside resources at any point due to online, self-study format
• Great mentors!
• Reasonable price

Cons:

• Written content often skipped over more nuanced/complex aspects of the coursework

Overall Assessment: There's a LOT of programming content online, so if you're fine with doing some of your own research to supplement the content in the course, this is a great program. And to be honest, you should be fine with this prospect because it's a key part of being a programmer that will never go away if you want to become and remain really skilled.

I have tried various coding courses, but The Firehose Project's course material is unparalleled. I learned so much just in the intro course, alone! The Firehose Project explains concepts in a much clearer manner than any courses I have tried in the past, so I am very glad I decided to join the full program.

Something I really appreciate about the Firehose Project is that you do not have to jump though hoops and spend weeks trying to craft the perfect application to get accepted into the program. All you need to do is complete their free two-week intro course, which they believe is proof enough that you are ready to join the program. The Firehose Project will take you as you are and help you learn :) 

Learning to code can sometimes be super difficult and isolating, but The Firehose team creates a very warm and welcoming environment (which was apparent to me even before I signed up for the full course--Marco was so kind and patient when I asked him a ton of questions before I signed up, haha), that is very conducive to learning, so you never feel alone/stuck. There is a strong sense of community here and it is very apparent to me that the Firehose team really cares about each of their students and their progress.

I just graduated from the Firehose Project and through building projects, completing coding challenges and quizzes, one-on-one mentor sessions, and attending office hours led by Marco and Ken, I still can't believe how much I have learned in just a few months. I had very minimal coding experience before I started the course, but now I have built 5 functioning apps, solved very challenging algorithms problems, AND I worked on a remote team to build a chess game application.

I highly recommend The Firehose Project to anyone considering learning how to code! :)

I started looking into bootcamps in 2015 while living in San Francisco. I went to a few locations like Hack Reactor, App Academy, and a few others I can't think of right now. Anyway, I could not figure out how to make a decision until I read somewhere in Quora that the best bootcamp will be the one where you can stay the longest because 2 months just isn't enough. I had ZERO coding experience other than doodling with HTML. So I knew that I needed to find something longer than 2 months and I could not find it. So I went with freecodecamp.com which was awesome but felt a bit unprepared as I didn't really have any support and had not built something that I could actually explain to someone else but it did give me the confidence in myself to know that I had the discipline. So, then I considered Viking code school and Firehose. After some careful reading, it was really tough, but what sold me on Firehose was the mentorship. The mentorship part of the program is AMAZING! You'll get to talk to someone for 1 hour about your code challenges and your projects. Really amazing to get all those questions answered; get back on track if you get lost; keep you motivated, all that good jazz, for the 6-month course. I've not heard of any other bootcamp like this. Very awesome experience so far; I am in the middle of the course and working very hard every day.

The Firehose Project is an amazing online bootcamp that treats each student with respect. It doesn't matter if you have a ton of experience or none, Firehose lets you learn at your own pace. At the beginning of the course they assign a mentor to each student who is able and willing to help you, allowing you to customize your learning style. The Firehose Project is a great bootcamp for those who want to learn, and for those who want to increase their knowledge of web programming. I can't wait to continue my course, and when I finish I'll be able to look back with fond memories.

i just finished The Firehose Project's online bootcamp. It was pretty close to a perfect experience! Because of my location outside the U.S., an online course seemed like the best option. Firehose mixed solid lessons with weekly mentor support and a challenging international group project. The focus went beyond Rails basics into algorithms and data structures, and my mentor was particularly helpful for introducing me to real-world topics and best practices outside of the course material. I was consistently challenged and it truly changed the way I think. Highly recommended!

The Firehose Project is a phenomenal investment. I had come into the program with a CS background, but its curriculum is certaintly flexibily enough for beginners as well. Because of this flexibility, and my fantastic mentor, Matt, I was able to not only get a very thorough background in web development, but was also able to tailor more advanced learning to my specific needs and interests. 

The lessons are concise and powerful. To this day, I still frequently go back to old lessons (for fun) and to brush up on aspects on Rails that I haven't seen in awhile. This resource carries with it tremendous value beyond just the designated weeks of learning: you get access to an amazing network of passionate new (and experienced) programmers as well as to great new learning materials as they update the program.

Above all, I think The Firehose Project is worth your time if you're passionate about being able to build something meaningful. It gives you the tools to control your own destiny. Because of The Firehose Project, I've been able to go out and pursue my dreams every single day and I couldn't be happier that I chose this appreticeship program.

 

(I enrolled and graduated back in 2015.)

I had gone through several interviews with other bootcamps before finally choosing the Firehose Project. While some of the bootcamps that I interviewed with gave me the impression that they only cared about my tuition payment, Marco and Ken (the cofounders) were different: they really seemed to care about my interest and success in programming. Their passion in teaching was really evident upon talking to them, which ultimately led to my decision in choosing the Firehose Project.

Students of this program will build several web apps using Ruby on Rails through tutorials which they can work through on their own pace. Marco and Ken might challenge you to add on additional features to the web apps should you complete them too fast. Students will be given a deep understanding of how code works while also learning important topics including OOP, DRY, TDD, etc, by building the web apps and working through several tough coding challenges.

Should you run into problems, any questions you ask will likely be answered promptly by the Firehose Project community. (Ask as many questions as you can!) There are also weekly office hours where students can attend whether or not they have questions. In my opinion, it's best to attend them even if you don't have questions because you will likely pick up something you didn't know about from other students' questions.

For the final project, I worked in a team with 3-4 other students, and together we built an online chess app. Ken, along with another experienced developer acting as the project manager, assigned us tasks to complete each week and guided us along. This part of the program is simply fantastic because not only will you get to work in a team with others like in the real world setting, it is also a time where you can make mistakes, learn from them, and learn how to fix them. It truly was a tough but very rewarding project.

One of the highlights of the Firehose Project is the weekly mentoring sessions with a senior developer. I was paired with an incredibly friendly and knowledgable developer, and the time I had with him was truly invaluable. He not only answered every question I had, but he also taught me how to write better code. I have used and still use to this very day the knowledge he imparted to me.

Although my focus is no longer Rails specific (currently working with iOS and Unity), the knowledge I've gained through the Firehose Project has made the transition into other programming languages/fields so much smoother. I am truly glad that I went with the Firehose Project over other programs, and I would never trade my experience with them for anything else.

My background:

I had virtually no coding experience prior to this bootcamp, apart from some free courses that I had dabbled in online on Codecademy and edX. I also did the free 2-week prep work offered by FHP before deciding to enroll in the bootcamp.

Lessons / Video instruction:

You are going to build some pretty cool stuff just by following the lessons online. A Yelp clone, a quotes generator, and an online marketplace that integrates payments are among the prescribed FHP projects. The lessons themselves are very detailed. There are also video lessons on topics like object-oriented programming, class inheritance, and asynchronous programming. If you have no idea what these topics are about, don't worry, neither did I. You will learn all about them by following the video content and asking your mentor or Ken (the bootcamp's founder) at office hours. 

Data structures / Algorithms:

On top of building cool web projects, you will also be asked to solve a series of algorithms throughout the course. Some of these are classic computer science problems that I imagine every CS undergrad would solve. The algorithms will be challenging but will leave you with a better understanding of data structures. Unless you have a prior background, you will probably bang your head against the wall a couple of times, but it's okay, it will be very rewarding once you get to a solution. Don't be afraid to ask your mentor, Ken, or even peruse the office hour recordings to help you solve through these challenges.

 Chess Project:

This is the really cool part. You will learn a lot from working on a team with other junior developers like yourself, under the guidance of a senior mentor (may be different from your regular weekly mentor). There were 5 students in my group (including myself). You will be assigned "tickets" (or tasks) to do each week and you will check-in with your team once a week at a "stand-up meeting" where you will report on what you worked on, what you accomplished, and what obstacles you faced. You will bang your head against the wall a couple more times while figuring out how to build out cool features for your app. But it's okay, because if you actively participate and challenge yourself, it will all be worth it once you see the results. I wanted to get better at using jQuery (a Javascript library), so I chose to work on all the tickets related to that. I also wanted to learn how to use Firebase (which allows you to see your opponents' chess moves happen in real-time), so I assigned myself to those tickets. You get the idea. You will pair up with other students in your group to work on these tasks, which is pretty fun. 

Office Hours

Go to them. Even if you don't have a question, you can sit in. Ken and Marco are awesome, super encouraging and very patient.

Weekly Mentor

My mentor was extremely experienced, helpful and encouraging. He even made himself available to answer any questions outside of our weekly one-hour session via email. You can work on anything during your sessions. If we were not working on algorithm challenges, we worked on building out specific features for whichever app I was working on at the time. We even did a whole session on using the command line in the Mac terminal.

Community

The FHP community is unlike any other. You can chat with other students (and mentors) in the Slack channel and post any questions you have. There are quite a few active members in the Slack group (some are former students who are now devs) and they will try to help you out. There was a ton of communication with my chess group when we were working on our project, via Slack and sometimes also Google Hangouts.

Outcome

You will not become an advanced web developer by the end of this program, but assuming you come in with little to no prior coding experience, the bootcamp will give you a very solid foundation in programming. You can then apply this knowledge to advance your skills in Rails or pick up other programming languages and frameworks (it will be easier to pick up other languages once you have a basic understanding). After the bootcamp, I wanted to learn more about mobile development (which is not covered by the program) so I set out to learn Swift. If I had not gone through the FHP bootcamp, it would have been much harder for me. Additionally, I am using Rails (taught in the bootcamp) to build out apps on my own that I am using in real life.

Conclusion

The best part of the bootcamp is the community, who is there to guide and encourage you. Learning to code on your own is hard work and the drop-off rate can be high. FHP gives you a super excellent foundation to excel in whichever coding endeavor that you choose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote a blog about how I chose the Firehose Project:

How I Chose The Right Coding Bootcamp For Me

Full disclosure: I took advantage of the Firehose Project when it was a 15 week program for $3500.

That being said, I am very grateful I decided to drink from the firehose.  I was clueless about the world of software development at the beginning of 2016.  I had been working at Trader Joe's for several years after graduating from university in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in Biology.  I got a taste of coding taking a handful of city college computer science classes, but there was no context on how these coding skills applied to building real-world applications.  My motivation for jumping aboard the Firehose Project is I wanted to get the technical training required to land my first tech job. 

The first half of the program (at the time) was dedicated to learning the programming language Ruby and building Ruby on Rails web applications.  These are skills offered by many bootcamps/online resources.  What drew me to the Firehose Project was the emphasis on algorithms and data structures, which is something that I needed to be exposed to if I expected to make it through a technical interview.  This is where the Firehose Project shines - they matched me with an experienced professional programmer to help me understand how these algorithms and data structures work.

This is a blog post I wrote to help me understand a data structure, the linked list:

Demystifying Linked Lists for Ruby Developers

As I mentioned in my blog post above, I had taken a time out during the middle of the program to move from northern to southern California.  I appreciate that the FHP was very flexible and made it easy for me to take a break from the program.  I wanted to make sure I would be able to dedicate myself 100% to the chess web application project.

A lot of other programming resources teach you how to make basic CRUD (create read update destroy) web applications.  This is nice, but is rarely that simple in the wild.  Hence why building a chess web application with an agile development team is such an amazing part of the program.  It gives you a taste on how projects are actually built in "the real world."

Here is a very extensive post I wrote about the group project:

Building a Chess Web Application with an Agile Development Team

To wrap up, what makes the Firehose Project unique is the group project and the quality of mentorship.  I am incredibly grateful for the mentor I was connected with.  He pushed me to learn how to use tools beyond the scope of the FHP coursework that allowed me to stand out as a job applicant.  He also was willing to act as a job reference, which was incredibly helpful.  I also was able to use my chess project mentor as a reference as well.  These two professional developers were both patient, supportive, and yet pushed me far outside my comfort zone.

I will also say that a bootcamp cannot just hand you a job at the end of your program.  One thing I learned early on that helped me feel comfortable with engaging with an online bootcamp is you need to network for yourself in order to get a job in tech.  I hustled for months, going to as many meetup groups as I could, in order to land my job today.  I had worked as a QA Engineer for several months after the Firehose Project.  In the meantime, I taught myself another programming language (Python) and data analysis.  I now work as a Big Data Engineer for a startup.  I am incredibly grateful I decided to push myself to learn how to code and get a job in tech.  And I am very grateful the Firehose Project helped me in the process.