Viking Code School

TLDR: Attend. Great instruction, curriculum, peers, and projects.

I participated in the Su '15 full-time program. The program covered a lot of material from algorithms and data structures to in depth Ruby, Rails, JS, and Angular. It's a tough schedule and pace, but made possible by amazing instructors, an extremely well put together curriculum, and pair programming with very smart peers. The project based learning helped me a lot as we built fun real world apps from the get go (scrapers, interacting with multiple API's, e-commerce backends, games etc.). 

VCS emphasized building skills applicable to on the job software engineering - so everyday we used Git while pairing, in our final project we set up continuous integration and deployment, were allowed independence in using gems and API's, and TDD'd projects as well. All this while using hangouts and slack to collaborate, which is important for today's global teams and using Pivotal Tracker for planning and executing projects in agile sprints. It's an extremely well rounded program. 

The deferred fees are fine - it means they are investing in us, but other programs offer this as well. With VCS however, we get to learn directly from the people that built and some that participated in the program. Everyone is so committed and bought in, there is no one left behind.  

Customary NPS: 10. I am now as biased towards VCS as I am towards my undergrad and grad schools, which is says a lot for the quality.

My name is Xin and I was student in Viking's summer 2016 full-time Web Application Engineering cohort.  I strongly recommend the program to anyone who is serious about starting a career in web development because it works.

Before Viking, I was a post-doctoral researcher at UCSF.  I wrote software to build computational models but the skills weren't enough for what software engineer jobs were looking for.  I joined Viking in order to get a more applied skill set in web development.  The week after I graduated from Viking, I got my first software engineer job offer from a Bay Area FinTech company. 

During the program, we built group projects every day and the instructors were always there to ask questions and review code.  The projects were not easy and we therefore learned a lot by doing them, including how to work on large teams and to build complex applications using Rails and Angular.  I appreciated the time spent understanding algorithms and data structures, which we did most days, and which helped a lot with interviewing.

In the end, I'm happy I joined the program and I'm very happy with where my career is now.

Hi, my name is Nick, I am a graduate of Viking Code School’s first full time cohort, and am currently a professional software developer living and working in Austin, TX.

 

Viking was nothing short of a life changing experience. While one of the most challenging things I’ve ever committed to, it helped get me to a place where I am now doing what I love for a living.

 

A bit about my back story -- before being accepted to Viking, I had graduated with a BA in International Relations. I worked for a few years in international development, mostly as a project manager for overseas communications projects in Afghanistan. The work was interesting, but ultimately I always felt like I sort of “settled” in college and this career. It was not very fulfilling, and I was always envious of other people who really seemed to love what they were doing. The old sentiment, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” certainly didn’t apply to anything I was doing.

 

While doing this, I found myself needed to write small programs to automate tasks, such as scraping and cleaning government contract award data. I had never programmed a day before in my life prior to this, but the first time I wrote a program that I actually used to solve a problem, I was hooked. I had always regretted not having the money to go back to school to become an engineer, and software development suddenly gave me a very accessible way to build and solve complex problems.

 

I spent almost all of my free time absorbing whatever I could, but even the most “directed” resources available still left me with large conceptual gaps about how software is designed, tested, and implemented. I could write code (which is good, because it’s totally expected of your before you are even admitted), but I still couldn’t really write and deploy usable software. Between working 50+ hours and week and jumping back and forth between resources, I found myself not making a ton of progress.

 

When I first learned about boot camps, I was extremely skeptical. I was naturally skeptical of anything that makes some of the huge promises these programs were offering (1 month and you can make $100k!), but as I did research I found that there were a handful of very highly regarded programs out there. I decided to try and find one that might work. My criteria was as follows:

 

• It had to have an emphasis on the software development process and not just teaching me how to write code

• It had to be based around building things, since the best chance of getting hired would be to have a killer portfolio

• It had to be highly interactive. I didn’t want a “mentor” telling me what to do and then checking in with me at the end of the day. I wanted to be working with people, day in and day out, since that is what would be expected of me as a developer

• It had to be accessible. I was living in Philly at the time, which isn’t a huge tech city, and I couldn’t afford to move to New York or San Francisco for a few months

• It had to have deferred payment. I have a ton of student loans already, and while I see the value of these programs and don’t mind paying for it, the reality was I was making about 40k a year in international development while trying to pay off student loans. I simply did not have any money

•  

These requirements narrowed my options down pretty fast to a bunch of online programs that came up short in some important areas, usually either not being much more than a “learn to code in javascript!” school, an expensive online mentor with no interaction with other students, or no deferred payments. And the programs that did meet my criteria were just not accessible to a guy living in Philly.

 

And then I found Viking. Erik had created a resource I’d used a ton already, The Odin Project, and was a graduate of a boot camp himself, so I knew off the bat he had a pretty good idea of how to take that big step. Furthermore, Viking offered a small cohort of 10 students, where we’d be pair programming every single day for 14 weeks, along with deferred payment. It was everything the top programs in NYC and San Francisco offered, but with the incredible convenience and accessibility of being online. It was terrifying thinking of leaving my job to take this on, but after a few personal conversations with Erik, I was convinced this was the right thing to do.

 

During the program, we spent every day pairing with different people on projects. Literally every single day we built something new. The process was basically:

 

• Go through a bunch of readings and material the night before about a new concept, technology, or framework

• Meet in the mornings for a Q&A and to discuss the day’s project

• Build awesome stuff that required us to use what we learned, along with a ton of creativity and Google to solve problems

• Code reviews where we reviewed each other’s code as well as had ours looked at by mentors

• Rinse and repeat

 

Honestly, one of the most frustrating parts of the course ended up being one of the most beneficial. Having graduated from college, I was very much used to classrooms where our hands were held and where everything was very directed. That is not how Viking works. You and your partner have to plan and design each day’s project. If you get stuck the team will help you find the best way to get an answer, but refrained from really telling you how to do anything. The result was we came out with the knowledge not just how to write good code, but how to solve problems. This is huge, has helped me on a daily basis as a professional programmer, and was one of the things interviewers loved to hear about.

 

We built so many awesome things, it is hard to even begin to list them. Early on we had to develop a chess AI that could maneuver a knight piece around to eventually capture a roaming king. We built games in Ruby and JavaScript, we built a fully functioning social network...so many interesting projects that not only beefed up my portfolio, but gave me the knowledge and experience to build and work with things I now work with every single day.

 

Perhaps most importantly, it gave me the creative freedom to be able to build things that I wanted in my free time. The personal projects I took from conception to reality during the course were some of the most valuable pieces of my job search arsenal, and the ability to have an idea, build it, and have people use it is something Viking taught me and employers loved about me.

 

But the course went well beyond just teaching you to be a developer. Their job search support and resources were incredible. We spent 30 minutes every day doing algorithm challenges to mimic interview questions, had people who hire engineers come in to talk to us about the process, and even talked about the best ways to negotiate salary. The program truly prepared me to be a professional developer more than I even imagined. They want you to succeed, and they give you everything you need to do it.

 

I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who is interested in taking the step to becoming a professional software developer. The program isn’t for everyone. It is extremely intensive, requires a ton of time and effort, and was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. But if you are serious about becoming a software developer, and don’t have time to spend a few years hacking together projects after work and hoping you pick up enough along the way to get a shot somewhere, you really can’t beat Viking.

 

Disclaimers: I attended the very first cohort of Viking Code School so my personal experience is specific to the older format of the program (12-weeks, part-time). I also helped with some of the very early design work before the program started. All that being said, I keep in touch with the founder and current developers for the program, and I am certain that my comments are still relevant to it's current form. I am giving my candid review as a student.

Before I start, the answer to the most common question is: Yes, you can get a job after this program.  I was offered a position as a "software engineer” working in AngularJS.  I am currently taking a different route, but I want to be very clear that it is possible to get a job with what you learn here.  (That it doesn’t mean that it’s easy).

This program is intense. Even the part-time version consumed more than every night and weekend.  Keeping up with the coursework required extreme dedication and self-motivation.  This is probably the hardest part of any remote program.  Having a group of people going through the material made staying on track a lot easier.  I had spent some time learning on my own before this program, and it was much more pleasant to go through with other people in the same boat.

The format of the program is “flipped classroom.”  All of the material is available on demand and you ask instructors and TAs questions during the group video calls. They do a good job of presenting a lot of media to consume the material, the core of the theory is presented in a written format with good examples and the application of theory is in video demos.  If you don’t learn well from videos, you can just dig into the demo code yourself.  You really have to self-motivate to get through the material and the exercises, because you’ll be discussing it with everyone. The discussions really show you where you thought you understood something and where you really did understand it.  

The instruction and learning materials are the best that I have seen online. Every question that I had was answered quickly and thoroughly.  There was one point where I was just burnt out, at my wits end from work and overwhelmed.  I just couldn’t understand some key concepts in JavaScript and couldn’t get a seemingly simple assignment to work. The lead instructor sat down with me on that assignment and dragged me through the JavaScript object model, stayed with me on the call walking me through the revealing module pattern until my code worked… at 11 pm on a weekday. It was a moment that really got me to clear the “pit of despair” and realize that I could do this stuff.

Surprises that I learned in this program:

• Laughing at your own bad code is surprisingly gratifying.  It feels great to understand why it is so bad that it's funny. You REALLY remember the funny mistakes.
• Peer code reviews are learning dense. Even if you get stuck on something and can’t finish it, the process of having people look at it and having to explain it will teach you so much.
• Peer coding is awesome and sometimes painful.
• Having somewhere to ask questions and have them answered nearly instantly saves you hours of searching through Stack Overflow.
• The most frustrating errors are caused by the silliest bugs.

Howdy, 

  So I am currently in the second cohort of viking code school, I think the structure is changing somewhat for the next cohort but here is what I've seen.    I had been self teaching a bit of ruby and whatnot on available resources from May to October 2015. I had been looking at development bootcamps, particularly with the chance to have a program that was not only quality but allowed for remote as I had to stay in my current location with work. Well, there was a good friend of mine who was halfway through this bootcamp and he had given me a hearty recommendation on it so I applied. There were a few interviews and coding tests and I was accepted.    I really think a good way to describe this program is you definitely get out of it what you put in. Every week we go through different areas of the stack and development (Rails, Sinatra, Javascript, AngularJS, jQuery, PostgreSQL, TDD, HTML5, CSS3, etc.); I have learned far more in the first 12 weeks than I did self-learning every single day the previous year.    The instructors drive you beyond your boundaries with tough love and support, and are available pretty much round the clock seven days a week.   The structure has us doing a kickoff/wrapup SCRUM on Mondays that looks over the last week's code and kicks off the upcoming week. We then have a chunk of material and SPRINT assignments to complete through thursday with SCRUM meetings wednesday and thursday night to review code and ask and answer questions and be quizzed. Friday we review each other's code on Github and get ready for the mega weekend project; we then pair up and pair program all weekend long on a much larger project. There were days I kicked off at 8am with my partner on a Saturday and before you know it it's 9pm.    This course is far and away the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life and probably the most satisfying too. I haven't been in other dev bootcamps so cannot compare that, but that was my experience. I know Erik is always accessible too if you have more questions as well!

Their course work has a significant amout of errors so most of the "information" you need to research on your own to confirm what is or is not correct. Most of which is based around raw memorization rather than understanding or experience.

Very little instruction or feedback is given in writing and is instead given verbally and is inconsistent between intructors.

No one associated with the school has any background or skill in education or teaching.

Most of class time is wasted "pair programming" [something you will never do in the real world] so very little time is spent productively in a given day.

There is no grading rubric and any assesment of tests or homework and are graded differently for each student.