1. A chance to code full time and get financing for the tuition, cost of living and gas.
2. A environment where I could meet others like myself.
3. A place to stay late and code when cramming to finish projects.
4. A instructor to help me when I needed it.
5. A good resume project to leave camp with.
6. A place to find community even after graduation.

Basically, #1 is the only thing I felt was adequately provided, and that was provided through a third party, so hey, thanks to them I guess. I’ll start with #2.

#2 :“A environment where I could meet others like myself.”
I was hoping to meet passionate newbies who really had the drive and competency to build awesome thing. The “admissions representatives” aka, sales people, were just pushing as many bodies through the door as they could, regardless of aptitude. Look it up on glassdoor, they work on commission. Students that needed excessive hand-holding through lectures. Students that seemed to be barely able to operate their own computers, let alone build software. I did meet some awesome passionate people at coder camps, but they were in different cohorts who have the same complaints about the program as I did.

#3: “A place to stay late and code when cramming to finish projects.”
When I first got to the camp, I had a late night TA. She was there if you needed questions answered, and to close the building late. However, 2ish weeks in, she got moved to a remote class and started working from home, subsequently causing the camp to close at 5 when the 2 instructors left. It would be occasionally be open a bit longer, but not often. I’d usually end up at the nearby coffee joint when I needed to get work done.

#4: “A instructor to help me when I needed it. ”
This was partially due to #2, it was hard to get my instructor to help me on harder concepts when he had students who were constantly making him repeat basic concepts like git commands and editor hotkeys. Beyond this. He left the company 2 weeks before my final project was over, presumably due to differences within Coder Camps. The instructor in the other class was willing to help when I needed it, but much of the project as in a completely different stack, and I ended up finishing it out. Which leads to our next expectation.

#5: “A good resume project to leave camp with.”
I was in a group of 2 others, one remote and one onsite. We finished, but there were features missing that I sincerely wished made it in. Beyond our instructor leaving, the remote student had to begin working a full-time job for personal reasons. The scope of the project was made for 3 full time developers, and it was more like 2.25. I feel like this made me pick up the extra slack. The project works as a demo, but not as a product, and it still bothers me to this day. I put a lot of heart into it.

#6: “A place to find community even after graduation.”
After I graduated the dot-net class wasn’t receiving new students, and the mean stack class ahead of me was finishing their projects. In total, on a day I would stop in there would be 5 people in the building including the instructor and TA, but often less. This was pretty suspicious, they went from just throwing in any warm body willing to pay them, to mysteriously sending no-one. This turned out to be that they planned to close the Seattle campus. I tried to stop by recently to find out that they closed the camp. They are still active in arizona and Texas (so far as I know). I’ve found a good community outside the camp, the JS community in Seattle is warm and friendly. Unfortunately, Coder camps’ Seattle campus was actually in Redmond! And if you know anything about Seattle, the people here hate driving. So you end up spending a lot of time and gas to go to meetups and events where the community actually congregates.

Most of what I have learned hasn’t been from their curriculum, it was pretty badly outdated. I’m self taught, they taught me nothing. 2 weeks out of camp I found some contract work for a startup. With zero help from Coder Camps. And that’s fine, as I said, I wasn’t expecting it. That lasted about about 2 months, and now I’m on the hunt again. This whole experience was just sad. I came in with reasonable expectations and was disappointed in a spectacular fashion. Don’t trust a word they tell you.

I attended Coder Camps from January – March 2015 at their Bay Area location. It was the best decision I’ve made in my high school/college drop-out career. I worked in sales for a company and made decent money. It wasn’t fulfilling, and I knew I could do more with my brain. So I took the leap of faith and enrolled in camp.

Before coming to camp, I was asked to learn and was tested on the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. During the first 3 weeks of camp there is a heavy focus on HTML and JavaScript. CSS is not a primary focus, as a better understanding of it comes naturally as you build out websites during camp. In my humble opinion, understanding JavaScript is much more important unless you want to be a designer but I digress.

The next phase of camp is learning .NET which is the framework of your web applications. This was a little more difficult for me to grasp. I had to dedicate the entire day (12+ hours a day) to learn the material and do the homework. But hey that’s what you are signing up for right?!

The final phase was group and individual projects. This was my favorite part because it was truly amazing to work with my peers; just a few weeks prior we had no idea how to even begin building out web applications and now we were operating like developers on a team. Also, the instructors were constantly coming by to offer assistance if we ran into issues. Instead of just solving the problems they teach you how to dissect the problem and rectify it. This is the way I like to learn – by doing, by trial and error, and by figuring out how to figure it out. The ability to problem solve is invaluable. Also in this phase, you learn source control (allows you to share your code with teammates and open source projects) such as how to use TFS and I taught myself how to use GitHub. I wish this had been introduced at the beginning of our troop. From my understanding, it will be taught at the beginning of the class for future students.

Overall, I feel confident with the skills I gained from attending Coder Camps. I started applying for jobs during the last two weeks of the course and had two job offers within a month. Caution: Do not come expecting that, come expecting to learn how to program and the job offers will come when they come. If you are someone who feels unfulfilled at your current job and have secretly always wanted to be a software developer, then a development bootcamp is for you. Coder Camps just so happened to be my program of choice. Whichever one you decide – good luck, work hard, ask questions and I know you will be pleased with the results.

They do not teach you Comp Sci theory in 9 weeks (I don’t think it’s possible) but they do teach you how to program. For me I tried for a whole year before coming to camp and could never get past the basics. Coder Camps pushes you through that. They teach you how to teach yourself, and how to learn a programming language, which is powerful. More powerful than just memorizing syntax of one language.