Coding Bootcamp Praha

Before joining the Coding Bootcamp Praha, I worked as an account manager in a marketing agency for three years and before as a marketing assistant. After 8 years in the industry I was feeling bit depressed and needed a change in my professional life.

In the beginning I felt nervous about getting back to a classroom into an intense programme for 12 weeks. I had read and heard a lot about the intensity of the programme and how demanding it could be, especially as I didn’t have any science background. Despite all, I am convinced that applying for the Coding Bootcamp Praha from the professional perspective the best thing that happened to me since I left school.

It was a great and challenging experience. I have started with my studies already few weeks before the programme began by studying the online resources, which Coding Bootcamp Praha provides to the students. Within the 12 weeks in the classroom I learned all the different steps of building a website - front-end, back-end, and working with the database. They use many creative methods to learn you how to code. Everything what we have learnt is clearly structured on their online platform and is available for the students and graduates even after the programme ends.

Now I feel I can work for lots of different companies and it was rather quick for me to find a job in the field. When I look back at myself struggling in the marketing world few years ago, I am so happy that I made the decision to apply for the Coding Bootcamp Praha. 

The programme was well worth it as it doesn't just teach you how to code, it teaches you how to think and to actually be able to solve a problem. The next step is learning how to build a full-stack website, backend and frontend, and how to go through the full web development cycle. 

I had a terrific experience at Coding Bootcamp Praha, never learn so much in such a short time. The atmosphere is super friendly and yet very professional. The teaching staff is dedicated, passionate and experienced. 

My most important takeaway from my time in Prague is that there is a way of learning, I feel that I can quickly learn any programming language. In my current job as a junior JavaScript dev I really appreciate that a lot because I keep learning new concepts every day (and I love it :-) )

I can wholeheartedly recommend the programme to anyone who wants to switch into web development. 

Really grateful to the entire Data4You Team!

I have been interested in coding for a long time but I could never manage the time or the patience to teach myself after regular work hours. I tried several online courses but it never felt like I can actually build something myself. I googled around for other options of learning and came across coding bootcamps. I did my research and chose Coding Bootcamp Praha, mainly because I wanted to learn full stack web development and many other programmes only teach front end with a bit of - mainly ready-made for you - back end. Besides the curriculum, I also really wanted to study in Prague :) I truly enjoyed my stay and made a massive progress in these 12 weeks. I am now working as a backend developer and despite I need to keep on learning every day, the bootcamp got me ready for the job. What I also like is that I keep in touch with the alumni through alumni events that are organised as it helps me meet new people. Thx guys!

Coding Bootcamp Praha enables you to switch careers into web development & despite I was not sure if I can make it in the beginning, I am so happy that all the hard work and dedication paid off for me. My advice for anyone who is applying:

- Be ready to work hard. There is no magic formula - the more you study and think about stuff, the better you get.

- Don't stress yourself if you cannot understand every little detail immediatelly. The instructors will keep telling you that it is a part of the process, so trust them, do the work and you will get there.

- Use the career support. I got my job through their partner organisation and currently work as a Javascript developer.

- Work with others. Study together with the other students after the classes and on weekends. You will have access to the bootcamp office at all times, thus make use of it. Also it really helps when you motivate each other when things get complex.

- Do the pre-bootcamp preparation. I underestimated this a bit and I had to work extra hard in the first weeks despite I had plenty of time before. Be smarter ;-)

I took part in the winter batch of 2017. I had some previous coding experience, several years ago, and some concepts were familiar to me. The course goes through multiple technologies such as HTML,CSS,PHP,Javascript and MySQL. The difficulty is rising as weeks go by, so it's absolutely necessary to put quite a time by yourself and study away from the classroom.

The instructors were extremely helpful to assist after the class was over or even early in the morning before class.Every instructor is proficient in his own subject and you should try to get as much as you can from them. There is lots of practice in class. Most of the times a new subject would be introduced and afterwards there were exercises which we had to do on our own, and then check with the solution of the teacher.

The only negative thing I can think of is that around the 6th or 7th week the material got very hard and at first it seemed impossible to grasp it. Nevertheless with more practice in class,back home and with the introduction of a framework things started to make sense.

Overall I'm very pleased from the Bootcamp as I have learnt a lot, enjoyed the wonderful city of Prague , and was privileged to meet wonderful people.

It was the best educational investment of my life. You will learn a ton. If you are considering it but on the fence, just do it.

From the general standpoint, I got much more value from the bootcamp than I did from my 4 year degree at university.

Before, I spent the better part of a year coding on my own and evaluating bootcamps. I wanted to learn full stack Javascript. I hemmed and hawed and couldn't decide because I was too afraid of writing a big check to some fly-by-night operation and getting ripped off.

I contacted several alums from the bootcamp. They all gave it a resounding endorsement (and they were all employed as software developers). So I settled in because it seemed like the best option to get the skills I wanted. I was not disappointed.

Here's why:

It is intensely practical.

This is not to suggest that you get no theory, you do. But the bulk of the program is about writing code. So you spend a lot of time and energy and focus writing code. Everything in the environment is a conspiracy to get you writing code.

If you love to build things, the bootcamp gives you lots of opportunities to do it while in the program and equips you to make great stuff as soon as you graduate. Practicality wins.

They have thought a lot about how to teach.

The founders and team have put a lot of thought into how to teach tech. It isn't some disorganized mess of pre-recorded tutorial modules that you can find online.

There is a structure and, even though it isn't always clear why you're doing a particular part while you're in it, you quickly discover that the process builds a tree of understanding. You'll learn the problem about some approach to development, struggle with it in vanilla JS, and only then get the library or framework that was built to resolve that problem.

The early part of the program uses test-driven development to help you get used to reading tests and inferring implementation from a desired functionality. I loved this approach.

After you struggle with the tests, the discovery of an answer feels like a grand, life-altering insight. I'm convinced this trial-and-error helps you learn and remember things more deeply than lecture, reading, or a repeat-after-me video tutorial.  

The instructors are wizards.

You are not taught by recent grads, but by legit software engineers who really know their stuff. The environment is ultra-smart. It helps you up your game. I didn't want to leave at the end because I knew I would miss spending so much time around such smart people. My instructors were both great programmers and great people. I will miss learning from them.

The founders actually care about the business.

The two founders are still intimately involved in the business. You can feel in the environment that the business has their attention and that they're improving it. I have huge respect for them both, especially when I saw that the founders was actually sitting in the room on our final day when we all gave feedback about the program. When it comes to 'caring for your students', talk is cheap. Jana's presence shows a true investment of time and attention that are the hallmarks of a dedicated entrepreneur.

The tech stack is in demand.

PHP and Javascript is huge on the market right now. There were tons of jobs available after graduation. 

You make friends with smart people.

Going for fullstack also pre-selects smart people. Your peers will be people from finance, entrepreneurship, academia, or even software developers looking to update their skills. Hanging out with smart friends = you getting smarter. You'll end the program with a great group of friends.

It works.

If you do the work, the process works wondefully.

The graduation and placement stats speak for themselves and the bootcamp has led the way in transparency in results.

My own experience: it isn't even a month since I graduated and I already landed an awesome full stack engineering job at an early-stage startup, which is exactly what I wanted when I signed up!

Before we begin: This is an honest, objective account of my experience at CBP, or DATA4YOU, in their April 2017 term. Just a quick note, I did not complete the course as I left halfway through after digesting my first 6 weeks experience and thinking hard about whether I'd continue. 

Why did I choose Coding Bootcamp Praha?
Over the last 2-3 years, I've created and run my own eCommerce stores, as well as successfully consulted in the field of digital marketing. The success of my previous ventures allowed me the freedom to live and work remotely and provided me with enough time to further develop my skills in any area I saw fit. Being involved in online business & digital marketing sparked my interest in all things tech and I felt that learning to code would seriously enhance my ability to perform in this field. So that's when I decided to look for a coding Bootcamp and take it to the next level. 

I chose Coding Bootcamp Praha (Data4you) because: 

Location: Prague was absolutely STUNNING, I felt like I was living in a fairytale city from a Disney movie. For my first experience in Europe, I honestly could not have been happier about spending 2 months in Prague. 

Price: As most the students remarked, we were all persuaded to join the boot camp as it was so affordable and based in a great location.

Reviews: While the sample size for reviews was VERY small (less than 5), they were all positive and so I felt just confident enough to take this course seriously. Looking back now, I wish I had listened to my intuition more seriously.

What were my goals? 
From speaking to my classmate I found out that most people were either trying to get into their first career or transition into a new one. This was not why I was here, I planned to learn enough during the Bootcamp to merge my current skills with my newly learned skills in web development. 

What do I think of the instructors?
The instructors were all good people, I enjoyed being around them and felt comfortable in the class. The main issue I had with them is that at times I felt they were unwilling to change/improve the structure of the course, and at times seemed unconcerned with the success of their students:

1. They prefaced the class with the comment "There is no such thing as a stupid question" but on one occasion I saw one of the instructors get very upset with a student who was apparently 'not asking the right questions' and asked him to stop interrupting the class, which I thought was very unfair. 
2. When spending time with the students outside of class there was a growing unrest in the students of the course, we were beginning to be very unhappy with the curriculum of the course. We voiced this on several occasions to different instructors and despite them acknowledging our concerns, no action was taken to improve the course delivery/curriculum.

The main issue: the curriculum & delivery.
The primary issue I had with the course was not the instructors themselves but the quality of the curriculum and the delivery methods. The structure of the curriculum is stated to be the following on their website:

• 9:00 - Morning Class: Challenges of the day are introduced by the instructor through lectures, activities, and discussions

• 11:00 - Live-coding Game: how to write better code, Challenges of the day on practical examples that students improve

• 12:00 - Lunch

• 13:00 - Simulated Work Environment: Individuals and group work on the challenges and portfolio projects in collaboration with our instructor

• 15:00 - Individual Progress Evaluations: Personal discussions between the student and the instructor who supports the student with specific recommendations

• 17:00 - Best Practices: Wrapping-up the day as a group, presenting accomplishments

This was what all the students were expecting from the course and much unrest grew when we were instead spending 8 hours a day watching our instructors point things out on a projector. Occasionally we'd code in the actual class, but the majority of the time it would be in a rushed 30 minutes where the instructor would FLY through the code at a pace not one of the students could keep up with. 

My ideal solution for this would have been coding MUCH more than we were, working on more projects, and spending less time in front of the projector. 

How was my experience?
I loved being in the city of Prague, it was a dream come true and really instilled me with a great desire to see more of Europe. In the beginning of the class, I was very hopeful about the end result, and I was happy with the students we were studying with. We all became good friends and spent a lot of time together inside and outside of the class, and so we became very comfortable with each other and had strong mutual trust.

• The first week or two of the class was slow but my peers and I were satisfied because we had been told things would get harder as the course progressed, at this point, we still had a lot of patience and were excited to learn more.
• By weeks 3-4 the sentiment of the class began to shift, many students felt the quality of the course and its instructors was lower than they had hoped. Several debates between the students took place outside of the class in bars/restaurants in weeks 3-4. Overall, the mood started to shift and we all agreed we'd have to voice our concerns in class in order to try and steer the rest of the course in a direction that would give us all the best outcome. So, we began voicing our opinions in class as a group and privately to instructors.
• By weeks 4-6 my peers and I became more agitated and disappointed by the class. Many jokes were passed around that we could have learned more from free coding resources online or if we did not attend class and instead coded together on projects outside of class. 
• By the halfway point I had lost faith in the quality of CBP and felt that I could better spend the 40 hours weekly on self-learning, I usually always self-learned subjects in the past and have had good results doing so. By this point, I had also started to get sick on a regular basis because I was studying 40 hours a week at CBP and working 30-40 hours per week outside of class, which I think started to impact my health. Overall, I felt that the increasing frustration of myself & my class mates, our lack of hope that the course would improve, and my health condition, were enough reasons to cease attending.

My biggest regret: their refund policy...
My biggest regret was that I didn't ask more about their refund policy before paying to attend the class. By the time week, 6 came round, myself and several other students were expressing great interest in obtaining refunds. However, we all read more about the refund policy and realized we most likely would not receive any refunds if we asked. I know for a fact that a big reason why many of the students chose to finish the entire course was that they were not able to get refunds + they had already paid for 3 months of accommodation. Despite being deeply unhappy with the course, they felt trapped. 

As for myself, I was lucky enough to have the freedom to leave if I saw fit, and so I stopped attending the course. After taking some days out and time to recover from my illness I emailed the Data4You team and expressed my reasons for leaving and asked them if a refund would be possible. I still had one installment to pay them and asked at the very least if they would refund that, to which they told me they would report me to the authorities if I did not pay for the remainder of a course I would not attend. Overall, my biggest regret is that we did not read the refund policy more clearly & that the students who also wanted refunds did not band together and press for this to happen. 

Advice for future students:
If you're REALLY serious about attending a coding Bootcamp, I would strongly recommend against attending CBP/Data4You. They are a very new Bootcamp and have not worked out bugs in their curriculum. I'm certain that if they do not improve the overall quality of the course, they'll certainly be out of business very soon. I know from some of my friends that their experience in other Bootcamps was nothing like mine at CBP, there are certainly other much better investments out there. Be careful, take your time, and do your research...you will find the right class for you! ;)

Coding Bootcamp Praha or Data4You is a 12 week basic coding class based in Prague, Czech Republic. They claim to "prepare you for a career in web development" in 12 weeks. They are one of many web development intensives designed to help someone transition into a career in tech. I will share my honest review about my experience with the most recent cohort.

Disclaimer: I decided to leave after 8 weeks into the course.

I am reviewing this class using Class Central's open-source review template to provide as much insight and value as I can to anyone considering attending this course.

Background Information

Why did I choose to attend this course?

I am an online marketer by trade and have been for the past five years. I have built a solid business that has helped me become location independent so I have been diversifying my interests into other industries and self-educating to continually improve myself. Since I have been working with software companies I have had a growing interest in tech and particularly web development because I enjoy the idea of being able to solve problems through creating useful apps and digital products. This interest has lead me down a path of self-study since 2015. After experiencing a plateau in my progress I decided the best course of action was to enroll in a coding bootcamp that would help me bridge the gap and shorten the learning curve.

I chose this course for the following reasons:

• It was located in Prague, CR a beautiful city that's cost friendly to live in.

• The course's price itself was also the most inexpensive out of all of the other ones I researched.

• The small collection of reviews were positive.

• I contacted some alumni that I found on LinkedIn and they gave positive feedback (I will address this later on).

What were my goals?

Though most people want to immediately get a job as a junior web developer I wanted to get enough experience where I could build an app end-to-end so I could solve my own technical challenges in my own business and/or fully build a prototype if I had an idea for an application. I wanted to use the program to push me past the basics and help me really develop the confidence to build a project.

History of the class

The class is organized and run by {redacted due to GDPR claims}. The course has only been around for about a year and they had previously "graduated" two cohorts of students before ours. It was mentioned at the course by an instructor that they originally intended the class to be for kids but after assessing the demand they decided to create a camp more suited towards those looking to change careers. Neither of the founders have any experience in web development nor do they have any startup experience.

Instructors

On their website, they advertise that including the two co-founders they have eight instructors during the course. This is incredibly misleading information. They only have one instructor a day, and for my cohort, they rotated between four instructors. One of them is still a student who works in their office and the rest are contractors. If we're talking about competency they definitely were skilled enough to teach the subjects they were covering but they lacked the proper mentality to be instructors. To be fair, two of the four instructors actually cared about the development of the students and consistently asked for feedback on what we thought we needed to cover and I got a lot of value from one of the instructors who would start the class by always asking everyone how confident we were about the topic we were covering. The issue with the class was the format and founders, not the instructors.

My Background / skills entering the program

As I mentioned before, I started self-learning since 2015. I finished 90% of the freecodecamp curriculum amongst taking other online classes from:

• Udacity
• CodeCademy
• CodeSchool
• WatchAndCode

Just to name a few notable ones. I have a very solid grasp of the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL. I’ve built a couple frontend projects before and I have also used a couple APIs for small projects while I was taking FreeCodeCamp’s curriculum. I’ve read the documentation on some JS frameworks like Angular and React and I’ve dabbled with a couple Ruby on Rails tutorials but I’ve never built an application end-to-end. I sold my first company three years ago and since then I’ve managed to build multiple profitable e-commerce stores. Currently, I focus my time consulting companies on their online marketing efforts specializing in conversion rate optimization. My clients would say that I’m dependable and very honest about what I can and cannot do.

The Course

Daily Schedule

The course is split up into 12 weeks. On their website they claim that the typical day is structured like this:

• 9:00 - Morning Class: Challenges of the day are introduced by the instructor through lectures, activities, and discussions

• 11:00 - Live-coding Game: how to write better code, Challenges of the day on practical examples that students improve

• 12:00 - Lunch

• 13:00 - Simulated Work Environment: Individuals and group work on the challenges and portfolio projects in collaboration with our instructor

• 15:00 - Individual Progress Evaluations: Personal discussions between the student and the instructor who supports the student with specific recommendations

• 17:00 - Best Practices: Wrapping-up the day as a group, presenting accomplishments

If this was the typical day I believe my experience would’ve been very different but the typical days actually looks something more like this:

• 9:30 - Morning Class: Everyone gets into class more or less around this time.

• 10:00 - 12:00: We talk about the day’s topic through the instructor sharing slides

• 12:00 - 13:00 - Lunch

• 13:00 - 17:00 - Watch slides and the instructor go through coding examples

On a typical day after the third week, if 10/16 of the students were left after 14:00 I would be impressed. There are some varying degrees of this of course where they would introduce a project half an hour before we left or “practice” the concepts which were taken directly off of other sites. But for the most part, the teaching format is very similar to what you would experience in elementary school.

Curriculum

The "advertised" curriculum had me initially excited about the course. On the homepage, they claim to cover everything from the basics of front-end to learning object-oriented programming, team collaboration tools like git, and server side scripting. During my initial interview, the founder told me that we would be focusing on using PHP and the framework Laravel to build projects. During my 8 weeks of attendance, we did not cover any Laravel.

My experience

The city of Prague is amazing, the price is reasonable (compared to other camps) and the environment of being around other students who wanted to learn was nice. Most of my bad experience stemmed from the founders. Since neither of them knows how to code the format of the course is extremely ineffective. You do not spend nearly enough time coding or working on projects. The ​{redacted due to GDPR claims} founder especially does not take constructive criticism well. The founder is extremely condescending and sensitive when it comes to feedback. The founder's actions made it extremely difficult for any of the students to express themselves or come to them about any issues they were facing. The founder has passive aggressive tendencies that turned a lot of the students off immediately.

My biggest complaint is that the said founder told me during the interview process that their acceptance process was rigorous to weed out those who didn’t seem qualified to participate in the class. I wish I knew that they didn’t care about who they accepted into the class or that they didn’t know how to code. I am not against a class designed to teach someone the absolute basics but for someone who has spent two years self-learning this was a complete waste of time for me. I tried to remain optimistic but after a direct conflict that occurred with me and the founder I decided that I did not want to be in a hostile environment. Most people do not learn web development through powerpoint presentations. Day one it was apparent that 90% of the course had never written a line of code before. There were massive gaps in knowledge. The course’s goal is enrollment and payment, not student development or education.

Can you get a job immediately after graduation?

No, I kept in close contacts with many of the students that became close associates. Many of the students have applied to multiple junior level jobs and internships with no success. Some of them are even applying to other bootcamps. Their only “Job Assistance” was inviting a local recruiter to one of the classes to talk about his own startup that places developers with local startups. Many of the previous graduates now “intern” for the bootcamp. They pretty much work for free on some of their internal projects and are encouraged to leave positive reviews for the course.

Conclusion

Coding Bootcamp Praha or Data4You is a new bootcamp started by non-developers trying to take advantage of the recent hype of coding bootcamps. Even though their price tag is attractive if you are looking for a positive learning environment you will not find one here. The city in which it’s located in is the best part about the bootcamp. I do not see this course being around for long, if you are considering attending this bootcamp I would spend a little extra money and look elsewhere. I have spoken to many friends who attended other bootcamps and their experiences were completely different from mine so I believe it’s not all bootcamps that are bad, just the ones where their focus is on making money like this one.

If you want any additional information about the course please feel free to contact me directly at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/realtimkim/

I had quite extensive experience before the bootcamp of learning through many various online environments - or at least that's what I thought :)) but once i arrived i realized how much more is there to learn! its been an intense time, a lot of tasks and projects but i always got help whenever i got stuck. Especially i enjoyed the group work where i learnt how to start developing a complex project from scratch. I had many fantastic discussions with the instructors, which inspired me tons. I am now working for a web dev agency as a php developer and i am really grateful that the bootcamp empowered me to do that!

Although I was a complete beginner in coding, the instructors were gentle and always welcomed any questions. Since the students had similar professional experience and the ambition to change their careers, we inspired and motivated each other a lot. The environment was very international and diverse, it was really fascinating to share our life experience and ideas. The progress in these three months was huge. I'm confidently participating in some coding projects now. The moment I feel my progress the most was the moment I realized that I started to understand programming jokes.