Epicodus

TL;DR: It was cheap, I had a lot of fun, learned a ton, made friends, am now making more money than I ever have, and my career prospects are good. But I'm still salty about some stuff!

The best parts:

In comparison to most of the bootcamps, Epicodus is dead cheap. I paid ~$8000 for four months of full-time coursework, career support, and an internship. 

Yes, the curriculum is available for free, and despite having instructors it is more or less self-directed, but the pair-programming model means that you will actually be forced to engage every day, all day long, with other people. This will keep you focused, reinforce your learning, and let you enter the field with a bunch of cool contacts and/or friends. 

Pair programming is really fun if you are the person for it. If you do not want to pair program, please don't go to Epicodus. Most of my bad experiences in the first half of the course were with people who didn't actually want to pair program. Guess what? All those people ended up dropping out, so it was a waste of their money as well as my patience. 

Once you are done with the coursework, you will be matched with an internship company. Some of these internships are paid, and many people were hired once the internship was done. Being able to move right into an internship with only a couple months experience is worth $8000 by itself (seriously, if you're not in a Computer Science college program, internships are almost as hard to find as actual dev jobs). 

The focus on getting a job - which includes stuff that can feel patronizing, like setting up LinkedIn - is actually super helpful. Throughout the program, you will be expected to work on your job search. By the time you are done, you've set up a portfolio, curated your Professional Internet Presence, and developed good job search hygiene. After the program ends, career services will send you actually helpful job listings with companies who want to work with new devs, and will meet with you as much as you want to help you stay focused and keep your morale up.

The downsides of the program for me were:

The quality of instructors. All were very nice but some were good coders and some had no idea what they were doing because they were fresh Epicodus grads who couldn't find dev jobs (no shade, it's just true; I could easily have been one of them).

The curriculum is not quite as good as other freely-available coding resources. I think they actually do a great job giving an overview of coding, but some of the material is repetitive and some of it is just not as up to date or clear as it could be. You will have to supplement a lot with FreeCodeCamp and Youtube tutorials (good prep for being a dev, honestly).

My internship. I got royally frenched in this regard, because I was matched with a company that barely existed, did not have access to mentor devs, and which was known to Epicodus to be a bad internship with poor outcomes. I chose to be positive and stay and attempted to make the best of a bad situation, but considering that other people ended up with jobs out of their internships, I feel that my career was negatively impacted in a way that could have been mitigated by Epicodus being transparent about past interns' experiences.

Anyways, if you read this far you're probably a conscientious student, ruggedly beautiful, and will make a good programmer. If you want to know more, you can message me on LinkedIn and I will try to answer your questions.

I came into this bootcamp with a passion for coding and several years of self-taught basic front end experience, and was getting into PHP which is why I chose the PHP and Drupal track. The fast-paced environment of the course really helped accelerate my skills quickly and while some of the homework and exercises were definitely challenging, it really helped me to progress and learn so much. The biggest and most useful tool of the entire experience however ended up actually being my peers. My classmates had varied backgrounds but everyone was very motivated and worked really hard to figure out problems, and on top of that everyone worked well together and shared knowledge so we all grew as a group.

Our instructor did not have much knowledge unfortunately and was not present most of the time so the learning was VERY self-directed, when there were issues or errors in the curriculum he did not have the answers, but luckily our class as a group would come together to figure things out and help each other. The pair programming was very rewarding and while I didn't love every framework that we worked on, I was very glad to try so many different ones and to really deepen my knowledge of both Javascript and PHP. Coming out of this program, I got an internship at a great company and was lucky enough to be hired by that same company after the internship was over. I am very grateful for my time at this school and the learning opportunity it provided, as well as the lifelong colleagues, friends, and contacts I acquired through the classmates in my program.

The only downside I would say is that this is definitely not for you if you are the sort of person who expects a class format where you are lectured at, where your teacher guides you, and you get a lot of outside instruction. This course and the pace of it best rewards those who are ready and willing to go out on their own, troubleshoot, and figure things out independently (which is really the best skill for an actual full-time job as a coder).

I attended  Epicodus' Intro to Programming course, as well as, the first five weeks of their full time program. On both occasions I was impressed by their community, curriculum, and staff. Epicodus has a strong sense of community that is fostered in all that they do. They strive to promote diversity and inclusion in their own curriculum and classroom, as well as in the tech community at large. 

The curriculum is rigorous, engaging, and well supported. The staff at Epicodus were there to support and assist me at every step in my coding journey, including when I decided that I didn't want to pursue programming after all. Not only did they honor their refund policy without hassle, they respected and supported my decision. 

Epicodus takes a unique approach to learning and it really works. They promote a growth mindset, focus on teaching you 'to think like a programmer', and they utilize pair programming. While pair programming is weird at first, the benefits of it become quickly apparent. If it is holding you back from enrolling, don't let it! It is immensely helpful and rewarding once you get the hang of it. 

Ultimately, I learned much more than coding at Epicodus. In just five weeks I came away with a solid understanding of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript; but I also learned how to be a professional in the tech industry and how to overcome obstacles. These skills are invaluable in tech. If Epicodus offered a web design course I would have joined it without question. If you are considering Epicodus, know that it really is a well rounded school that exceeds expectations. 

I took the C# / React track without having prior experience programming. Who would have known that within a year of signing up I would have a full time job in the field using the skills I developed at Epicodus. 

The course content flies by, and it can be a little discouraging when you don't understand a concept. That being said the support of my classmates and teachers was invaluable. Epicodus encourages students to learn how to solve problems collaboratively and ideally without the help of a teacher because it tries to mimic what working world of a developer will be like. Personally I found this a pain point, but it pushed me to grow and step outside my comfort zone. Looking back I realize how much more I learned by working with a pair and solving problems with my classmates. I learned much more much faster following this paradigm.

Perhaps the most valuable experience Epicodus will give you is an internship with a local company. While you only work with the company for a few short weeks, it really opens your eyes to what professional developers do on a day to day basis - and you make good connections. I'm honestly not sure I would have attended Epicodus if I wasn't given an internship. In this field simply knowing how to do something isn't enough - you have to have a bit of experience you can talk about to prove yourself.

Epicodus gives you the tools and confidence to develop full stack applications - and this is very important after you graduate. You'll hear people say to never stop coding (until you get a job - at least that's what I did), and they are right. It took me roughly six months to find a job. During that time I relied on the skills I had developed at Epicodus to recognize more advanced development patterns, and start building apps that were more advanced than what the Epicodus curriculum taught. If you want to be successful it is imperative to remain curious, and to continue to play. A job will come, but you will need to work for it. 

All in all this was a great program that enabled me to change my life. It will be fun and challenging, but the dividends pay off immensely if you stick through. You will struggle, but you will also have made a network of fellow developers that will be more than happy to help you when you are stuck (and vice versa). At the end of the program it's hard to not feel a sense of accomplishment for both yourself and your classmates. I would 100% recommend Epicodus.

Before joining Epicodus, I made a market research about coding bootcamps in Seattle area, and Epicodus was one of the best options on the market with affordable pricing for 27-week intensive program, curriculum including front-end and back-end technologies as well as the opportunity to have internship experience after the course.

In Epicodus, I went from basic knowledge in programming to being able to write code in such widely used languages as C# and JavaScript. And by the end of the course I learned how to build complex web applications from the ground up using different programming tools. But most important, having 5 weeks of real world work experiences was worth the value of the course.

I would say that Epicodus is great start for prospective developers and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a career in tech industry.

I started Epicodus with a goal of learning enough about coding to create opportunities to change my career. Naturally, changing a career means that I need to know enough to get a job doing this. I can say upfront that Epicodus helped me accomplish that goal. I graduated from Epicodus in June of 2019 after having completed an internship and the company with which I did the internship offered me a position within the next few months.

I was brand new to coding when I started at Epicodus. I had never worked in the IT industry. The majority of my career I spent in the medical industry. Like other students with no coding experience, I found the subject of programming to be extremely challenging with plenty of days full of confusion. In fact, I had thoughts at multiple points that I wasn’t going to be able to do this. However, I am proof that having the right educational opportunity and support system as Epicodus provided makes it possible.

I really enjoyed the learning environment and especially that it was onsite. It’s very helpful to have the support of others around you who are going through the same learning curve and the same challenges. Epicodus structured our program by having us work directly with others in a project-based learning environment and this naturally encouraged the formation of relationships that were important for me to make it through this program. The pair programming was often very helpful because there are people with varying degrees of experience and this enabled those of us with less experience to learn from them. Additionally, I thought it was helpful learning to work in real-life scenarios where we as people sometimes agree and sometimes don’t. It definitely helped me learn how to get the work done regardless of the difference in perspectives and to deliver on time. I also really enjoyed the support of the instructors. They were very friendly and encouraging at all times. This goes a long way when you are having a rough day learning to code. They had enough experience to help get me on the right track when I got lost.

Throughout the week there were other real-world skills that we were learning including how to work with source control (Git), how to conduct a scrum stand-up and practice solving algorithms on a whiteboard. I needed to know something about all of these aspects in the various interviews I had. There are times when I would have liked a little more one-on-one coaching but there was a silver lining to that. I was increasingly getting used to the idea of relying on myself to find the answers. Each day as I go to work now, I find that the ability to seek out and find the answers yourself is a crucial skill to do this for a living.

After I graduated, I had no shortage of interview opportunities around the Seattle area. I applied to just about everything even when I wasn’t sure I was qualified for it. Epicodus helped me polish my resume and my LinkedIn as part of their career support. This was especially helpful since I was new to IT.

All said and done, Epicodus was a great value especially for the price and I would recommend this school to others who are looking to get their foot in the door. Key things that you need to know before you start this is that determination and grit are the most important things. There will be days when you are sure that this is too hard for you. It will be much easier to quit. The important thing to understand is that you only need to survive. You will learn enough to open doors if you don’t quit. If you’ve never done coding before, expect it will likely be the most challenging educational curriculum of your life. When you get your first job, it will feel worth it. And I want to say it’s very nice to make the most money I’ve ever made while having a career that allows me to be creative on a daily basis. I really appreciate the opportunity that Epicodus created for me.