Coder Foundry

I started my boot camp on September 30th of 2019 and overall have been thoroughly impressed. The entire staff I have worked with are nice and professional. The main instructor Jason, is extremely knowledgeable on the subject material and always goes above and beyond to explain things students may not be understanding. The director of education Antonio was a fantastic source of extra help to me and other students during our time here. The TA in the class at the time Greg pretty much worked non-stop helping students with individual problems they may be having on their projects. I really appreciated all of my teachers. The course is definitely hard work and while I did not pass I still feel I have enough tools to continue on and pursue my career in development.  

I want to say thank you, especially to the teacher, Jason. For not only his excellent knowledge of coding, but his ability to teach it to others. He is a very patient man, and an understanding mentor. My only con I could give of this course, if the amount of time is limited to 3 months. 3 months simply is not enough to learn everything he has to offer. If I could, I'd take the class again, but with a better mind because of him.

And the recruiter  Natosha is excellent. The ace in the hole for landing jobs.

After 12 weeks of going at it, this program is over. It's been a really good run and I'm sure there's still better things coming. The curriculum moved a little behind the original schedule, so we didn't cover Xamarin much (although we did look at it the last couple of days), but I suspect that was mostly because of the abnormally large size of my class. I've heard that the next class will be divided into two so that students can recieve more one-on-one help when needed. That said, the staff here are excellent people and help was always there when I asked for it. We're now in the job hunt, and I'd say it's going really well from my perspective.

I ultimately ended up signing on for the 3-month full stack course because I liked the idea of a project-based learning experience, and because I liked the dedicated staffing resources. No regrets. All the staff are super friendly. The educators all have a slightly different style of teaching (all quite good), but adhere to the same loose curriculum- I found the different angles of approach to the same problems to be very interesting and informative. Having done the project-based learning scheme, I can't imagine another way that would be as effective at teaching such a large quantity of information while simultaneously prepping for job interviews. There are weekly project reviews/mock interviews to ensure that, not only is your project proceeding as necessary, but that you're comfortable talking in a professional environment about all the technical decisions you've made.  From day one the staff let you know that the end goal is a new job as a software dev, and you can tell that everything in the curriculum is crafted with that end in mind.

So, should you attend Coder Foundry? I can't speak to everyone's situation- it is obviously a large monetary and time commitment. But it certainly worked out well for me, and I'd strongly recommend you consider it.

Out of my cohort, 2 people received a job offer and accepted them during class and as of this writing (and completion of the course), 2 more have received and accepted offers, myself included.

The course is broken down into 6 total projects, each varying amounts of time (1-4 weeks depending on project). The course builds on what you have already learned in class and continues from there. I recommend truly learning what is taught, not just trying to memorize it. Not only does it continue to show up in class, but it is vital in a job interview to be able to discuss in both technical and liamens terms what you have done during your projects and how it was accomplished. I enjoyed how the course was layed out. Very thoughtout in the building steps.

This course is tough and requires work to be completed after class on weekdays and many times on weekends as well. The instuctor often offered additional assistance during this time. As long as we had the drive to succeed and would put in the effort, the instructor setup times to provide one-on-one assistance.

After graduating from the course, I was then assisted by another person during the job placement time frame. As is told to you by Coder, within 90 days is the goal. I communicated with this person numerous times a week discussing current opportunities and potential ones. Once an offer was made, it was even more than I had initially asked for.

For those that believe they are capable of more and want to earn good money for their family, their hobbies, etc., I would recommend going to Coder Foundry. With the quality of the instructor, you will learn a lot. Also, with the placement opportunities both in class and out of class (and even farther into the future if you are a graduate) that Coder assist with, it will be that much easier to get a job.

My experience with Coder Foundry was excellent. The staff were caring and genuine. They went above and beyond to ensure that everyone in my group experienced success.

They trained me on how to ace the interview, and then they got me the interview. At that point it was up to me to demonstrate the skills I had learned in my time there, and through their service, I have landed an awesome job in the software development industry.

I would recommend this boot camp to anyone.

...for a year to write this. Not because I didn't know what to say, but because I needed to take a step back and decide how to best go about it. I see all the good reviews, and I'm genuinely happy to see all the success stories of other people. I'm sure that this process worked for them, and, given their circumstances, it was well worth it. My experience, however, was one of the worst of my life. It isn't about the program or how good or bad it is overall for me...it's about MY experience, along with the other 5 people in my "class". The talk up on this program was great; Natosha made everything sound wonderful. And at the beginning, things seemed great. But as time wore on, and we realized what was going on, things went swirling down the toilet in brilliant fashion. After being offered a transfer to the Charlotte, NC location (which my brother and I only took because it was 9 minutes from where we lived, instead of 2 hours away like the Kernersville class we drove to daily for 6 weeks without missing a single day), we started at our new location and on our FIRST day, the instructor wasn't present. Coder Foundry leadership apologized with pizza and promised to have someone there the next day to fill in. Antonio, our director of education, filled in for two days and those two days were the best days of class, because it felt like we actually learned something from someone who knew what they were talking about. Once our main instructor, Eric, finally arrived and took over teaching, everything went zooming downhill. We spent days teaching ourselves how to work through problems we encountered and hardly ever had any "learning" time that included lessons from our so called instructor. Whether he lacked the knowledge, or just stopped giving a crap, I'm not sure. Either way, our class suffered because of it. About 8 weeks into this $16,000 program, and after struggling to figure things out on our own, we were informed that Coder Foundry was filing for bankruptcy, and that, although there would be a "teach out", the school would be closing its doors for good after our class was over. When that news surfaced, the prior lack of leadership in the classroom dropped from chilling to sub-zero. We were left to finish projects that we had no instruction on by ourselves, while our instructor took phone interviews of his own. I understand the need to find a job on his part, due to the circumstances, but I don't understand management AND instructors leaving the 6 us of in the cold, regardless of what was going on. Before the course started, we were promised many things, including resumes, headshots, job placement, and support for our projects under the schools azure account until we graduated. the only satisfactory thing we received were the headshots, and we had to consistently bother Natosha for them. The resumes came in, 4 weeks after they were promised, and they were terrible. The job placement was an outright lie, and IF there was any truth behind it, the jobs in question would require us to move hundreds of miles away. But again, those jobs would have been welcomed, had the job placement aspect of the tuition be fulfilled. The school shut their azure account down, and all of our databases and project necessities were terminated without us being informed and given any time to find other avenues. No certificates were given for our participation and completion of the course, and our instructor didn't show most of the last week of class. My brother and I elected not to go to the last two days of class. What was the point? We had seen what they were about, and they didn't care about our needs. When we did finally get in touch with the founder, Bobby Davis, he offered to "teach" us for the day so we would have some know how. We obliged this offered, and sat through an all day meeting, telling him our issues and concerns about how the program played out, and then were asked a series of basic questions that played on how much the program "taught" us. We were flat out told, after requesting a refund on our tuition based on the grounds that we received NOTHING of what we were promised, that no refunds would be issued and there was nothing that could be done about it. Not one of the management team would step up and take responsibility for not checking in with us and seeing how the class was going, nor would they take responsibility for betraying our trust and not delivering the things they had promised. We paid a very large sum of money to better our future and begin a career, and all we received were bank-breaking student loans and turned backs when we brought our issues to the attention of the management of Coder Foundry. What may be worse than anything is the fact that, after bankruptcy, the "shutting down of the school", and all of their broken promises, the school stayed open (last I checked, they were still having open houses for new potential students) and I'm still paying my student loans with no new knowledge and nothing to show for the time I spent there. I can't speak for everyone in my class, but we have all agreed on multiple occasions that what we were promised and what we received are nowhere close to matching up. As previously stated, this is MY experience with this school. I came into this program with the highest hopes and a mind ready to learn, and left with a dejected morale and a huge debt. My recommendation doesn't matter in the slightest, because there is always going to be someone to come in and clean up the messes left behind by bad management. That's what a marketing director and/or assistant is for. So whatever representative for CF reads this, don't bother responding to this review unless you have $16,000 for both my brother and myself for reimbursement purposes.

Coder Foundry is very much a web development bootcamp on the Microsoft stack and it's the real deal. At my cohort the absolute most time spent in "lecture" was about 40 minutes per week, but usually closer to twenty. Most weeks there was no lecture at all. This is absolutely nothing like school. All the experience we got was hands on. The immersive course starts from basic HTML and Javascript exercises then quickly moves into one or two sites in HTML and CSS. We did a small C# desktop application to learn C# before moving into full website development with ASP.NET, HTML/CSS templates, Entity Framework, C#'s MVC framework and backed by a SQL database. All the websites are cloud hosted. From then on you continue to build website after website until the end of the course. The sites take two to three weeks to build and you do everything yourself. 

My instructor was phenominal. Some of the instructors are CF graduates, but don't let that worry you. They're not just the best graduates from their cohort, they also have years of industry experience and are super qualified to be teaching.

I landed a job before the end of my cohort. Coder Foundry helps you build a stellar resume and helps you a lot with finding jobs. Every Monday there's practice interviews so by the time you're in real interviews you're going to be super prepared. With the portfolio you'll have built by the end and all the skills and experience you've acquired from building the websites from the ground up, companies will be eager to sweep you up. 

You definitely get more than you put in. If you put in a lot of time, care, and effort into your projects you're going to come out as a very good developer. 

I went into Coder Foundry wanting to get a bigger end-to-end picture of full-stack web development utilizing MVC (Microsoft's preferred design pattern), and they definitely delivered. In a relatively short 18 weeks I was able to touch on a much wider array than I expected, and the skills and experience gained were enough to give me confidence in obtaining three job offers within a week of graduation, and a fourth which was not available for a few months that they lined up for me and I'm now enjoying as it turns out it was the perfect and much-more-suitable job than what I found. The instructors do not leave any question unanswered, and are willing to help even outside of "business hours". Prior students and current students collaborate during - and even after, e.g. TODAY I had five (co-owner included) huddle around on Slack messaging to help me tackle a little-more sophisticated coding question I had at my current job ... what a blessing, and even my employer was impressed by them!