Coder Foundry

Great bootcamp. The projects were incredibly valuable and the way they teach you to leverage them in interviews made a huge difference in my interview process. The staff are all senior-level developers with years of experience, no TAs or recent grads teaching courses. C# and .NET are awesome tools but very complex and I appreciated having skilled developers teaching us how to use them correctly. I HIGHLY recommend coming into this bootcamp with a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as these are really easy to teach yourself and will allow you to focus more on learning the ins and outs of C#/.NET rather than struggling with the basics. I had self-studied HTML/CSS/JS for about 6 months using some Udemy courses prior to starting and it definitely made my life easier when I got to the bootcamp because having a foundation in JavaScript made it easier to transition to C# and let me focus more on learning how .NET worked. Overall I'd say this is the best bootcamp out there!

I held off from writing this review until I got my first job. I attended the April-June 2020 cohort. They don't give public rankings but I was told at one point that I was one of the top 2 students of my cohort. The benefits of that were getting to do interview practice with Bobby, the founder. That only happened twice, and instead of doing interview practice every week we skipped it for the last 4-5 weeks.

The good: Jason and Drew were the instructors for the course. They're both very approachable and knowledgable. I learned a lot from them. The portfolio you build is pretty good, if you put in the work. If you fall behind or write crap code that works but is obviously the wrong way of doing it, you won't have time to fix it and the instructors won't have time to hold your hand through the entire process. Which is a good thing in some ways. You won't have someone holding your hand once you get a job, you need to be able to do your own research and meet deadlines. That being said. You need to a moderate amount of knowledge and a lot of extra time to meet the deadlines for coursework. So in the positive, you get a pretty stellar portfolio and learn a lot of relevant information in 12 weeks.

The bad: The biggest problem I had during the course was they let anyone attend. The tests they have you do before accepting you are a complete joke. We had people in the cohort who didn't know what HTML and Javascript were. A decent amount dropped from the course in the first couple weeks but not before severely slowing the class down. By the 4th week we were a full week behind. This continued to be a problem as the coursework gets harder by the day and people who were behind face an increasingly difficult battle of catching up. To put that into context, we started with 25 students and only 12 were at our graduation.

The bad after graduation: Natosha and Mary-Hannah are the recruiters for getting into the bootcamp and they're also the job placement advisors. So basically, they're stretched way too thin to be effective. I'm sure having to choose between recruiting new students which earns revenue and helping alumni find jobs is a pretty easy choice. I had a couple messages never get responded to only to hear back a week later about a job they were presenting me to. After a couple months I knew I was really on my own and put all my efforts into job hunting on my own. Due to Covid-19 it took me 7 months to find a job after graduating. Out of being told I was an amazing candidate and I was being presented to an employer that had hired CF grads in the past a couple dozen times, I heard back from only 1 employer. They ended up hiring one of the weaker candidates in our class, who knew nothing coming in and barely graduated. Their tech stack was about 15 years old so it's probably a blessing I didn't land that position. However, I probably had to apply to about 300 jobs before I found employment. Getting a job as a junior dev is probably the hardest thing I've ever done. Getting flooded with rejection emails takes a toll on your sanity after a while.

Looking back: Coder Foundry definitely helped me but I would not do it again. For the amount of money you pay, you should be getting support from more people. if you decide to attend, I highly recommend knowing moderate levels of logic in at least javascript and being extremely comfortable working in html and css. Also know that regardless of what they tell you, getting a job after graduating is going to be very difficult and they probably won't have time to help you.

I came into the course with passing knowledge of front end web development, but it was nothing near the level of what is taught in the course. This is a boot camp not a laid back college style class. You will be pushed, you will wonder if you're going to make it, and in week 12 I looked back at my week 1 code and wonder how I ever wrote code that rough.

Jason / Antonio (main instructors) and Greg (TA) are both knowledgeable and, more importantly, approachable. In addition to teaching the requirements they also make themselves available to help with any tangents a student might go on.

While there are no group projects or group work collaboration between students is encouraged. Students who are further along are encouraged to assist other students, this both saves instruction time and reinforces the knowledge of the student doing the teaching.

I can't express how amazing this bootcamp is. After having a terrible experience with another program, I felt that I would never be able to successfully pursue this type of career, but Coder Foundry changed that for me. The staff here is so friendly and inviting, and they truly care about your success. Their support goes far beyond just teaching the cirriculum here, as they spend so much time focusing on developing your career and finding placement for you. I wasn't even able to complete the course because they found a position for me! They really went above and beyond to ensure that I got hired. They believe in what they are doing and will push just as hard as you do for your success. I won't lie, it is not an easy feat, and it certainly isn't for everyone, but if you put in the effort and truly dedicate yourself, wonderful things will happen. Coder Foundry can make dreams come true!

Antonio was a great instructor for this one-week boot camp on Xamarin Mobile Development.

This was my first experience with CoderFoundry and first Mobile Development training and I was quite impressed.  The instructor is well educated and/or experienced in Xamarin Mobile Development and the surrounding technologies including MVC and WebApi.  The class was all hands on, no lectures and taking notes.  Detail reference material was handed out and was very helpful.  All development projects were real-world sample projects that we worked with and added features to it, expanded it's abilities or tweaked the UI.

As with any leading-edge technology training, we had our fair share of issues that slowed or delayed training, but nothing too serious.  Most of these issues were caused by NuGet package updates that were unplanned since the previous month when this course was taught.  Well, these issues are occurrences in .Net developer’s everyday life and you need to know how to understand or debug the problem, research and update the correct NuGet packages.

Being a seasoned Microsoft .Net developer, I had hoped for more in-depth coverage of Xamarin Forms and all its controls, but to attract a broader range of students with different experience levels, the class also included training/review in WebAPI and SQL to access the data for the mobile app.  Other classes within an hour and a half drive offer the same similar curriculum.  Overall the class covered a good basis to begin Xamarin Mobile development to grow from.

My employer had an existing Xamarin iOS application that I need to take over maintenance and development, Antonio also helped me learn how to configure my Mac and Visual Studio on my laptop to work together.  THIS was a great help.

I would recommend this class to any Mid-Level or Sr. Level developer that is needing to or wanting to expand their development onto mobile devices. 

To the reader,

Please note that your opinion may very well differ from my own (the writer) and this is only to help give insight as to if Coder Foundry is the right place for you.

 

I stumbled upon Coder Foundry while I was looking for a career path that was right for me. While I was initially nervous about taking the course, I decided that I should go ahead and try it out as I had two weeks to get my money back. Now that I have finished the Couse, I somewhat wish I had gotten my money back. Of the many things that were stated throughout the course; the two things that stood out to me the most were, "We will help you find a job." and "No, you don't need a degree to get a job." Well, I sit here now writing this review to say that over the past several months, I have adamantly applied and followed up with over 40 companies in the North Carolina area as well as spoken with around 15+ recruiters who have all given me a similar answer as to why I was NOT being looked at or chosen for the position. That answer was, almost always one of two; "You don't have a degree and we can't hire anyone without a degree." (and yes, HR reps said that even though they are to treat everyone as equal on their desk.) and "You don't have enough experience, have you considered getting a degree?" Most of the positions I applied to were entry level requiring anywhere from 1-5 years of experience, with or without a degree (meaning a degree was not required). I have now decided to further my education in computer science by getting a degree and taking part in WBL (work-based learning).

As far as Coder Foundry is concerned, they helped me get three interviews while I was an attending student, and zero interviews after I graduated. I managed to get around five over the phone interviews of which only one seemed promising. There liaison has not contacted me to help me with finding a job nor with any information about companies that may be hiring.

The instructors are knowledgeable but not overly helpful, as the most of my questions were meet with “Have you googled it?” or “Keep looking.” and only where finally answered (after multiple times asking the same question in different ways) in what seemed to be you should know that already manner.

The curriculum overall was laid out in a nice fashion but was not executed in a timely manner due to the main instructor not being in class on a few occasions, granted things do come up in life that we need to take care of. And after having five different people teach the class, there is no consistency in the teaching style nor information being taught. Keeping in mind that it only covers .NET and Microsoft’s codebase, they did manage to cover all the basics, but there was a lack of fundamentals. I recommend prior knowledge of any languages such as Microsoft VB, java, or even python.

 

I should also mention that it is labeled as a 12-week course. With that in mind, I was told that I would not be receiving my certificate of completion because the instructor had to approve of and sign off on our work. That took three more weeks of extra time and money to appease the instructor. This made me very upset as every time I fixed something and said this is done now, the instructor would say hey you need to make this a different color and change this icon because it will look better. All of that for a single piece of paper saying that I have completed a 672 hour course (even though I had accumulated more that 672 hours of work because of the ‘three week extension’ for not having it done the way the instructor wanted it to be; this is also why I list my graduation to be in May as opposed to April when the class actually graduated).

 

All in all, if you have made it this far, I feel I can not recommend this course to others because of the cost and the way I was treated as well as the so called ‘services’ that I never received. I gained more life experience than I did knowledge of programming.

 

To prospective students, I wish you much luck and hope that this opinion has helped you to make your decision.