Coding Temple

Before attending Coding Temple I was working in operations management. The pay was great but the job was mundaine and stressfull. I was attending school part-time and working towards getting a degree. A good friend of mine approached me and asked if I "wanted to become a software developer after taking a 10 week course at these new schools called coding bootcamps". I immediately told him that it was a scam and told him that it sounded too good to be true.

Intrested at what my friend told me I looked up coding bootcamps and found many testimonials online on various sites like youtube, reddit, various forums, and here at coursereport.com. I approached my friend and agreed to look around at various bootcamps, and that I would attend with him as long as we found one that we were both satisfied with. We ended up looking around at all the bootcamps with the best reviews and decided to contact them and visit. We headed downtown one day to visit various bootcamps and to make a decision if we found one that we wanted to attend. 

The decision was easy, Coding Temple was the one. Ripal was one of our first contacts and also the most informative person we talked to that entire day. We even got to meet Joe who was going to be the instructor of the class we were interested in taking. That same day we had the opportunity to talk with students that were there and they all had positive things to say about Coding Temple. I would reccomend anybody planning on attending a coding bootcamp to do this and see if they get the same first impression from any other bootcamp. 

Overall Experience (5 Stars) - Coding Temple is a very relaxed enviornment. Everyone there has a great attitude, and they all have an interest in your success. The school offers 2 classrooms where the instructors teach to the class and will answer any questions that you have. The teacher to student ratio is great, and allows you to have individual attention that no university or college will ever be able to offer. 

Instructor (5 Stars) - The instructor for my class was Joe. He was very personable and very knowledgeable. He has many years of working in the industry, and any questions that you have about working as a developer he will be able to answer. Joe wants everyone to succesful and will do what he can to the best of his abilities. 

Curriculum (5 Stars) - I ended up taking the .NET course and it was comprised of learning - C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular JS, SQL, Entity Framework, GitHub, and ASP.NET MVC. Don't worry if you don't know anything I just said because I didn't have any experiance with any of this before taking the course (My only experiance was Visual Basic in high school and C++ class that I took in college). Over the course of 10 weeks all the languages were broken down and learned week after week. **Disclaimer** You won't be an expert in any of these languages. If you put in the time and incorporate some study time you will be in a position to be job market ready. There was pre-work before starting the course (3 weeks) to teach you fundamentals of programming. 

Job Assistance (5 Stars) - Ripal was the best resource for finding a job hands down. He helped with writing a resume and any questions you had writing a resume would be answered. He was always available on a chat platform we used to ask for advice, and would followup and give advice on what to do as your next steps. Additionally, at the end of the course we had recruiting companies come and you would present what you learned, and projects to them. The exposure, job assistance, advice, and other resources during the job search set Coding Temple apart from other coding bootcamps. 

My entire class that finished the bootcamp ended up finding jobs. I feel that we were prepared very well and have a great future ahead. 

After I decided to do a coding bootcamp, I went to 5 diffferent schools and asked questions, sat in on classes and researched them heavily. After speaking to Joe, the .NET instructor, I decided this was the place I wanted to be. I went from not having any coding background to being headhunted by recruiters for developer roles. But this isn't a get rich quick scheme. The classes are challenging and you HAVE to put in the work. Just showing up is definitely not enough. You must work on projects at night after class and on weekends! There is a reason why developers get paid well and you will be learning a new language almost every week. But all the instructors are very helpful, make themselves available, and encourage you to grasp the knowledge. Ripal is great at getting you in front of employers and helping with the job search after you finish class. Also, a big perk is they offer scholarships and they do financing. This made it accessible to me and I am now proud to say, I'm a developer. 

Last winter, I made the decision to attend the Coding Temple. After 10 weeks of study and few months of work, I have realized, that this was one of my best decisions.

First of all, the atmosphere in Coding Temple is amazing. You don't feel like you are just a student. You feel that you are the part of the family. You feel that peaple around you, your teachers, Ripal, another students ... , they really care.  They support you. They answer all your questions. They try to do their best to help you to become the best.  And this motivates you. 

Secondly, after finishing the course, you will have all skills that you will need at work. Of course, you will not have all knowladges. But you will know how to learn fast. And in developing world this is much more important. You will know how to solve  problems, how to find and fix bugs, how to deal with new framework in a very short time and so on . And in the world when everything changes so fast, this is a necessary skill.

Thirdly, you not only learn a theory, you practice. You proctice a lot. You do  projects every day. And after course you will have the whole GitHub repository  full of code you wrote. And it will help you a lot in future. 

And last, but not the least, you WILL get a job after graduation. All students from my class got a job within a month ot two. Ripal helps you to write a resume, prepare you for interview and help you during the whole proccess...

So, if you are thinking of joining the best bootcamp, Coding Temple is what you are looking for.  And this 10 weeks will change your life. 

My experience with coding and web developing was little to none before I started the Full-stack Python course at the Coding Temple. Now seven weeks into the course, and I can't believe how far I've come. The Coding Temple creates the ideal classroom environment by keeping class sizes small and allowing for plenty of hands on teaching from friendly and highly knowlegable Instructors. The course moves very quickly so this is quite important. The Instructors will answer every you ask but if you don't ask then they might now answer, so it is good practice just to ask a lot of questions. I would highly recommend this course to anybody who is interested and willing to learn this amazing trade.

Coding Temple proved to be everything it promised and more. A fun, intense course focusing on not just how stuff works but also makes you put all your learning into action, changing the way you think in 10 weeks. 
Very supportive instructors and TAs. With a small class size, everyone was guaranteed individual attention. Amazing management who help you on every step from enrolling into the course of interest to job search. 
The content of the course covers all aspects of the Fullstack from the front end to the back end involving all the current trend in technologies. 
Got to learn a lot, code a lot and meet great people. 
Definitely helped make my transition from a software dev to a FullStack smooth.

This is an exerpt from a message I sent to an inquiring potential student while I was enrolled at Coding Temple: 

"Good on you for doing your research. Coding temple is good. I hadn't had much coding experience before and I will tell you that the earlier you start the better. Start now. Once we crossed into Javascript (week 2-5) I had to put in a lot of extra hours pouring over basic stuff and it was taxing. I think that you can't go wrong with any code camp, learning this skill is a valuable asset and a great idea. That being said, you will essentially get out whatever level of effort you bring to it. Unlike a traditional education program at a university, it is less like a course where you need to get good grades, but more like an apprenticeship or mentorship where all your success and failure is dependent on your ability to accept some direction from the instructors while simultaneously immersing yourself in the subject and spending lots of your own time and energy working through problems and testing your limits. As far as coding camps go, I'm sure you get what you pay for essentially. A larger, more established and expensive camp would probably provide a more intense experience than Coding Temple, but you're also more likely to be just another random face passing through. I felt like here everybody is very close to the students and eachother, and are committed and on a very close basis with the students (management constantly checks in on us and gets feedback both anonymously and verbally). It can seem like a more relaxed atmosphere and the instructors are laid back but they are industry veterans and know their shit. Its all about feeling like you can access them personally. Go to the different camps and get a tour. The best one is going to be the one you feel the biggest personal connection to. And as to the value of the camp, I feel like coding temple will definitely get me placed so the saved money from here versus hackreactor or full-stack is nice. So to reiterate everything and add in a few caveats, choose carefully but know that no single camp can make you into a programmer. Its all about how much of your own focused time and energy you spend punching away at the keyboard, its your own sweat and tears(many many tears) that allows you to breakthrough from abstract understanding to writing your own code. That being said, a coding camp can guide you and cut down the learning curve(which can be intimidating) significantly, and is well worth the investment if they have job placement and payment plans(so they have a financial interest in your success). Lastly, what environment are you looking to study in? That will determine which camp is best."

I attended Coding Temple's full stack development course this year and  found a Software Engineer 1 position less than 2 months later!

I do have a background in programming, I was in college as a Computer Science major for 1 year before dropping out, plus some visual basic experience in high school. If you have no programming experience going in you will do just fine IF you treat the 10 weeks like a full time job 40+ hours a week.

I would recommend this course to anyone looking for a rigorous program that teaches current code practices needed to get a job in the market today. You must be willing to work outside of class and do ALL of the pre-work. I myself went through a c# tutorial class from WiBit.Net as well as completing the pre-work before starting the first week. The people who dropped out of my cohort were the same people who did not complete the pre-work and got overwhelmed quickly. So as I said before, people of all backgrounds CAN excel in this program, if they have a genuine interest in coding and a desire to work/learn.

There is a lot of material and not a lot of time. We were only able to spend 1 week on angular which was not nearly enough in my opinion. The sections on C#, .NET MVC were the core strength of the program.

The atmosphere of the program was fantastic, felt like a San Francisco startup without the crazy! Joe, the .Net instructor, was an amazing teacher who can answer any question you can throw at him. His teaching style was engaging and informative. The small class size was the reason it was such a good course. Joe spent as much time as possible 1 on 1 with every student. The personal instruction and 1 on 1 help I received from Ripal with my resume and job search was what made the course exceptional! 

Computer science is a Field that moves quicker than you can write textbooks about it. Having a senior developer who has been working in the field as your mentor and teacher is worth every penny.

4 steps to understanding

1. Clueless - you don’t know what you don’t know

2. Naively Confident- You think you know, but you still don't know what you don’t know

          -This is where I was at going into the program

3. Discouragingly Realistic -You know what you don’t know

          -This is where you want to be, it means you can REALLY begin learning  

4. Mastery Achieved- you know it

          -I am not sure if any programmer has ever achieved this level in this ever                 changing world!

If you are willing to put in the work to figure out what you don’t know, coding temple can get you over the first rise and over your first pothole if you are willing to ask questions and try. How far you master your skill past that is up to you. If you are serious about being a software dev Coding Temple is far and away worth your time and money.

We had an amazing experience with coding temple at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They came to teach the students a workshop which was a great tool for any student in this generation. Majority of the students were unaware of this skill therefore it gave the students a proper insight and better understanding of what programming really is. Been given the opportunity to be able to attend such a great workshop and host it, inspired a lot of students to learn this course. Since they also had a small presentation where it showed how much easier it was to get a job after going through with this program. It wasn't just a workshop where they plainly just taught coding. But they also interacted with the students and showed how fun it could be.I believe it's a great and useful way for anyone to succeed more in the future. Coding temple does the perfect job to provide the right assets for the students to learn.

Note: This review is somewhat in response to the anonymous review posted on 4/2/2017, titled Disorganized and Unprofessional. Read that review if you want to know what Coding Temple is like for someone who is not genuinely interested in computer programming.

If you are interested in computer programming, and you've taught yourself enough about the subject to know that you can see yourself doing it for a career, then you should be more than happy to fork over the $10,000 investment in Coding Temple. The experience is 100% worth it if you want to start your way on becoming a programmer, or if you already have some experience and are just looking to refine your skills, you should still do it. You'll learn a ton, and more importantly the knowledge you gain will be immediatly applicable in the real world (meaning at a job or in personal projects). 

If, however, you are not interested in programming, but instead are interested in making money from programming, then you will, I imagine, end up very unhappy at the end of your 10 weeks and $10,000.

My compatriot below, though his complaints are valid, should not deter any serious students from enrolling in Coding Temple. At least go down and give the place a visit. As soon as you step into main hangout space you'll be sold. While, yes, a monster TV, on-tap beer, and a ping pong (not fooseball) table seem like a recipe for distraction, it's really not that bad; and the boon of having chips, oatmeal, gronola bars, nuts, fruit snacks, coffee, and alcohol available whenever you need them is invaluable. 

Not to mention that Joe (the .NET instructor) is a top-notch teacher, easy to talk to, and has what seems to be a bottomless wealth of knowledge about programming and the programming industry. If you have tried to teach yourself coding before and find that your brain is flooding with questions, fear not, for Joe can probably answer those questions, almost always in a non-jargony way.

Final thing: The reviewer who gave this school such a scathing review is a good example of someone who should not do this program. That's not to say that this reviewer is wrong, but I was in his/her class at Coding Temple and know that he/she was not only not interested in programming, but in fact didn't even do the small amount of pre-work we were asked to do before the start of class. I think he/she gave some of the questions a go, but clearly did not put in the effort required to understand the basics of programming. The pre-work is designed to give even complete beginners somewhere to start, so that by the time class has started, you at least understand enough so that everything the teacher says isn't gibberish. If you don't do the pre-work, don't learn about computer programming outside of class at least a little bit, and don't actively want to do both of these just for fun and learning, then don't expect to have fun at a place called Coding Temple; you would do well to respect the warning of my former classmate. If you don't love (or like the idea of) coding 24/7, then Coding Temple is going to be a torture chamber for you.

TL;DR You'll gain a hollistic, pragmatic understanding of computer programming, and you will get a job after (or even during) the program if you put in any amount of effort, and, most importantly, if you actually enjoy coding (or are at least interested and have done some prior research). 

Those are the words that I would use to describe the experience that I had as a Full-time .NET student at Coding Temple. I can't emphasize enough how disappointed I am and was during my time as at this "school". 

The Layout of the School
 I don't really know where to begin with my dissatisfaction with Coding Temple. I will start with the bizarre physical set-up of the school itself: it's very similar to a college frat pad, but within the pad, there are two classrooms, both are poorly insulated from sound, but the .NET classroom is especially so. You can hear literally everything from the surrounding rooms, almost down to a whisper. Outside of the classrooms, there's a living room, with a fooseball table, two couches facing a big screen TV, some video game consoles, a bar-style kitchen, and an area to play darts. While this set-up may be appealing to some people, it wasn't for me, at all. You can hear literally everything that goes on in the living room, from the classroom: you can hear other students cheering as they play fooseball, loudly speaking to each other, and the TV blaring all-day. Since the classroom is also separated by a glass window, without blinds or shades, you can also see everything, too. There were so many daily (hourly, really) instances during the lesson that one of the  students from the adjoining class, came out and made a ridiculous amount of noise. The isntructor, and the Coding Temple staff pay no attention to the fact that people are trying to learn (and mind you, paying quite a bit to do so)in the classroom, literally five feet away from them. Bottom line: if you are easily distracted (or, not even easily... absolutely anyone should expect to be distracted), this set-up will likely cripple your ability to learn.

The Students
I came into the program, with absolutely no experience, but I was clearly in the minority. Almost all of my classmates had some or considerably heavy exposure to computer programming. Because of the speed of the course, the depth of the subject and the careless assumption of the staff, there is essentially no learning curve: you jump right in, with very little introduction, and just do it. The program seems to clearly not be intended for students with no experience, so if you're like me, and come with no experience, you will likely sink very quickly, and have no concept of what you are doing, or how to even begin to get started. What you don't know, you may as well teach yourself, because the level of support provided is completely rushed, unsatisfactory and unuseful. 
The issue was not only felt by me, but by a couple of others who also dropped-out of the cohort. The class started out with eight students, and after a week, there were seven, after two weeks, six, and after the third, five. The rigorous framework is not the issue, it's how it's delivered, and more realistically how absurdly disorganized the lessons are. 

For the students that did have experience, prior to enrolling, they seemed to understand what was going on, or could grasp what was being introduced, but there seemed to be quite a few murmurs about lack of clarity, even from them. 

Staff
The instructor for the course is really quite intelligent, and knows the industry, inside and out. He is patient if you have a *specific* issue, but for me, he was extremely technical in his delivery, often using jargon that I had never heard, with little to no explanation, which is okay for some subjects, but for computer programming, it can be incredibly frustrating to follow or connect the dots when a teacher is unable to convert that jargon into something more user friendly for novices or early learners. Oftentimes, his lectures left a lot to the imagination; there was a lot of skipping around, random, poorly placed visual components, and complete ommission of important topics. 

The speed was, as to be expected for a bootcamp, break-neck. We were expected to "learn" JavaScript in 2.5 days, and by learn... I mean, master. It may work for some people, but those sorts of expectations are completely unreasonable. If you can't keep up, you had better grab an energy drink, and prepare to teach yourself, at home, on your own, using a different resources (not Coding Temple's), to battle through a way to catch-up. Even then, the next day, there's something new, and if you didn't get the prior lesson before the new one, have fun putting the pieces together. The Coding Temple staff won't help you with that, either.

The staff is, for the most part, generally pleasant, but nobody goes out of their way to be especially helpful. The teacher assistant that spent time in my course was an interesting guy: he had no interest in the subject that was being addressed, slept on his laptop during one of the days, and was not actually "present". Aside from him, once class is over, the staff goes into the living room, and hangs out, plays video games or watches TV.  So, if you need something, you have to interrupt whatever is going on, and ask for help... It feels very juvenile, uncomfortable, and unnecessary. 

The Format
The course is 10-weeks long, so there's definitely an element of urgency to mastering the subjects presented to you, in that short amount of time. The pace may be an issue, and could be the reason so much was omitted from the lessons. So, filling those gaps that weren't taught can be an overwhelming challenge. Most of the gaps that need be filled in should be done, outside of class, on your own. Having to fill those gaps, while also catching-up with the pace of the course, is essentially the most frustrating part of the experience. The course does an incredibly poor job covering the basics of really, anything. The instructor speaks to you, as if you already know the jargon (even if you don't), and provides nothing in the way of crash-coursing any concepts. Again, you hit the ground running, and if you want to succeed (and more importantly, get a job), and you're a beginner with no experience, this should serve as a warning to look elsewhere for a more learner-friendly bootcamp. 

The Tuition
The tuition is $10,000 for a full-time course, which is pretty high, but not as high as some other bootcamps. With a price tag that reaches 5-figures, you are making a sizeable investment. With an investment like that, you can only hope for a return. In my case (and possibly your case), this was just wasn't true. You are better off taking your hard-earned money and either investing it into a more reputable, stable and well-established school, or saving it and studying on your own. Coding Temple is nowhere near worth the cost of tuition. The amount of time that you put into self-teaching, while in the course, and the constant head-scratching while listening to the instructor, and of course... the endlessly loud environment, makes your investment worth nothing. Here's what you pay for: a seat in a shabby classroom, lectures that are disorganized and lacking direction or clarity, free granola bars, a place to hang-out, and resources to help you find a job (if you get that far). That's it. It doesn't seem like you are paying for an education,  you are paying for Coding Temple to provide you with networking opportunities. For some people that may be okay, but not for me... Not for $10,000. That's what networking events and LinkedIn are for.

Take Away
Do I regret my decision to enroll at Coding Temple? Absolutely. I can definitively say, this was one of the worst decisions I've made in my life, and I am sorely, financially regretting it. Was it worth it? To me, not at all. I really, truly, learned nothing. The one lesson that can be taken away from my time at Coding Temple is this: if something sounds too good to be true, it most likely is. In the case of Coding Temple, everything sounded great *before* enrolling, and then came crashing down once in the program. 

Bottom line: if you would like to learn how to code, consider applying to a different bootcamp. There are many others in Chicago that are much more respected and esteemed. Coding Temple may work for people who already know how to code, and just want a place to hang out for ten-weeks and then get a job, but if you actually want to learn, and want to see true value in your investment, you may be incredibly disappointed.