Devmountain

DevMountain provided me the foundation to become a successful iOS developer. With fantastic instructors and the ability to get the help you need when you need it you receive an incredible education. They provide instruction based on real world experience and teach you what you need to know to become a great developer.  After taking computer science classes in college and learning some basic programming skills at a slow rate I wanted more. Having a developer in the family I asked what he would recommend me doing and thats when he brought up DevMountain. Because of DevMountain I have a solid career path and the ability to make an impact. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from the best and look forward to seeing DevMountain produce top quality developers. 

I literally knew nothing about code or development. All I knew was that I didn't want to work in a call center for the rest of my life. I looked around and interviewed every single code camp in Utah. All of them. DevMountain was by far the most personable, knowledgeable and real out of them all. They don't accept everyone, but they do believe that everyone they accept has the potential to learn and grow into a developer.

DevMountain taught me more in three months than I learned in a whole semester at the community college. Since completing DevMountain I have reccomended everyone I think would be a good fit to go there. A few of my friends, who just graduated with four year degrees, will be attending DevMountain and I hope that it changes their life like it changed mine. I doubled my salary in just three months and now work for one of the largest online retailers in the world. Life isn't good, it's great.

It was an intense 12 weeks but I got so much out of it. As with any boot camp, you can't expect them to hand hold you through out the whole course. You will get what you put in. The teachers and the mentors explained clearly the concepts and they were fun to be around. I love the new Salt Lake location its very spacious and they provide snacks and water to keep you going.

They provided free housing which is a 5-10 tracks ride (VTA Trax which they ALSO provide a bus/train pass). When they mean, immersive, they mean immsersive.

They hit all the needed course materials without getting to bogged down on the details (Having encountered the detail myself rather than hearing them explain it saved them/me more time). It was an overall rewarding experience.

I got a job within 3 weeks!

I am currently in the iOS immersive cohort and one word that would describe my experience is intense. Coming from absolutely no coding background from even before the program we were learning the basics and expected to cover about 50 hrs of pre-course work. We are in class 40+ hours a week, half of that is instruction and the other is projects that are related to the daily curriculum. Overall its been a GREAT intro into iOS its impossible to cover everything in the 12 weeks but after the program we can build and app and more importantly we learn how to LEARN and use documentation and online resources to solve problems and continue developing as a developer. DevMountain is an excellent way to start the long journey into the coding world.

DevMountain is, hands down, the best value you can get for your money. They provide free housing for out of state students, the school environment is awesome, and the mentors were some of the smartest developers I've yet met in my time as a programmer. They had excellent lectures during the learning portion of the class, and then throughout the hands-on and group project time, they had brown bag lectures (optional attendance but highly recommended) that focused on really valuable and applicable topics (e.g. email sending, deployment, encryption, file uploads, etc...). These "brown bag" lectures were some of the msot valuable learning experiences I've yet had and were a real confidence boost because it's where you start to really put all your knowledge and experience together and start understanding high-level concepts as a developer. 

I landed a job the following week after I graduated at a startup company and can honestly say it's my dream job, and it's entirely thanks to DevMountain and the team there. They have a staff member dedciated just to helping students and alumni find jobs, and the majority of students in my cohort had jobs within 2 weeks of graduating.

tl:dr 11/10, best money I ever spent and now I have a legit career.

I had been looking into attending a coding bootcamp for the past ~two years, and decided DevMountain was the best fit for a few reasons. 

• The curriculum caught my attention because it wasn’t Ruby on Rails (nothing against RoR, I just found the focus on Javascript appealing).
• I looked up the instructors and watched their talks (Dave Smith is particularly awesome).
• The price point was reasonable. It was by no means something I took lightly, but was actually feasible. 
• Housing was probably the tipping point in making my decision to go with DevMountain. The rooms were nice, but more importantly, I didn’t have to stress about where I was going to stay. Other programs were around the same price, but finding a temp room on craigslist sounded sketchy at best. With everything you want to focus on, housing shouldn’t be one of them.

The program itself is extremely intense, which I had read from other reviews (for all of the bootcamps), but for some reason didn’t think others’ emphasis on the intensity was accurate (I was wrong). I’ve attended college full-time while working full-time, but this program is by far the most time consuming thing I’ve done. Being in the immersive program allows you to dedicate yourself to learn something new, and I think is the best way to go.

There were highs and lows during the course (sometimes things click right away, other times you feel like an idiot), but not getting discouraged is key. The people in my cohort were awesome and it made the ‘lows’ a lot easier to bounce back from. Find people you get along with and work together. Even if you aren’t actively pair programming, it’s nice to know that you can bounce ideas off of someone.

Summary: Great program / nice housing / awesome people / extremely intense (a description that you probably won’t appreciate until you’re in the program).