Launch School

Before I begin, I would like to establish the two core tenets behind Launch School's teachings that form the premise for this review:

• Learn slow to move fast
• Focus on the fundamentals and ignore fleeting trends

I'll explain why I think these principles are key and how Launch School accomplishes this, and then discuss how they helped me land my first proper SWE job paying above mid-level FAANG total compensation and my second job paying above senior-level FAANG compensation a year later.

First off: learn slow to move fast. Launch School inverts the schooling system we are all familiar with by mandating that students get at least an A- on their assessments. This forces students to prepare deeply, and it's common for students to take at least two months before attempting the first Ruby/JavaScript course (you get used to it and time needed per course falls over time). For example, one of the first lessons was about variable declaration/initialization/assignment, and learning it in excruciating detail was extremely tough. Yet spending time forming mental models and typing out explanations in assignments solidified my understanding, and once it clicked I was free from making such errors. This effect snowballs. Being able to learn about functions without difficulties regarding variables makes learning much easier!

Second, focus on the fundamental technologies. In Core, Launch School avoids teaching frameworks, and instead focuses on the core tools used by each segment of a web application. For example (and this is not an exhaustive list of the core tools taught), you learn how to construct an SQL query, rather than use a scripting language to do so. You learn about HTTP, then construct an HTTP request from scratch, and serve your own responses without external libraries. You'll use HTML and CSS to replicate a web page and, later on, JavaScript to animate its contents.

Why learn these core tools instead of whatever gets the job done? It's simple: these tools have been used for decades, and will continue to be used in the future. If you started by learning a library like React, what happens when there's an error that isn't documented? You would go into the source code and, suddenly, you're confronted with JS code! Moving jobs and want to try Vue instead? You'd struggle without an understanding of JS, since the React syntax wouldn't apply. However, understanding JS means that any time you're stuck, you can reach into the code and solve your problem. This applies to the other parts of the tech stack: understanding the fundamentals lets you understand related technologies much easier in the future.

As such, completing Core provides you with the coding skills needed to get multiple offers from top engineering companies (I had two offers after completing just the back-end portion). However, there is a final mental shift needed to become a solid software engineer, and that is where Capstone comes in. The close mentorship of the LS team allowed me to develop the following competencies I've observed in top software engineers:

• Problem-centric thinking
• Just-in-time learning (only after the mastery-based learning above)
• Vital soft skills in communication, teamwork, negotiations and more

Through my experience with Core and Capstone, I joined a cybersecurity company dealing with 10 trillion digital interactions a week and immediately hit the ground running as a software engineer. These experiences then snowballed and I'm now in a crypto fund handling large investments into decentralised finance and P2P loans. During the interview, I was questioned about my philosophy behind software engineering, and needless to say I was leaning heavily on everything I've experienced in Launch School.

I can safely say that my life has been transformed by Launch School, and I am incredibly grateful to the team’s vision of a new pedagogy in software engineering. Beyond engineering, the philosophy of Launch School, particularly that of mastery, has deepened my appreciation for slow-and-steady progress, which has helped me in my other hobbies such as language learning and music. The facets of my life that have been touched by LS continues to surprise me, and I can safely say this has been the most fruitful investment I've ever made in my life. If you are eager to challenge yourself to reach new limits, then Launch School is 100% the course to go for.

Once again, thank you so much for Launch School and I hope that the School continues to inspire others as it has inspired me.

Context: I currently work at Gatsby JS. I went through the capstone program from february 2021 to June 2021. I got a job in 6 weeks after i started my job search.

I'll start by saying, I cannot over emphasize how effective this program is.

I went through the capstone program starting in February 2021. This capstone program is easily one of the toughest things I've ever done in my life and also one of the most rewarding experiences. The program allowed me to form friendships with the right people and at the same time it gave me the tools necessary for a productive career as a software engineer.

I particularly want to highlight:
- In capstone, there are highly competent staff that make themselves available to answer questions
- I too was sceptic about the salary - but, I'm proof that every single person in my cohort got a salary above $100k and sometimes above $150k base salary.
- I use the same approach to tackle very complex problems i face today on the job as i did within my capstone project.

My fair warning: This program is for a person who can take the time to dedicate to it - I warn everyone - it doesn't matter if you have kids, are in a relationship, no relationship, no other commitments: the capstone program will take whatever amount of time you possibly have for about 4- 6 months so be ready. It is an experience that i regularly say, it was necessary but not something I would want to have to do multiple times in my life. It is hard and time consuming but also fun in a challenging way - if you enjoy the process of capstone - you will enjoy working as a software engineer.

To the one that is on the fence about the capstone program - I'd say:

1. What you gain with the capstone project is not necessarily just knowledge but experience - everything in their curriculum is pretty public so you could learn the content on your own. After being on the job for a while, i can tell you that it's pretty clear when someone has learned a bunch of concepts but can't coherently put them together in a way that a team would benefit from. With capstone - you work with a team, you build confidence in your ideas, and you build context for actual engineering problems.

2. The best benefit is probably the staff and research done by the staff - The staff plays an under-appreciated role in all this. The staff vets projects ideas to make sure they are actually industry relevant ideas. Each time a cohort hits the market, the capstone team evaluates how they hit the market and pivots based on the changes in the market. This allows you as a person to focus on learning and trust that when i go look for a job i am really ready. There are also working software engineers who act as mentors through the program to coach and guide you through the process.

3. After a certain point you are actually losing money if you try to emulate this program on your own - at one point I thought about just doing a 'fake' capstone project on my own or with some friends - and there were two things that made me reconsider. A. What if I am wrong about what i think would be a job relevant project and waste my time. B. How do i know what to study for a job I've never had when there's conflicting information on the web. Because of these two reasons I opted to 'trust the process' and signed up for the capstone program.

I hope this helps you whoever you are

The core curriculum moves from the basics of programming, OOP, cli tooling, testing, networking, DBs, html & css, advanced problem solving, the dom and api's. The focus is on allowing students to fundamentally grasp the problems at each layer of programming and understand why the current solutions are in use. The core curriculum really sets students up for unlocking what the school calls 'just-in time' learning - the ability to pick up new tools quickly because you understand the underlying problems they are trying to solve. 

Overall my experience with launch school was a positive one 

Things that I liked:
- I felt like the instructors gave enough help and there was enough community to push my learning forward
- The school seemed very receptive to feedback
- Because they were upfront about what kind of program this was and the pedagogy, i never felt like i was played.
- The content taught is directly relevant to my job experience and at different times i need to draw from almost all of the classes
- Staff is receptive and warm, you couldn't really ask for a warmer group of individuals who are dedicated to their jobs while also 

things that could have improved:
- I felt like there were times when i wasn't sure how much i was actually learning because i didn't know where or how to apply it - the program could have used more real world projects as a mandatory part especially around the end of the backend portion.
- There was a lot of written content to study. I would have appreciated more video content and some of the video content could use updating

Overall, for where I was in life, this was the best decision I could make at that time in my life. 


Now as a working Software Engineer at GatsbyJS, I find that i use the concepts learned in the core curriculum daily. I find myself consistently needing to come back to what I learned in core and coming back to my problem solving approach

Launch School, at least at the time of writing, does not do much marketing, if any at all. So if you are pursuing a career switch to software engineering and web development, it's likely that you did not first encounter Launch School at the top of a Google search result. Instead, you probably encountered those boot camps, advertising that you will become a software engineer or developer in a few months while charging you thousands of dollars for a curriculum you can find online for free. In short, Launch School is unlike anything that I just described. Their lack of marketing is just one of many of their distinctive traits that underscore how a great product or service can rely mainly on its quality to attract those who seek it. So if you've found Launch School, you've probably dug deeper than the first search results to discover a more rigorous pedagogy, without the heavy price tag at the end.

One of the first things Launch School has you read is their article detailing what Launch School is and isn't and whether or not it's a good fit for the prospective student. Unlike predatory boot camps where it's easy to join but hard to leave, there's no slick marketing involved that tries to lure you in as the unsuspecting student. Instead, there's full transparency and you do not feel pressured to join. Furthermore, their payment plans are flexible and reasonable. As a result, you are also not financially pressured to stay if you were to join and decide to leave. Most importantly, there are no "get-rich-quick" implications that you could become a professional in just a few months. Rather, their cornerstone pedagogy centers on the importance of mastery and first principles, cultivating skills through a slow but rigorous path. This approach is not just a contrarian mindset but something that they implement through their detailed curriculum and enforce by their rigorous written and live coding assessments. These standards ensure your mastery and that you have the proper mental models and foundations set in place before building on top of them with higher order concepts.

Earlier I acknowledged that the curriculum of most coding schools can be found online for free. Technically, that's true, and I personally resolved to self-study in the beginning of my journey. However, as I went on to discover, software engineering is a field riddled with rabbit holes of tools and technologies. Without the proper curriculum and guidance, it's tough to focus on the core principles. Launch School will thus act as your beacon, so long as you trust the process and persevere, your efforts will almost certainly reward you in the end.

These are the factors that make Launch School stand out in the ever-expanding field of coding schools. It's truly a hidden gem of a learning center, a place to not just learn but to personally grow alongside a supportive community of motivated students.

I started Core in September 2020 and finished in March 2021. I then started Capstone in May 2021 and finished in August 2021. Within a month and a half of interviewing after that, I had 3 generous offers.

I've been dabbling in programming since my childhood and even built database-driven applications deployed to Heroku, but it wasn't until I finished Launch School's Core curriculum and then immediately afterward completed the Capstone program that I felt like I was a software engineer.

The Core curriculum experience was exactly as advertised, and exactly what I was looking for: a rigorous and comprehensive deep dive into the fundamentals of object-oriented programming, deconstructing and understanding what happens at every layer of the OSI networking model and under the hood of common methods, mastering SQL queries and joins, understanding the JavaScript runtime environment, the event loop, and asynchronous callbacks, and getting experience with REST APIs. The methodology behind the program is leagues above other training options, because you're actively engaged in writing code, taking timed assessments and live technical interviews, building projects, and getting feedback from experienced mentors throughout the experience.

As much as I grew and learned during Core, however, Capstone was even harder and considerably still more worthwhile. While the go-at-your-own-pace approach of Core meant that we had time to soak in the material and make sure we understood it well before we could move on to the next course, the time-limited approach of Capstone taught us to not only quickly pick up a new language, a new framework, and new mental models related to deploying and running software systems on hardware, but to also then actually build and deploy an advanced application to solve a problem that no one had solved before, in a team environment. I cannot stress enough how important and invaluable this experience is both intrinsically, but also when it comes to being able to prove to interviewers, recruiters, and fellow engineers that you have been battle-tested in this industry, and triumphed.

What sets Launch School apart from other approaches is exactly this double punch of:
1) an unlimited time to master the fundamentals on your own during the Core phase, followed by
2) the time-constrained and pressure-driven Capstone experience in which you and your team research multiple software engineering problems and then pick one to tackle together.

Once you reach the Capstone phase with that underlying mastery from Core, you then not only learn many of the latest technologies and what problems each is addressing, but you even more importantly get to work on a joint codebase together with teammates, getting invaluable experience with system design, agile methodologies, and problem-solving along the way.

Lastly, it's worth addressing Launch School's pricing model, because it was also one of the driving factors for me. Many programs require a flat fee, regardless of whether you get a job after you graduate or not. But Launch School believes so much in their program that you only pay for Capstone if and when you are offered a position. Not only that, but because of the ISA, how much you pay Launch School is in proportion to your offer salary. To me, that meant that their financial incentive was aligned with mine--and this manifested itself in the high quality of the material and the support that we received.

I came to Launch School from a non-technical background, unsure whether I could be successful as a software engineer. The mastery-based curriculum at Launch School provided a carefully curated path to follow via which I could improve my technical skills, learn to speak knowledgeably about programming concepts, and practice breaking down challenging problems. By the time I finished the core curriculum, I was confident in my mastery of the fundamentals and in my ability to pick up new languages or frameworks as needed.
Launch School’s Capstone program took me to the next level. The strong foundational knowledge I gained throughout the core curriculum allowed me to quickly digest a wide breadth of advanced topics at a fast-pace and immediately use them. Along with my team, I was able to develop a tool that solves a complex real-world problem faced by engineers.
After finishing Capstone, I felt more than prepared to hit the job market. I was able to secure three job offers in just three weeks. All of the offers I received were over 4x the salary I earned in my previous career.  Launch School’s core curriculum + capstone program gave me all of the tools needed to establish a long career as a software engineer in which I am able to do meaningful work, solve interesting problems, and earn a high salary.

I was a working architecture professional for 4 years before finding Launch School. I had dabbled in scripting and cobbled together some experience in the Python data science stack, but I had never found a course/taken the time that would allow me to learn programming from first principles.

After nearly 18 months progressing through both Core and Capstone (build a project called Dendro in the process), I landed a job as a Senior Software Developer and tripled my total compensation from my previous role.

I cannot recommend the LS pedagogy or approach highly enough, it changed both my life and the lives of everyone else in my Capstone cohort. LS gives you not just the skills to find an entry level SWE job, but the methodology for building a lasting and successful career in the world of computer science. I'd give the program 10 stars if I could.

I first thought about the idea of learning to code around 2013. Some might remember the viral moment around that time that CodeAcademy had with their New Year’s resolution of learning to code. I didn’t really try, but I looked around on the Internet as to what this coding thing was all about. I came across truly random and terrible advice. I recall reading this awful blog post by someone saying that they finally learned to code by simply putting themselves in the “sweat locker” as they called it (just locked themselves in a room) for a few weeks and when they came out the other side they could finally code. What bullshit. I recall reading that I needed something called a text editor to code and Text Wrangler was suggested as a good free option. I downloaded the thing and stared at it; now what? Can you imagine the very beginning, not knowing really at all what any sort of code or software is? Maybe you’re there now.
In any case, you can sort of see this history on my GitHub profile. You can see when I first signed up and then did basically nothing for many years. I wasn’t actually trying yet, but I did poke around at the concept and it all seemed so confusing and complicated. At some point I decided to try a little harder. Information and resources online had gotten a little better, too. I did a couple things like follow a short rails tutorial that did nothing but confuse you. I started the frontend course at Thinkful. I read Chris Pine’s book. And slowly I started to see at least some of the things involved in software. I even thought about signing up for Dev Bootcamp (when that was around) and I put down a deposit and did about half the prep work. Ultimately, I backed out and asked for my deposit back; despite not being an expert in the field, I could sense and pick up on signals that this was not the right way to learn.
So I think I’d like to phrase things like this: I’m 100% certain that absent Launch School, I never would have gotten from there, to here. Meaning a zombie GitHub account and no real knowledge or skill to a well-compensated engineer at exactly the type of company that an engineer wants to be at. That’s a big hurdle to climb over between there and here. There are levels in every field, and Launch School is not a path to a basic engineering job, but a good career.
If you really want to get into software engineering, save yourself the time and trouble of the random walk through the desert. You could try and hack and slash your way forward using bits and pieces of un-targeted advice on the Internet. That’s difficult because things need to be taught in the right order and with the student’s current level of topic understanding in mind. You might look back 5 years from now and see a zombie GitHub account, skeleton knowledge, and not be much closer to your goal. Or you could trust the path (now well-trodden) that Launch School has forged. Follow their curriculum, keep at each section until you ace it, do Capstone, and you’re basically guaranteed to “get here.” I don’t know whether it will take you one year or three, but if do what they say, you’ll make it to the place you seek; that’s a virtual certainty. And yes, I believe Capstone (after completing Core) was a necessity in terms of a) further education after Core, b) preparing me to be able to land the good job, c) convincing myself what I’m capable of (i.e. self-confidence), and d) realizing that not everyone knows everything, and that’s ok, I’m still enough for now, i.e. to “Launch.”
Read Launch School’s marketing materials and see if they make sense to you. What I mean is, even without knowing whether what Launch School is saying is true (about how to learn), it’s possible to get a signal on whether it’s likely to be true. I got a good signal from Launch School before I actually knew whether they had the “goods.” See if you can convince yourself of the same. And in the meantime, here you have another person giving you a signal that they do.

Context: I completed the core curriculum over ~2 years while working full time. I resigned from my job and participated in the February 2021 Capstone cohort, and successfully launched my software engineering career immediately after.

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Launch School is incredible. It's hard to overstate how effective it is at preparing you for a professional career as a software engineer

I had my fair share of doubts all the way through Capstone. I knew I had learned an incredible amount in Core, but I really didn't have any point of reference for how I compared to other people in the job market.

My confidence started to grow during the job hunt - as long as I was able to get past the HR checks for specific degrees or years of experience, things generally went better than expected. I was able to hold my own in technical discussions, and every engineer I talked to was blown away by our Capstone project - multiple people recommended I try to get funding and launch our capstone project as a business.

I ended up accepting an offer as a senior software engineer at an early-stage startup just 2 weeks after I started applying. I was nervous knowing that there was "nowhere for me to hide" on such a small team, but I was excited for the chance to work across the entire tech stack. I've been working as a software engineer for about 6 months at the time of this writing, and the further out I get from Capstone, the more I realize how incredibly well Launch School prepares you for actual working life as a software engineer. I've already taken on a huge amount of responsibility working across our frontend, backend, and infrastructure, and I'm actively involved in planning the future direction of our product.

At Launch School you learn the right collection of core fundamental topics to the correct depth to be an effective engineer. I've had to learn several new technologies on the job, but in every instance, it's been a straightforward process because I have the appropriate foundation to build on.

I am incredibly grateful that Launch School exists. Of all the education paths out there, it is the most practically effective while also being uncompromisingly aligned with the student's interests.

My early experiences with programming education were a huge influence on my decision to study at Launch School. I took classes at university, explored online tutorials, and even built out a few projects using walkthroughs. Though these approaches to learning may work for some, they never seemed to resonate with me. They normally lacked two things: A mastery-based approach to learning, and a bottom-up pedagogy.
Launch School's Core Curriculum is an excellent entry point for aspiring software engineers with little to no experience. This is due to not only the mastery and bottom-up approaches to learning, but also the self-paced environment. Learning fundamental programming concepts from the ground up finally allowed me to understand how to "think like a computer". Not only do I understand each character of syntax that I write, but I now can methodically reason about a challenging problem and solve it with relative ease. Also, the self-paced nature of Launch School made me confident that I had truly mastered a concept before I moved on to the next one.
Despite not teaching any frameworks or libraries, the foundation that Launch School builds has made learning new technologies relatively simple. Just a few months after finishing, I've become comfortable with React, Golang syntax, and AWS. Professionally, I've developed a much deeper understanding of how our organization's databases are utilized and how our web applications are developed and deployed.
Within just one year of part-time study, I went from "I have no idea what I'm doing" to "with enough time, I can build anything with code". That confidence boost alone is enough evidence for me to say that Launch School's learning model is by far the best I have ever experienced.

It’s hard to overstate the impact that Launch School has had on my life.  I consider myself a studious person - I took high school and college seriously, got good grades, and made an effort to find a career that aligned with my degree and interests.  I unfortunately found the options for my specific field of study limited, so I’ve spent the past 15 years of my professional life in a series of stable but largely unfulfilling jobs.  Because of Launch School, I am now in a field that truly interests me, and I’m on an income trajectory that will allow me to give back, provide a stable base for my family, and accomplish many of the things that make life enjoyable to me.
There are a few facets of Launch School, and especially the Capstone program, that make them such an effective springboard to a career in software engineering.  As someone who tried to learn a few programming languages and web development on my own, the structure that Launch School provides is important.  Even for someone who is focused and motivated, it can be hard to sustain the energy and interest needed to learn on your own without any feedback, any community, and any sense of how close you are to your goal.  Launch School provides all of these.  Knowing exactly what to study may just be the most challenging aspect of trying to learn on your own, because the programming world is both wide and deep.  While learning anything interesting is often time well-spent, it doesn’t necessarily get you closer to landing a paying job as a software engineer, which was my goal.
That is Capstone’s explicit goal as well, and it does a fantastic job of preparing you for both finding a job/nailing the interviews, and the daily work the job requires once you’ve landed it.  It is important to note that the type of jobs the Capstone program prepares you for are not entry-level jobs.  Official job titles of Capstone students often range from Jr. Engineer to Sr. Engineer, however they all effectively require multiple years of experience, have great starting pay, and often allow you to work on the kinds of interesting problems that entry-level roles often don’t have access to.
While the Capstone program prepares you incredibly well for your first job, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have all of the knowledge you’ll ever need from the start.  Your first role may require a language you don’t know, or it may require advanced problem-domain expertise, or it may use frameworks and tools you’ve never worked with.  And this is perhaps where the most lasting benefit of Launch School becomes apparent.  Because Launch School focuses on the fundamentals of programming, you have a solid base from which you can learn new material quickly and efficiently.  When you have to learn something new, and you most certainly will, that fundamental knowledge that was ingrained over years allows you to pick up concepts and identify patterns rapidly without getting bogged down by basic concepts.
All of this amounts to a Capstone program that truly does prepare you for a career in software engineering and helps you get past the first few hurdles that can be a barrier to so many.  There will always be that little bit of imposter syndrome when you switch careers to an entirely new field, but after having spent the first few months in my new role as a software engineer,  I can honestly say I do not feel out of place and I do feel like I have all of the tools required to do my job effectively now and in the future.

Context: I found and began Launch School in December 2018, completed Core in December 2020, and went through Capstone in Spring 2021.

I got my bachelor's degree in Computer Science, graduating in 2020. Yes, that means I did Launch School alongside school. It was long and difficult road to persist and finish - I paused my subscription/studies several times in the 2 years I went through Core, and there were times when I nearly let go of my goal of getting to Capstone. The thriving and encouraging community is a lot of what kept me motivated - seeing people I had studied with during 129 getting amazing jobs and producing technically robust Capstone projects. I never doubted that if I stuck with it, I would get the same results.

Why go through LS when I had a degree? Put simply, school gave me broad exposure to CS topics and a good breadth of knowledge, but doing things like working professionally and writing production software in a language I knew nothing about a few months prior is all thanks to the depth of my studies during Core. Depth is something a lot of people are missing, and it's the real "secret sauce".

During my job hunt, I had the confidence and belief in myself to turn down six figure offers and opportunities that would have surpassed all of my expectations for a first job a few years ago. That's the power of a strong support system and incredible peer group - you know without a doubt what you're capable of achieving. I ended up accepting an offer in just under 6 weeks for a position I am overjoyed with, making a previously unbelievable-to-me salary, and having technical conversations daily that would've sounded like gibberish to me a year ago. I will never stop talking about LS to anyone who will listen!!