Launch School

They charge $199 to teach students to ‘self learn’. There are no projects at all. The instructors are quite judgmental. You get an answer wrong in the study session and they’ll reach out to the owner Chris and complain and that’ll be on your record even though the whole point of study session is to attend and learn. After reading the previous reviews I can confirm Ableism and Racism does exist here. 

Save your time and money and learn by making projects and on a much faster pace. There’s a whole community out there willing to mentor and help aspiring developers.

I just got hired as a junior software developer at an amazing company in LA making 20K more than I was making previously! This would have never happened had it not been for Launch School's amazing program.    I majored in psychology and had never coded before starting the program. I studied for 5-6 hours every night for a few months and acquired strong engineering skills that made me feel ready to start applying for jobs. After spending some time looking, I received a call from a local company inviting me for a three hour, in-person technical interview. And guess what? When the interview came along I was prepared and in the end, received an offer from the company.    If it wasn’t for the in depth material covered at Launch School, I don’t think I would have received the offer. The strong emphasis on fundamentals, exercises and code challenges (especially some of the data structures and algorithms problems) gave me a lot of confidence growing into a software engineer. But what I believe really tipped the scale in my favor is the portfolio of projects I built throughout the program. Some of them are major, production quality and fully tested apps that really impressed the lead engineers at the company. I believe anyone can build simple apps following a tutorial. One of the reasons Launch School is so unique is that you learn how to build production quality applications where you get to learn how to make engineering decisions and tradeoffs. This is how you differentiate yourself from graduates of most other bootcamps who spend a few weeks on one or two frameworks and build toy apps. At Launch School, we spend months to learn to bend frameworks to our will while implementing advanced engineering principles into our apps.   In the end I truly believe that Launch School changed my life. For those of you who are working through the program - just have faith. Make sure you work through the curriculum, participate in code challenges, build projects and stay positive. Once you get to show what you have learned in your interviews I promise good things will happen!

My background is not in computer science.  Before starting the Launch School curriculum, I had never even opened a text editor.  Less than a year later, I've accepted a job at a fantastic company, making quite a bit more than what's average for juniors in my city.  Do I think I could have learned web dev. on my own? Yes. Could I have been this succesful this quickly? Absolutely not.

I took advantage both of LS's self-paced courses and the Captstone Mentoring Program.  The courses stress the fundamentals.  Although the curriculum is Ruby-heavy, the emphasis is not on "learning Ruby," but learning how to solve problems with code, not just "learning Rails," but learning the concepts behind it and the habits of mind necessary to tackle the challenges that web dev. throws at you.

As happy as I was with the courses, the Capstone Program just blew me away.  The amount of face time I was given with a senior dev. was outrageous. This is not an hour-a-week deal--I was on a Hangout talking programming, getting impromptu lectures, or pair programming with my mentor nearly every evening. My learning was guided: there was never a time when I didn't know what to do next or what to focus on. And I was pushed, pushed far harder than I'm likely to have pushed myself.

The result? I became not just someone who dabbled in code, but truly, a professional developer.  I acquired the knowledge and skill necessary to succeed in the field.  Companies agreed.  I got several full length interviews and received job offers from all of them. I have so much to learn, but LS has put me on some seriously firm footing.

Don't get me wrong--the program is not magic.  It's a LOT of work, but if you've got the aptitude, the work ethic, and the appetite for success, you can go far, fast in this program.