RMOTR

I found really interesting how well designed each project was during the course. It was not just a bunch of assignments. They were specially thought to practice each of the concepts learnt during the classes.

I also really liked the way instructors explained topics using slides and sharing screen in their computers. In my old experience with other schools, instructors were teaching concepts by typing sample snippeds that many times were boring or not really giving a good example of the topic we were covering.

Aside from everything else, the human factor involved in RMOTR is probably the greatest aggregated value this school has. I really loved the community and the group of classmates I had.

If you have enough time to commit, I recomment it.

I like the forced accountability that encouraged me to to a lot of work. I was also pushed out of my comfort zone. I was learning Python at a much slower pace before the class, and now I feel like I have a good foundation to more forward at an accelerated pace.

The schedule is a little too rigorous. But I think that may have a lot to do with me having next to no coding experience. I felt like a lot of the time most of the other students were much further ahead of me while I was catching up. Perhaps in the future, maybe encourage people more and let them know that being behind is okay and that they should not feel intimidated. But in the end, I got a lot out of it so it turned out ok :)

Having mentor help available and group projects was the part I loved the most. I knew this way of working works very well for me, but in previous experiences everything happened in person. Achieving the same great experience in an online environment seems very challenging, but this guys managed to do it pretty well.

Recommended.

What I liked most was the challenges and the instructors abilities to get me to think out the problem and a practical solution.

Class times were sometimes a bit tough for me, but that's totally a personal issue. I would have loved to have more free time, so I could attend to all sessions.

People involved in this program are great, and the syllabus totally covered my needs

I was impressed of the cool platform RMOTR built to foster the collaborative work remotly. I liked the collaborative coding and individual approach of great mentors.

Curriculom in general is good. I liked that they mentioned many times related topics, that maybe were not explained in details, but at least let us know those topics exist and give us the chance to learn them by ourself later.

A good example of that is MongoDB, that is not included in the scope of this couse, but let me know at least a bit about it and allowed me to keep learning by myown.

The instructors were responsive and personable. They actually cared if we understood lessons no matter what level we came into the class as.

Honestly, I don't have any bad things to say about it. I know in this kind of reviews is useful for other students to also read about bad things, or things I didn't like as a student of RMOTR. But, I had such a good experience working with this guys, that I only have good words to say about it.

Mentors were always willing to help and pushing us to go for the next challenge. I would have never kept myself as accountable if it wasn't because of the pre defined schedule and the weekly sessions.

I had the chance to talk a lot with Jason, and he is a great mentor. I used to be frustrated very easily in the past, but having someone like Jason helping me on my side made me feel a lot more confident of what I can achieve.

One small suggestion. I would have liked for the slides to be printer-friendly.

I really liked the variety of coding projects, and they way how they were structured to tackle specific topics covered in the class.

There was only one real class a week. When taking a class, I mean to be taught by the teachers. During that class a lot of topics were explained, and sometimes it was hard to pay attention and keep the pace during the two hours of class. I would maybe split the class into a few days, and mix them with projects to practice the covered concepts.

I'm more than happy with the overall experience.

The projects helped a lot with retaining what was covered in the lessons. I think that having an instructor leading a class and explaining each topic is a wonderful way of learning.

There were lots of projects, maybe a bit too many. But I would have loved to have more time to tackle them all.

I was a bit frustrated with other online platforms that I used in the past to learn programming, but with RMOTR I now believe again that it's something totally doable.

Working in groups with other people remotly was great. I'm from India, and don't have much chances to learn in my local city. RMOTR gave me the chance to share a classroom with folk from the main cities in the US, and that's an incredible opportunity.

The only thing is that there is not enough time to complete the pre-readings if the individual taking the course is a full time employee somewhere, so it's very important to specify that this course if for people who can work on this full time. Other than that it's great.

Working in groups with other people from all around the world, from home, was simply amazing.

I didn't feel like there was enough time to complete most of the assignments, but that's probably associated to my bussy weekly schedule. It's know that it's an intensive course, so I should have reserved more time to commit in the extra readings/coding.

I think it's a great approach. If anything, I would say that having a little more time for readings, and having supplementary material for subjects that are not central to the course but are necessary for projects would help (e.g. I would have worked through a SQL tutorial before the last week had I known it would be needed.) Also as I mentioned on the call, I think materials on debugging, linting and all of that fun stuff would be a great help. Some of this I learned from other students, but that is hit or miss.

I want to enroll for the more advanced course as well. This methodology definitely made my learn a lot in a short time.

The greatest part is having live class and coding sessions.

I didn't feel like the coding exercises in the homework assignments on the learn site were very helpful. I'm not sure what would make them better.

I liked the process a lot. Knowing that we had an opportunity to ask questions in class about the reading topics, and knowing that we would be using the concepts we were reading and discussing for our coding sessions provided good motivation to prepare, and the class was structured so we could prepare well. The readings were very helpful, but they were hard to get done. I take a while to process what I read, and it would have been helpful if the readings had been available earlier. I think if they had been posted a full week before the class sessions, I would have been ready to ask more questions in class.

Recommended.

Doing group programming live on cloud9 was fantastic. I never thought attending an experience like this from the confort of my home, sharing the class with folks from all around the globe.

Sometimes the suggested reading was too much for me to do. But that's probably my personal issue.

I really liked working in teams with mentor help. It might have been good to have the whole group read the project assignment before hand so we could just jump right in to coding when the time starts.

It was a great experience overall, but maybe there could be a structure that works more easily with full-time workers. For example, readings and class during the week with an easy project. Then two intense projects during the weekend.

Group work was a bit hard for me sometimes. I am guilty of this as well - especially during the work week real life commitments took away how much I or my teammates could contribute.

Aside from that, I would totally recommend this methodology. Kept me accountable the whole month.

It was great that professors are super kind and helpful.

I feel like a lot of material was just thrown at us. i.e. I did not know how to use the time module and I needed it for the decorator problem. However, we never touched on how to implement those modules. It would be nice to see the professors code more, and see how they solve similar problems. Anyway, I understand that this is how real life works, and getting prepared for that it's also a good experience.

Interesting projects that exposed me to a variety of topics in python.

Sometimes the projects involved libraries that were confusing, and so instead of getting to spending most of the time learning about the topic that we were supposed to be learning, we had to waste a lot of time struggling to understand the other library (e.g. in the decorator project, dealing with logger. Or in the mix-in project, dealing with argparse.). I would suggest that when there is an extra library being used in a project, there should be some practice with it in the learn platform ahead of time, so we can get used to the syntax.

Also, I think having more experience building a project from scratch is important. Having the interface and tests already created is probably 90% of a typical project. And overall project structure (how to structure packages and modules) is something that I don't know much about and wish I had had the chance to practice in this course.

Another issue was when the tests had errors in them that made it impossible to pass the tests. That made the coding sessions frustrating, because we were not just debugging our own code but the tests also.

Finally, I thought there was a big difference in what was taught during the lessons on Wednesday and what we were expected to do in the coding sessions. I found that most of the Wednesday sessions didn't teach me much that I didn't already know from the assigned reading, learn platform, or previous experience. But then when we got to the actual coding session it was far more difficult than what was taught. I think it would be better to assume/require people have done the reading and then teach the class accordingly so that we learn more in the teaching sessions.

That said, I still think it's a great course and methodology. I would totally recommend it.

I loved the intensity and collaborating with other course takers.

I truly enjoyed my experience with the RMOTR guys, I have just two things I'd want to have shared with me if I were a RMOTR owner: 1. I felt a few times that mentors were pushy / overbearing in their 'help' during coding sessions. I had been cut off mid-thought several times while trying to describe my problem + thought processes. Once the mentor saw the issue, I felt flooded with 'xyz' on what to do; most often this left me more confused on what the code was doing and why. 2. I posted in the mentors-help Slack channel twice over the 4 week course, both times it felt slow to have someone get back to me; which I didn't really like in the moment - a good chunk of the Rmotr sales pitch was 'mentored learning', between this and point 1, I'd have to say I feel better mentored by my peers than Rmotr itself. A few checks-and-balances to what I'm saying here: I asked for mentors-help at weird times (e.g. Sunday evening) and I probably should have been in the beginner's camp (as the material was too dense for me to get through in the 4-week time frame). All in all, I'm very happy I chose RMOTR and would give you my business again under the right circumstances. Thanks so much

The people at RMOTR, whether they are the instructors, mentors, or fellow students, are perhaps the best part of the RMOTR experience. Everyone is very helpful, kind, and they all want you to understand the material.

"What follows is my perspective as a student who literally picked up coding earlier this year in January 2017. For others, I under these criticisms may not apply. At multiple points in the course, I found myself in way over my head in terms of the difficulty of the projects. This is both a good and bad thing. It's good because it is helpful to learn difficult concepts. But on the other hand, the feeling of helplessness during some of the projects left me very drained. Especially with further projects on the horizon with even more difficult and novel concepts. For example, after trying to learn one library or module in one project, we are thrown into a new project where we have to tackle even more modules, novel syntax from other frameworks, and even more new syntax from SQL databases. I am happy to try and learn all of these things. But all at once, in a 2-3 hour coding session, is quite daunting. I would have appreciated more practice and familiarity with some of these modules/libraries and concepts outside of the coding sessions. I'm not sure what could or could not be done with the 'learn' environment. In the latter half of the course, 'learn' is used a lot less and while I'm not sure the comparison to the Introductory Course is apt here, but in that course, the 'learn' assignments were much more helpful in preparation for the coding sessions and projects. Lastly, the more difficult projects seem like they would take most people quite some time to complete, necessitating more coding sessions. It can be difficult to arrange times outside the allotted schedule with other students and mentors to get help. P.S. - You guys should clone Jason Symons."