The Firehose Project

I decided to sign for TFP after doing a lot of research looking for the right online part time coding bootcamp for me, and decided for them after taking their free pre-course. I liked this preview a lot (and I took it before they improved it  a few months ago), specially the friendly feeling and how active and close their founders Ken and Marco seemed. That gave me a lot of confindence.

Overall, I’m really happy with my choice and most likely I would do the same choice today, but of course not everything is perfect, or at least lets say that there is room for improvement in some aspects.

The program focus on three different main points:

• Learning to craft webapps mostly via Rails.
• Learning to solve algorithms and learn about typical CS concept or data structures, mostly using Ruby.
• Software Engineering related topics: Agile, SCRUM, TDD etc. You get exposed to them via the final team Project.

To support this, you have one weekly session of an hour with a mentor (I was very happy with mine, by the way, a truly profesional software engineer with a lot of experience in industry and deep knowledge of a lot of technologies including some of the cutting-edge ones). There are also weekly sessions of office hours, and you can always ask Ken or the other guys in the staff who are always glad (and quick) to help-

You are tought how to create webapps via written lessons where you follow a walkthrough to create several apps each one more complex than the previous one, getting exposed both to Rails itself, specially how you can get things done more than how it works, and also to the gems and tools used by developers on a daily basis. You also get exposed to tools like the CLI or Github from minute one. In my opinión, this part of the curriculum is very well executed and the lessons are well designed in progressive complexity.

Regarding algorithms, there are assignments where you have to solve problems or work with data structures. This  is helpful specially for people looking for a career switch, since you learn about things you are going to probably be asked in a interview. You would typically try to solve the problem, and then whether you are able to do it on your own or not, you should check with your mentor to look for ways to refactor or improve. This is the part where you are supposed also to actually learn Ruby.

What I didn’t liked about how this part is planned is that you have to look for ways to improve your knowledge of the language outside the program, cause of the lack of an organized intermediate-advanced course in Ruby. It could be argued that being able to google for stuff and learn on your own is another needed skill, and this is true, but I feel like once you pay for a program, having to go outside to look for somehow basic and expected content about the language or the tools is dissapointing.

This is even more dissapointing given the fact that the pre-work have a pretty good introductory course to Ruby, that I really liked it. I found myself expecting something similar in the lessons, but there isn’t. This is extensive to how the key “theory” concepts are explained. You just have some short video series explaining concepts such as MVC and the basics of Rails, OOP programming, Intro to Javascript etc. In my point of view this is insufficient and this is the weakest point of the program by far. More written content to serve as a guide about the important topics should be a must, specially given the nature of the background most students have.

Lastly you get exposed to software engineering topics such as Agile methodologies in the Final Project. This experience is unvaluable, and something you can only have in a place like this, Granted, you can learn to code and craft apps for free if you are disciplined enough given the huge amount of free content there are outside nowadays, but you can’t have an experience like the Agile Team Project for sure for free. Along 7-8 weeks, you work with your team using Agile methodologies and being guided by a mentor that acts not as a teacher but as a team manager, assigning tasks and defining goals and timings while you make a complex app using all the knowledge you have by this momento, close to the end of the program, and using new tools and workflows where you could actually have a feeling of how it would be to work in a team of developers.

They also have a job assistance curriculum which I still didn't take since I'm not looking for a career change today, but recently they totally re-worked it adding a lot more content.

To summarize, what I liked:

• The healthy and friendly environment, staff deserves a 10/10 and community is also friendly.
• The walkthoughs where you actually build apps.
• The mentorship program.
• The value you get for your money (usually these programs with 1 on 1 mentorship are way more expensive)
• How fast and accurately the staff provides feedback or help.
• How they periodically improve the content.
• The Agile Team final Project.

What I didn’t like:

• If you want to understand and work the technologies, patterns or languages involved or actually learn in an intermediate-advanced level about them, you have to look for content outside. There is a lack of written content apart from the walkthoughs. The video series are not enough in my honest opinion, by far.

Overall though, as I said I'm glad with my experience.

I am about 10 weeks into the Firehose Project curriculum, and it's going great so far. The pacing of the lessons and the regular challenges and exercises are so helpful in solidifying the course materials. I particularly like the written lessons. It's much easier to re-read a sentence or explanation rather than rewinding a video. Finally, the combination of having a personal mentor as well as the important insistence on learning algorithms & computer science fundamentals is what makes Firehose superior to many other bootcamps that I investigated. 

Having a mentor allows you to keep moving through course materials by jotting down something that trips you up during a particular lesson and discussing deeper in a one on one meeting each week. This allows you to keep a steady pace in the lessons and using the mentor sessions to gain clarity on anything you might be confused about. Getting a solid foundation of CS topics are crucial as well. It's one thing to master some syntax, but without understanding how the individual pieces ladder up to efficient, consistent solutions to challenging problems, I imagine you'd have a really tough time landing a job after the program.

So far, I'm really satisfied with my decision to choose Firehose over the other camps on the market.

Note - I haven't gotten to the job assistance portion of the curriculum yet, so I'm not able to rate that at the moment. However, I know they recently revamped that piece and have created a full learning track dedicated to that process, so I'm looking forward to diving into that when the time comes.

I finished The Firehose Project bootcamp 2 years ago and I must say I would highly recommend this course, especially if you are looking for a flexible online course to fit your schedule.

The Experience: the mentor and the course

I had a great experience in the learning environment that was set up by the course. My mentor was not only very knowledgable but also a great teacher. He knows the subject matter very well and was able explain complex things to beginners.

On top of the 1-to-1 mentoring, the Firehose project also built a very supportive community through different forums (weekly office hours, online discussion groups, slack chats, team project, etc.) Students and alumini regularly interact and support each other in these forums. Much of it is down to the students, but the team at the Firehose Project has definitely been instrumental in intentially facilitating that supportive vibe. The different interactive opportunities have also grown substantially since I finished the course and the large network of alumni and students is really inspiring to see.

The Content

It is not until I started working and building projects for clients that I appreciated how much breadth and depth the curriculum covered. The deceptively simple apps that you get to build throughout the course covered a big range of complex technical requirements. The curriculum was also well structured into technical components that you need to learn. When I started building projects from scratch for myself or for clients, I was able to apply what I learned to build things with different requirements.

I like written contents because I can then progress at my own pace without being restricted by the "pace" of videos. Firehose's mix of written content, graphic illustrations, and video contents are well balanced. The style of the written content was very conversational-like, making it really easy to follow and understand.

The Firehose Project also continuously improve, update, and add to the curriculum, so as an alumni, regularly go back to the course content and learn about new topics.

Job Assistance

Throughout the course, you are given good amount of job searching preparation. For me, this mainly focused on the coding challenges that you might encounter during an interview and the team project to give you the experience of working collaboratively. 

You are being given quite a lot of flexibility of how you want to progress in the course. You can either take an "employment" route or a "start your own thing" route, or even both if you are willing to put in the work. Although there is a suggested pace, if you finish the course content sooner, it just means that you can embark on different challenges you and your mentor set for yourself.

I subsequently took a different bootcamp on Data Science with a similar model (self-pace content and mentor). By comparison, I think that The Firehose Project is outstanding. Not only the content is great, you really get a sense that The Firehose Project team cares about the students and always tries to make the learning and the experience better. Well done!

Excellent value for the money. Firehose offers a superb course for much cheaper than the other coding camps I looked at. The course begins with some basic coding and by the end you are building complex apps. I found everything easy to follow and when I got stuck there was plenty of support, from the slack channel to a ticket response system that is surprisingly fast, and also a weekly live video meeting hosted by Ken and Marco where students can ask questions and get help with what they are stuck on.

The mentor system is another high point of TFP. For one hour a week my mentor and I would discuss new concepts and go over things I was having trouble with via webcam. I found this extremely helpful and it adds a whole different layer to the learning experience.

The final project is the agile team project, where 4-5 students work together to build a complex web app under the guidance of a mentor team leader. This simulates what it is like to work on a team in the real world and brings new challenges, and it was a lot of fun. I found the experience valuable and it gave me a taste of what to expect in the workplace as a programmer.

Overall, I would highly recommend the Firehose Project. If you want to take a deep dive in ruby on rails and learn how to code, this is the place. There is a strong focus on learning how to code the right way, and this will help no matter what language you end up using. 

Looking through my experiences I have had in The Firehose Project, I know the journey is just beginning for me. I'd known for awhile that coding was in my mindset, but for a long time felt lost and stalled by all the seemingly endless routes to take. 

That all changed with this coding bootcamp.

This gives you real, hands on experience of what it is like to fully deploy working, quality web apps alongside great people that do so on a professional basis. It's given me a can-do attitude for a field that piques my interest to keep myself going, with quality communication being highly valued.

I've since landed a comfortable, variable-by-day position that uses many aspects that came to life going through the course, applied now in working extensively with databases both physically, and on the computer interface.

The mentors are personalized specifically to your case, so that check-ins with them are especially productive times. Every step taken feels meaningful.

There are also several community group channels to partake in with fellow Firehosers taking on the same work as you, along with weekly Office Hours for true live discussion. Exceptional work is going on behind the scenes here to make this all happen, and I am very happy to have joined The Firehose Project. They are there for you every step of the way and beyond.

I finished The Firehose Project’s curriculum in late October of 2016 and am extremely happy with the program and all that I learned throughout the 22-week course. Before deciding to enroll in a bootcamp, I had tried learning JavaScript and Ruby on my own, but never made any progress due to analysis paralysis around all the tutorials and material available for learning. One of the best aspects of the program is being able to set aside that thinking and follow their well planned out lessons, which teach you what you need to know, when you need to know it.

The curriculum is project-based, so you jump right into building a functioning Ruby on Rails web application, and continue with more web app projects that build on what you just learned. With algorithm challenges throughout the program and a focus on learning object-oriented programming, I felt like I received a great foundation in programming concepts. Getting an introduction to agile methodologies in the final group project turned out to be very valuable in the job search process — being able to talk about that experience played a large part in my landing an Associate Software Engineer position after finishing the course.

Between the course’s Slack channels, weekly office hours sessions and weekly calls with a senior developer-level mentor, there’s always someone available to help with questions. The curriculum is structured as written and video tutorials, so the entire program was very easy to fit into my lifestyle, which was very important to me. Students have lifetime access to the curriculum as well, which has already come in very handy when I needed to brush up on some JavaScript concepts. The Firehose Project turned out to be an incredibly smart investment in my personal development and I highly recommend the program.

So far I have gotten through the HTML/CSS and Ruby section of Firehose's free online pre-course, and it's been superb. You build a very basic website with HTML/CSS, then you move into building a foundation in Ruby. The lessons and coursework are ordered and presented in such a way that you're able pick up things quickly, and your challenge submissions are reviewed usually sameday by a Firehose expert. If the full course is anything like the precourse, I plan on taking it!

I can’t say enough great things about Marco, Ken, and the Firehose Project. Thanks to everything I learned, I not only was confident enough to code the website for my law practice (monroemannlaw.com), personal brand (monroemann.com), and my not for profit, Break Diving (breakdiving.org), but I also learned enough to recruit and lead an all-volunteer coding team to build Break Diving’s Terms of Service Fairness Project hosted on Heroku at www.tosfairness.org. Oh, and I’m building websites for others now too, and teaching them how to code! While I had a bit of coding experience coming in to this program, nothing really made sense. Firehose brought everything together. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t applaud Ken, Marco, and Brita for offering me a special payment plan based on my current financial needs.  If you don’t think you can afford the program (yeah, it IS expensive), talk to Ken and Marco. Explain how passionate you are about the program. I know they will bend over backwards to try to accommodate you. And don’t give up until you figure out a way to finance it. I wouldn’t be the head of a growing coding team now were it not for what I learned at Firehose. Are many of the coders working under me much better a coder than I am? Hands down yes (and I’m learning from them). But The Firehose Project taught me enough that I can lead this team in their own language and actively contribute to the project as a junior full-stack developer. I tried many other online coding programs. None of them seemed to be as simply constructed, as cleanly presented, or as incredibly supportive as Firehose. Oh, and when you graduate, if you want to join Break Diving’s awesome coding team, you can apply at www.breakdiving.org/volunteer  We’ve got multiple exciting projects all in various stages of development.  We’d love to welcome you aboard. 

When I found the Firehose Project it was about the fifth bootcamp prep I had taken for a test run in as many days. I didn't mean to keep coming back to the lessons because I thought I wanted something with more JavaScript up-front, but the first section on HTML was so engaging that I stuck around for more. I've been "shopping" around, trying to find a bootcamp prep program that was both challeging but not impossible and the supportive nature of the online set-up was another unexpected bonus. I wish the videos continued into the other sections of the program, but other than that I highly recommend it.

Currently taking the "Free Bootcamp Prep" course." Doing this will pretty much let you know if this stuff is "for you" or not. It starts out with basic HTML and CSS and transitions you into learning Ruby, which is awsome stuff by the way. The way it is taught is perfection. When learning HTML and CSS, you are taught via video by Ken (CEO). Everything is explained with perfection and choice of words is great so that noobies are not left behind. I'm really happy i decided to take this up. I have always wanted to work with computers, and learn how to program, and here we are.

IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST in becoming a web developer/software engineer, please please please do not hesitate to take the "FREE Bootcamp Prep" course. The amount of content that is taught to you for free, it would be silly for anyone not to try it. Another massive plus to this is that Ken and Marco (CEOs) actually care about their students and their students futures, you are able to communicate with them, ask them questions, etc, that is a MAJOR PLUS.

 I plan on going through the "flexible program" (part time) as I work a full time job 8-10 hours a day and transition my career to being a full stack web developer. I will make sure to post another review in the future after I finish the part-time program.

Since I decided that I wanted to pursue education through The Firehose Project, I have been constantly surprised by the amount of prompt responses I have received from advisors and help from other students and teachers. I have been working through the Free Bootcamp Prep course to help prepare me for the program I chose. Everything is easy to navigate and I am excited to continue on. I was also very impressed by how easy it was to navigate through the financing options that are offered. I am excited to learn more and see what I can accomplish.

I have been a front-end web developer awhile ago when knockout.js was popular. I took different jobs inbetween and wanted to jump back to Web development as I realized that it is my passion. I wanted to understand the behind the scenes of front-end part of web development. So I started exploring my options. I learned that Ruby-on-Rails is fantastic framework for learning full stack. I decided to go with Firehose project, as they had mentor program which is lacking in many other programs.

I finished my course last year. I am happy that I took the course with them. These guys are awesome! There was always some one to answer your questions including Ken and Marco. I used to get clarifications to my questions within minutes. They have very good mentor program and support group which helped me keep going. They encourage you to ask questions and answer it with right amount of detail. They also have office hours. 

You will learn based on the amount of time and effort you put in each and every one of your projects. These projects will look great on your profile. The area where I live does not have that many opportunities for this technology. But whatever few interview calls I got is because of the projects I did during this course. If you have no work experiance, the group project will give a great exposure to the current agile methodology and CI.

I have just finished going through the prepwork at The Firehose Project. I would like to say how impressed I am with the amount of support I received while working through the prepwork, even though it was completely free. I have worked through another bootcamps(which i won't mention) prepwork and although the work itself was great and informative I did not have any support through it and therefore was unsure if the code I wrote was good, bad or ugly. 

I am looking forward to getting stuck into the full program at The Firehose Project and will come back here to write a full review!! Coming soon... to a web browser near you!

So I am one of those folks who are totally new to programming and decided that it would be a good plan to find a structured course with a mentor.  The learning curve has been tough thus far but I have found that if I keep reviewing the info they provide and just keep plugging away, I do start to figure things out eventually.  I think no matter what course you might sign up for there is a lot of vocabulary and new concepts to learn, so be prepared for your brain to hurt at times.
I have really appreciated that help is always there and is really quick to respond to one of those moments where I have exhausted trying to figure it out on my own.  I also really love having a mentor who I can ask all of my "stupid" questions to.

The Firehose project.  Where do I start?  I'm 1 month into the six month intensive.  Let me begin with an unpleasant prior experiences at a different school.  

Galvanize.  Horrible!  I took an introductory javascript course at their in person school in Boulder, CO.  To sum it up briefly, it was a horrible waste of time and money.  The in person schools are too expensive.  You can get an excellent education at the various online schools that are available.  Firehose is one of them.

FreeCodeCamp.  This is a safe place to start.  Or choose from the several other FREE online introductory programs.  It's free and the beginning of the course is a great way to introduce you to some of the most basic concepts.  Although it's great at introducing you to the basic concepts of programming, it doesn't explain in an intelligible way the more complex concepts.  Start with the easy stuff, and once you get to the point where you are about to pull your hair out, move on to something a little bit more polished and user friendly.  

Udemy.  This is another great place for beginners to start.  The courses are about $10 and they are extremely well done.  Again, once you get to the more complex concepts, you need to move on to a place that will slowly spoon feed you information in a clear and intelligible way.

That brings me to The Firehose Project.  After you have gotten your feet wet, and you have taken the free beginner's course at Firehose, you are ready to get serious.  I am enrolled in a 6 month intensive that covers topics ranging from CSS to complex algorithms.  I was hesitant to give a review so early into the curriculum, but I think it's safe to say that this is a great online school.  The curriculum is written in a way that is easy to understand.  I already built a couple of sites, and I'll start on my third one soon.  There is a forum at the bottom of every lesson where you can ask questions.  Ken, one of the mentors, usually gets back to me within 5 minutes, even if it's late at night.  That guy is the man.  I will be updating this review once I finish with the program.  For now, I give it 5/5 stars.  Save your money and go with Firehose.  Forget about the in person schools.  Most of them are a nightmare anyway.  Firehose has helped me understand many key concepts that have already allowed me to add some cool features to my sites.  This is an excellent choice for those of you who are really serious about becoming a software engineer.    

This is a great bootcamp.  Be prepared for a full 40 hrs/week and sometimes more (for the accelerated bootcamp).

I'm grateful for the access to great learning tools and the aptitude to enjoy them so much. I'm grateful I can afford them after being unemployed for almost two years now. I'm switching from Engineering back to coding after about an 11 year span in engineering work. I want more creativity, challenge and self-direction than is available in my previous work. The substantial pay cut is painful - zero pay now and surely low for my first junior coding roles - but I want the creativity vs. just "doing" and it will be worth the trade. The income will improve one day, but the enjoyment starts right away. I'm very grateful and excited about the change and the new opportunities.

The prep course is amazing!

There is forum support for each lesson within the prep course and the response times to the questions are so quick and helpful! The prep course teaches the fundamentals of programming in well thought out lessons with learn by example challenges.  These challenges also have a submission process in which they are reviewed and you are given feedback on parts to improve upon. The cherry on top is it is completely free!

I am currently wrapping up my agile group project with Firehose. It has been an amazing experience, and this was a huge reason why I chose this program. I am on the job hunt, and many job ads mention that they prefer someone with experience in an Agile group project. This also means that you have experience using Slack, Trello, and collaborating with Git, which is also mentioned in many job ads. With all the many things out there in tech world that I still don't have experience with, every one I can "check off" is a win for me. We covered a lot lot of skills in the program, including algorithms and complicated math stuff. I am not a natural in this arena, so Firehose's mentor project sold me here. I was paired with a mentor, which has been seriously valuable. He is very skilled with alogrithms and teaching math stuff to me, and he breaks it up into understandable chunks. He gives me advice as I enter the job hunt, and I am so sad to be finished with him and with the program. Highly recommended! I did work full time and I completed the part time. If you can, I say do the full time accelerated because being in it 24/7 is hard, but also makes it stick.

I spent a lot of time researching bootcamps, and I almost started at an in-person bootcamp. I liked the Firehose Project's honesty in their blog: The Definitive Guide to Choosing a Bootcamp, the 2 week bootcamp prep content, and how responsive Marco (one of the founders) was when I had questions. Doing an online bootcamp required more discipline and a lot more effort in networking, but for me it was worth it. Now I'm a software engineer!

What The Firehose Project did well:

• Weekly mentor meetings: Having these scheduled with someone there personally for me was useful in motivating me to keep going even when things were challenging, and of course I had someone to ask all my questions.
• Algorithms & data structures: This really differentiated this bootcamp from others I had researched. I'm glad they made me struggle through these because it was absolutely helpful in learning the core of programming by thinking in a way to break things down and problem solve better. Ultimately I use this in my daily work as a software engineer.
• Career Prep: There's a TON of content on preparing your resume, social media presence, networking which I found to be pretty important. Also I liked that during the career prep track you're also supposed to continue working on technical problems to keep your coding/problem solving skills sharp.
• Interesting Web Development Projects: I liked the variety of technologies and tools used to build the applications throughout the bootcamp. It was nice having them build up incrementally in difficulty and amount of tools needed to learn as you gained more experience. Compared to other bootcamp students I talked to, some of the Firehose Project's applications were more challenging.
• Cost: At the time I paid $6500 for almost 6 months, which was way cheaper than courses I saw of the same caliber.

What could have improved:

• More Concrete Resources during Mentorship: My mentor was really smart and kind, but I wish that I could have had more direction in what we did during our meetings. I appreciated that he left a lot of it up to me but I had a hard time knowing what I didn't know and what to focus on. 
• Emphasis on Networking only toward the end: At least when I was at the Firehose Project, they encouraged going to networking events during the career prep section at the end. I started going to tech meetups from the beginning of the 6 months and this was incredibly beneficial for me, even though I had no idea what anyone was talking about most of the time. It was key to talk to people, make connections, and learn new things in tech.

Overall, I had a good experience with the Firehose Project. If I would do it over again I would make the same choice.

I started looking into coding as a possible career change roughly 10 months ago.  I have a son and a full time job, so doing a full time immersive bootcamp wasn't an option.  After finishing most of the courses on Codecademy and completing Watch and Code I decided to apply to Hack Reactor.  I finished most of their prep course and structured study program, but ultimately didn't find much actual teaching and didn't feel comfortable with what I was doing.  

I started looking around for a different option and found The Firehose Project.  Most of the reviews that I found were positive and the price was far better than most other options, so I decided to sign up for the prep course.  Their method of teaching is a little hand-holdy compared to Hack Reactor, but so far in my experience it's been really effective and covers a wider range of front end development right from the start (instead of making you solely solve Javascript challenges).  

Several times in the prep course you are required to submit your solutions to different problems using Ruby, and those solutions are checked by their staff (sometimes by the co-founder - Ken Mazaika), where they review your code and offer you hints on how to make it more concise if needed.  You also build an entire working portfolio / website before you even start the bootcamp.  Initially, I thought that I would need to be in an actual classroom to learn anything, but this course has felt way more personal than anything that I've tried so far. 

I'm really excited to be starting the bootcamp this coming Monday.  

After learning on my own through websites and YouTube videos, I even tried another bootcamp, I have learned so much more in the first 6 weeks I have been through this program then I ever did on my own or with the other bootcamp I tried and decided to quit.  Extremely happy with the cirriculum and mentor.  Mentor really pushes me to think like a developer instead of just going through the motions.  

The ciriculum is easy to read and follow, showing exactly what to code and what to expect to happen from your code.  And if any errors develop and you get stuck, current and former students discussions are right there to help you out.  I have never felt alone in this program and am very pleased with the support in the Firehose community.

I have done weeks and weeks of research on which bootcamp would be best for me.  And with Firehose going sticking on mainly one MVC rather than a little of everything approach, focusing on algorithims, and Agile you really cannot go wrong with what they off for the price.

i will head this review off by saying that this was written as part of a competition to win a prize by ekaving feedback. There that is off my chest, now onto the review.

I have not yet completed the on boarding but I have been bow,ed over by the whole positivity and encouragement as I attempt to muddle my way through the Ruby on Rails set of lessons.

Articles for each lesson are descriptive and easy to read, I found that some of the code excerpts could be a little misleading at times, but if you reread it then everything should make sense. If not you can always ask a question in the forum.

One of the best parts of the whole experience. The team are ultra responsive and helpful, they always reply within a few hours to upto 48 hours and with full descriptive answer to your code related queries. Top notch!

I cannot reinstate it enough, the onboarding is so worth doing!

I started by taking the free 2 week course, thinking it would be boring like other free courses. I was surprised to learn it was fun and well structured. I created ruby programs and the first part of my portfolio during the free portion. 

What impressed me the most during the free period was the ability to get help.  If i had a problem, i would post it to the discussion board and I usually got a response within 1 hour or 2 at the most. Unless it was after 9 pm at night.  

The lessons are well structured with a variety of challenges, quizz's, and videos to do throughout the entire course on top of the lessons.  The timeline can be a bit confusing as you are going through it. I found myself rushing at times because I am part of the accelerated program. I learned to slow down to better absorb the material.  They are always improving the courses so I have seen better information on my dashboard in regards to timelines.  Your mentor can also tell you if you are on track or not. 

My computer wouldnt work with vagrant so I ended up using cloud9 for my dev environment.  This made it challenging sometimes to initially setup the applications. I saved the initial instructions so I could easily do it myself. 

I ended up going through 2 mentors until I found one I really clicked with.  This was important because they help you with the challenges.  Mentors can assign additional work. I was overwhelmed with the addiitional work from my first mentor and wanted to quit.  I contacted customer service and they quickly helped me find a new mentor who didnt really mesh with me at all.  Finally, I was matched up with Rose, who is a fabulous mentor! I also found a local ruby on rails meetup, i highly reccommend going to meetups for additional help and learning.  

The office hours are good. The topics vary. Both Marco and Ken (founders of the firehose project) host these. It was very cool to see them interacting with everyone (they use Zoom). 

I am currently starting the group project which is to build a chess game app.  I was a bit overwhemled by my first task which was to chose and integrate a CI. I went with Travis CI. I was able to get it done and now I have another skill I can add to my resume.  

I signed up for this bootcamp because of the ability to get help, mentoring, algorythims, and the group project at the end. 

I can't answer anything about job prep because iam not on that section yet.  

Firehose project's free bootcamp prep course has been an awesome experience.

It is exceptionally well structured, with a great UI and user experience. The content is top notch and project based so you'll get you into building mode quickly. While building a Portfolio website from the ground up to deploy, you are introduced to fundamental concepts in HTML and CSS and then an to Ruby with some challenges/ algorithms to brainstorm over.

The outstanding feature in this prep course is the code review and feedback. I am not talking test suite and clever errors logs. Even at that stage you are assigned a mentor that will provide timely and constructive feedback on your code submission. How to name variable, refactor your code, alternative way of resolving an algorithm...the real deal. 

Thanks a lot for providing the free bootcamp prep and getting me started, I shall join you on the full software Engineering and web development track. Let's drink from the firehose :) 

Having a job coding hadn’t always been a dream of mine. I wasn’t really aware of all the possibilities or paths you could take and never really knew anyone that had much knowledge about it. Once graduating high school I found out that my cousin had become a programmer. After talking to him for a bit I decided that is what I was going to go to college for, programming. After getting an Associates’ in Computer Science I attempted to find jobs where I could develop my skills and expand. Sadly, I was unable to find a job, internship, or anything and this discouraged me so I stopped school and went on a different career path.

Five years later, now having a wife, 10 week old child, and a job working upwards to 16 hours a day multiple times a week, it was time for a change. Going back to the cousin I talked to previously, I asked him what I can do. His reply, “Anything in web development. Seriously, it is booming and where the world is moving. There are a bunch of coding bootcamps out there that teach people how to code for the fraction of schooling costs.” I had not even heard of the term bootcamp before, so I started my research. I was quickly flooded with bootcamps and apprenticeships and training schools and started getting excited.

I talked it over with my wife, weighed the books to make sure we could afford the risk, and decided we would use our tax returns to invest in a better future. Before making a rash decision I told myself I would wait a minimum of two weeks before making a decision. Being stuck between two options at the end of the two weeks, I decided to reach out to them and try to have a 1-on-1 discussion with them on “why I should choose them.” The first option I received what seem to be a populated generic response with a tiny bit of customization added to it. This put me off quite a bit… So, onto the second option, Firehose. I received a very prompt response pertaining specifically to the questions I asked along with an offer to jump on a call and talk about my concerns. My decision was made right there, I was seen as a person and not a number. After the call my decision was solidified and I signed up for their prep course.

After completing the prep and being accepted to Firehose Project, I started in the middle of March. I honestly don’t know where to start when pointing out the amazing things they have to offer. I think the best part for me was that it was 100% virtual. With my crazy schedule and time constraints, there was no possible way for me to attend an in-person training program.

Alongside the course being entirely online, there are weekly 1-on-1 mentor sessions with senior web developers, algorithms and coding challenges to build up your skills on programming logic, multiple applications that you build and publish to the web, and forums at the end of each lesson to ask questions when you get stuck. On top of that, their amazing Team Project gives you the skills of working on an agile development team. Did I mention the job preparation resources you get access to, and having lifetime access to the materials in the course?

Fast-forward through the course and I don’t have a single negative about the course. Yes it was hard-work and yes I had quite a few nights with little sleep, but this didn’t have to do with the course, it had to deal with my crazy schedule and life. The Firehose has since developed options for different paces since I graduated to account for students like myself. I am now employed by Firehose as a Web Developer. Looking back now at what I thought was a risk is really one of the easiest and smartest decision I’ve ever made.

I was 2 months in the bootcamp and due to personal issues I had to leave, but looking foraward to come back. The program was amazing, for someone that had no experience in coding like me was really great to start getting all the knowledge from scratch. I was able to learn the basics of MVC, how to browser communicates with the server, ruby language, and many other stuff. The lessons are well explained - very detailed - and if you have any question you can ask your mentor and he kindly will help you. I did the first two projects, Splurty and Nomster and both were really great to learn the basics until something more complex.

The management team was always in contact with you for any particular issue you have, they are really supporting and giving you any advice on how to take the best advantage of the program. 

My mentor has great experience in rails framework and he was always giving some advice on how to have good practices and teaching new stuff that was not in the program.

Overall, the experience was really great and I will recommend it to anyone that want to get into the programming world.  I didn´t take the job prep so I can not comment about it.

Regards,

Ivan 

First off, I honestly think Firehose is one of the better options for Bootcamps and if any of my friends where thinking about it I would definitely recommend it to them. 11/10. That being said, I kind of do think that I got as much as I did out of it because I was lucky enough to be living with relatives during my time of study and didn't have to worry about expenses or housing. I'm not sure I would have been able to get as much as I did if I was working full-time or even a part-time job.

As for the good parts, I think the mentor system was amazing for my learning. Just being able to ask questions face-to-face really changed things. I know I could have asked in emails, but being able to ask questions as they come up in your head or being able to get further explanations right on the spot was amazing in my opinion. I also enjoyed that there was no real "thing" that we "had to do" (no pre-determined task) in the mentor sessiosn so I could come up with extra things not in the curriculum (questions about JavaScript frameworks i.e. React or build smaller side projects with external APIs) or things in the curriculum that I wanted to expand on. I also really enjoyed the self paced nature of the program. I could take time on certain things or speed past parts I already got a grasp on.

The group project was also an amazing experience. When I started it I really felt like I was using what I had learned in a "real" programming setting. The evolving code base was something really cool to experience. I would maybe put a little more guidance in the tasks. I felt as though we were really just free balling it and at some points no one really knew if they were doing things correctly. But maybe that's the point and figuring out how to work together is important. I however sort of wished we could get our code reviewed by the mentor who was leading the project, as most of us didn't have any coding experience and thus most of the time weren't able to give that good feedback and eventually devolved to just everyone saying "looks good to me". Honestly though as I started working at my company we basically do the same things we did in the group project (daily standups, weekly retrospectives, code reviews) so nothing really felt foriegn and I was able to get the ball rolling on day one. 

Lastly, I'm not sure if this belongs in the program but having a little guidance on how to read code would have been nice. Before ending the program I was trying to contribute to some open source projects online only to find myself really overwhelmed by what was happening. Even as I started work the code base was huge and there were many coding patterns (decorator objects, form objects) that I didn't understand and had to take time to learn. But again that might just be something that you learn on the job so I'm not entirely sure it belongs in the curriculum.

Overall, I got exactly what I wanted out of the program and enjoyed it thoroughly. I don't really understand why people online say bootcamps are a waste of time because I learned so much through firehose. It might be possible that people who give bad reviews didn't put any effort in because it does take some work but it is really worth it if you want to pursue this field as a career. 

I'm a recent graduate of the Firehose Project. I took the full-time course and graduated on time. I feel that the course was worth every penny, the quality of the instructional materials and the ability to get help in a timely manner made the course well worth it. You don't have to deal with outdated or old materials that the cadre have failed to make relevant or reflect the latest changes in code. If you're stuck there's a forum and slack channel to ask questions in and I don't believe that I had a single question that it took longer than an hour to get help with and none of the responses failed to fix the issues that I was dealing with.

I'm also enrolled in a traditional college CS course and I can say without a doubt the things that I've learned more in the 22 weeks of the project than I've learned in almost 3 years of school. I can't stress enough how fast you get up and running building applications and understanding concepts with this course. 

Mentor sessions are another great feature of the course, once a week you're able to meet with a mentor who's a professional in the software industry and ask questions about the course material, employment, pretty much anything. My mentor and I had a great working relationship and we plan to maintain contact now that I'm through with the course. 

The Firehose Project provides a ton of job placement advice and materials. While I personally am not actively hunting for a job in the software industry at the moment. I've known a number of graduates who've gone on to gain employment shortly after the course. That being said, these were incredibly motivated individuals who took the hustle to heart and started out griding applications as soon as they were able. 

To sum up, the Firehose Project was a great experience and I've experienced nothing but exceptional support throughout the entire program. 

Last year, when I was looking for a program that would work well for me, I had some specific requirements: a remotely accessible curriculum, good reviews of mentorship, and a price I could afford. Firehose met those requirements and the two-week trial gave me a feel for what I would be getting myself into.

The curriculum at Firehose starts off with the basics of Ruby on Rails (a healhty understanding of HTML and CSS would be a good idea), creating a database, and accessing that database to create a simple, dynamic website. Later lessons introduce you to Ruby Gems (a way to implement useful programs and libraries into your own project), interactive JavaScript (i.e. dynamic sorting), and common frameworks such as Bootstrap and jQuery. Despite the guided layout of the curriculum, there is plenty of room for customization on the student's end and readily available Ruby on Rails resources offer up limitless learning potential.

The greatest value I derived from the program was my weekly interaction with my mentor and the final 8-week team project. I used my mentor sessions to asks questions related to the curriculum, but also to delve into topics that were specifically interesting to me. It was enlightening to get a professional perspective from an experienced developer; I found his insight to be useful in determining what additional topics to study on my own. The team project was an eye-opening introduction into team dynamics, working towards a common goal, distributing workloads, and facing real challenges as they relate to software development.

I attended weekly office hours at the start and found the exposure to advanced questions a nice glance of what was to come. Each lesson module allows a student to post questions specific to that module and the Firehose staff are quick with responses.

Ultimately, Firehose gets you started on a path with great potential, but you will have to do the legwork. Even in my current role as a beginning developer, there is so much I'm still continuing to learn. Firehose was a great start to that.

This is my first experience with any online study course and i must say i am plesantly surprised how well it is going. Ken is extremely good at explaining the concepts and simplifies everything for a novice like me. The support team is equally encouraging and keeps track of your progress and prompt at answering questions. I am really pleased to have joined this online course and aim to register for the full course soon!

I am doing quite a few prep courses! Firehose has been the best so far.  Nice intro to HTML + CSS and some ruby code.  There was a lot of flexibility in completing the prep so that was great because I work full-time in support at a start up.  

• The feedback is quick and easy to digest and apply. 
• The price point cannot be beat.
• Flexible plans to pay for it if you do not want to front the $$$$
• Full stack 
• Other courses available to expand on

I am not sure if they offer job assistance but I already work in the tech space so I do not really need that.