The Firehose Project

I delayed writing a review. I have been busy with our business and grad school studies.

I enrolled in The Firehose Project in May 2017 as a fulltime student.

I will keep in as brief as possible.

The TEAM is amazing.  They are super repsonsive, super helpful and super knowledgeable, and it seems never sleep.

The course program: as a new programming student... I had no experience, only bravado.  The coursework is challenging but fair and quite extensive.  It will get anyone off and running and give them the tools to explore the Ruby and Ruby on Rails language in detail.

Overall: I highly recommend attending The Firehose Project, it is the best bang for the buck.  You won't be dissappointed.

One thing: I have not explored the career advice from them, since I am still a business owner and grad student.  I won't be preparing to enter the job force until next year.

I am a career switcher and I found FHP to be the perfect fit for me! Each lesson was super engaging and like a good book...I found I couldn't wait to get to the next 'chapter' after each lesson was done.

FHP also has a very supportive team that help students get over road blocks. Ken and Marco (the co-founders) are very engaged and accessible. When you can see their passion it makes you excited to accomplish any coding challenge you may have in front of you.

I graduated in the early summer and just got a job as a Full Stack Developer. I had no official training in coding before I started with FHP. I now have a career doing something I am absolutely passionate about...thank you FHP!

I am starting my journey on coding and I have taken a couple online prep courses but The Firehose Project was by far the most interactive, easy to understand and result oriented free class I have come across. 

I was able to learn as i was building a real project so everything made so much more sense to me. The videos are easy and the way the lessons are make sense.

When I was finish and could see my page, it gave me a strong sense of pride and motivation.

I have moved to next chapter and I am doing the Ruby and finding even more exciting!

Can't wait to what's to come. 

I took the free 2-week "Pre-Course" offered by The Firehose Project mainly to check them out. I got more than I had bargained for!

The lessons were clear, well-structured, and fun. First I learned a bunch of html and css, then some basic Ruby, then more html and css. 

But the best part was HOW I learned these things: Over the two weeks I built a portfolio page advertising myself as a software engineer and featuring code I had written myself!

By the end I realized with a shock that I no longer thought of myself as someone who MIGHT someday learn enough to be a web developer. I AM a software engineer in the process of learning more of my craft!

Signing up for the full program was a no-brainer. :-)

I was all set to sign up for another online boot camp when I learned about the special feature only The Firehose Project offered: experience working with a real agile team creating a chess game two people can play that implements all the usual chess rules.

It seemed obvious to me that potential employers would be more interested in a boot camp graduate with this experience working on a team than in someone with equivalent “classroom learning” but without that experience.

So I checked student reviews and found other things to like. 

If you’ve read other reviews, this will sound repetitious, but I found that they were right! Doing the accelerated 22-week program, I found that:

• • Yes it took pretty much full time, but if I put in 6+ hours a day I could keep up. (Like any online program, doing this successfully WILL require a good deal of self-discipline! That includes the discipline to get up and MOVE frequently throughout the day, or you’ll get very STIFF as I did at first.
  • I’m changing careers (I’ve been a corporate trainer for several decades and want to stop spending all that time on the road), and found the program completely worked for me - challenging but doable, with NO prior experience with coding. (If you’d like to read about my experience, check out my blog at https://medium.com/@kalen7/a-surprising-career-change-93ad8f58d8df.

• • The lessons were well-structured, well-presented, clear and engaging, because they consistently taught principles of effective programming and web development along the way to creating real working apps. This both gave me a real feeling of progress and built up a portfolio I’ll be able to share with potential hiring managers.
    
    I DEFINITELY suggest following their recommendation of typing every line of code yourself. I discovered that one of my biggest sources of code that didn’t work was simple typos; by the end of the program I had gotten a lot better at simply looking at code and SEEING the typos because I knew by then what the code SHOULD look like. This meant I was really understanding what the code was doing AND the syntax that made it do that. This takes longer but is very much worth it.
  • Because the features of the apps we were building are ones I’d be likely to actually USE later (creating forms and saving user input to a database, authenticating users, uploading images and streaming videos, storing those images and videos on Amazon Web Services, processing credit card payments etc. I built up a set of notes that will save me huge amount of time when it comes to implementing features like those “for real.”
  • I discovered that I could indeed use what I’d learned to create an app for myself from scratch that I use as a dashboard every day to test goals and tap into beauty, weather reports, and inspiration (including from TED talks).
  • In addition to the prepared lessons, there’s a weekly “Office Hours” session where people can ask the top guys at Firehose anything at all. This means I got to ask questions of my own and also learn from answers to questions I had not thought to ask. (They allowed enough time to answer every question posed, even if the session ran over a bit.)
  • Unlike the usual situation when doing free tutorials online, the Firehose Project has full-time mentors responding to questions, so as I went through the lessons if something wasn’t working for me I never stayed stuck for long. I would post a question to the mentors, get up and walk around the house to stretch, and by the time I came back I nearly always had an answer waiting for me so I could move ahead.
  • The Firehose Project also provided an excellent 1-on-1 mentor for me to meet with every week for an hour to ask any deeper questions I had, talk about programming in general, push me to work on complex data algorithms and help me understand WHY the stuff we were learning about developing apps worked the way it did, give job-finding advice - any way I wanted to spend the time. Invaluable!
  • The Firehose people reached out to me via email several times to ask how I was doing, as well as paying attention to the notes I made on my weekly meetings with my mentor. For the first few weeks I had a mentor who was “OK” but mentioned that I wasn’t learning as much from him as I had hoped. I thought of asking for a different mentor but decided he was “good enough” and I was still learning a good deal, but when I expressed that they placed me with a different mentor who was FABULOUS.  So if there’s anything about this program that is NOT working superbly for you, I recommend making sure they KNOW that. They do seem to care a lot about student experience and will work with you to fix whatever’s not working.
  • There’s a VERY complete set of lessons with job-finding advice - everything from how to present yourself well via resume and portfolio through how to prepare for and make it through the job interviewing process and what to do your first day in your new job. (I rated everything about the program 5 stars except the Job Assistance section which I rated 4 stars: What they provide is excellent, but I would be even happier if they had provided two more kinds of assistance):
                1) Because the toughest part of getting hired seems to be the “technical interview” where an interviewer will ask me to solve computer challenges in real time on a white board, I’d like to have had more help preparing for that. To their credit, the Firehose People DID suggest a resource that was just what I needed: “Interview Cake.” (Google it!) It costs $200 and I think it’s worth every penny, but I wish they had rolled it in to their program or provided something similar.
               2) Some boot camps have arrangements with companies or headhunters that they claim increase the odds of newbies getting hired. Links with companies who are hiring would of course be best!
  • And the Agile team experience? It was everything I’d hoped for and more. The team lead, Jacob, was tremendously generous with his time - I had several Google Hangout sessions where I learned a tremendous amount about how to get complex things done through code. And working with the others folks was illuminating and occasionally exasperating and ultimately very satisfying just as a “real” team would be. I’m now in a position to talk about some REAL experience producing a product on a timetable!
  • So did I finish the program ready to get a job? Yes and no. Yes, I actually feel ready to DO the work of a web developer. No in that after applying a couple of places (and getting the response “your skills don’t match what we need”) I started taking seriously that most of the jobs in my area (Tampa, Florida) are looking either for php or C#. What I got from the program was a great grounding in Ruby on rails and JavaScript. So I decided to do a crash course in php. (The best resource I’ve found is at Laracasts. Free, but excellent. BECAUSE I have the grounding I got at the Firehose Project, I’ve been able to quickly move through the tutorial and UNDERSTAND what I’m learning! As the Firehose people said, once you know a couple of languages, picking up another isn’t hard.) So a little over month after graduating from Firehose, I’m about to relaunch my job-finding program.
  • In the meantime, would I recommend The Firehose Project? Without reservation! If what you’re looking for is a way to get a solid foundation for a career as a software engineer QUICKLY with support from truly helpful, highly effective people, DO it!

I started the bootcamp program in November 2015 back when it was an intensive 15-week course and I had no prior background in programming (I had previously only dabbled in some HTML & CSS courses online). I was looking for a structured program to take my coding learning experience to the next level as I have great difficultly learning from content that is not contextualized; in other words, online learning programs left me frustrated and not understanding how a piece of knowledge is applicable in reality.

The course structure is laid out very well and Ken Mazaika does a phenomenal job in explaining each concept clearly and concisely. The contrast is made even more stark when I watch content produced by similar instructors; Ken knows his stuff inside out and more importantly, is able to use the right terms and analogies to help students understand a new concept.

The course also includes lessons on algorithms but this was one area that I felt was a little lacklustre; it was intimidating to get into and did not provide much guidance in tackling the problems (students were to work through these challenges with their assigned mentors). This - combined with the fact that my assigned mentor was not too familiar with how the Firehose Project curriculum was structured - meant that the aspect of algorithms was a little glossed over, in my case. Perhaps the mentors could be more exposed to the Firehose Project coursework so that they can better prepare sessions with their students.

Also, one point to note for students not based in the US: during my time on the program, it was mildly frustrating whenever I had the opportunity to work on the program during the daytime (I'm on Singapore GMT+8 time) which meant that there weren't any available instructors online to help with troubleshooting. If there are instructors assigned to handle queries across different timezones in future, that would be really helpful.

Overall, I think TFP is an amazing option for anyone looking to get into programming. The fact that it's a remote bootcamp makes it an attractive option to individuals who need to balance this with maintaining a day job. I have recommended it to several friends and acquaintances whenever the topic of learning to code comes up, and I would continue to recommend it because I love their curriculum and the brevity of the content.

I have been a student in TFP's free online course for just under a week now, and I have to say, I'm very impressed with this school so far. Two things have stood out to me: 

1. The lesson content is easy to follow and even fun! Although I had learned the basics of Javascript and Python prior to enrolling in this course, I had not written a single line of HTML/CSS. One day after starting this course, I had built a basic portfolio page hosted on an actual website. I was hooked from the very first lesson, and I'm enjoying learning the basics of Ruby as I write this review. 

2. The level of support and guidance is unlike anything I've seen from a free bootcamp prep course. I receive personalized feedback on my coding challenges, and the student success manager, Brita, has been able to answer all my questions quickly as well as provide encouragement! I have yet to find a student blog post about a coding problem during one of the lessons that has gone unanswered for more than a few days. The team at TFP seems to really care about their students. 

In short, TFP has met or exceeded my expectations about what a coding bootcamp should be. I can't wait to get through the prep course and enroll in their Software Engineering and Web Development track. I'll post another review when I graduate from that course. ;)