WBS Coding School

Hi ! I am Aleksandar, a senior digital media designer striving to become the whole package ( growth product designer ). This path is quite long and one of the key expertise I was missing was experience and knowledge in Web Development. After careful consideration I decided to sign up for the Full-stack Web & App development program at WBS Coding School and all I can say it was just the right decision. The curriculum is nicely structured and built for people with different backgrounds. You will never feel left behind and if you do, the the extra set of hands ( junior instructors and school staff ) will help you get back on track.

Regarding the content, we studied the latest tech in Frontend ( Html, Css, Js, React ) and Backend ( NodeJS, Express + DB). We built many complex projects for which I thought I will need years yet we did all of this in only 15 weeks.

Personally, I would always recommend this school to anyone who is interested in getting into Web Development !

I am not a tech guy and I probably won't turn into one. Nonetheless I was highly interested in learning to code for several years. Last year I decided to turn that wish into reality by taking the Full-Stack Web & App Developer course of WBS CODING SCHOOL. The course was highly demanding - as expected. It is called Coding Bootcamp for a reason. While you are learning it is hard to recognize what improvements you are actually making. But seeing my final project and compare that to my zero skills from the beginning ... I made a giant leap within these four month thanks to the awesome mentor and the whole team of the WBS CODING SCHOOL. 

WBS Coding School’s 15-week hybrid bootcamp isn’t just a course that teaches you to write some web apps. Sure, you will acquire numerous new technical skills and industry knowledge but on top of that the whole program unfolds in a fantastic community of motivated and competent instructors and staff, inspiring guest speakers and peers who might become good friends. All that makes this bootcamp both an extremely efficient way to get a solid foundation in full-stack web and app development and a great experience you don’t want to miss.  Starting with a review of the basics you are expected to study in the primer course, you will first work on some smaller plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript exercises and projects and train your Git and GitHub chops in the command line. But the speed quickly ramps up when React.js is introduced around week 3-4 and then there is another considerable acceleration moment when you’ll transition into the backend side of web development with Node.js and Express. At least that is how it felt to me.  Most likely, there will be times when you are going to struggle to keep up with the pace and as far as I can tell, this is the same for every bootcamp style of program. Knowing that you really want to learn these skills and being determined, will help you to overcome the hurdles some concepts or technologies might pose at first. But aside from your own motivation and persistence, being able to ask your instructor, the junior instructors, the mentors or simply the community support channel for help in such situations is of tremendous value and oftentimes you might even find yourself in the pleasant position to help your peers out with the troubles they might be facing. This contributes to the cohesion and solidarity that builds in your group over time. This is further increased by the fact that you are continuously working in small teams that are reshuffled every one or two (sometime even three) weeks to work on group projects. This can be challenging at times, but it is a realistic simulation of the conditions you will most likely find yourself in after graduation. And even such challenging moments might offer you opportunities to practice such extremely important abilities as empathy and patience and maybe even a chance to connect with your peers on a deeper level **and** become more productive as a team.  Also, take advantage of the excellent career services WBS Coding School offers you in the form of regular guest speakers and Q&A sessions with people in the industry as well as personal consultations and fine tuning of your profile, strategy and application documents.  As with everything in this world, there is room for improvement and to give the team due credit for it, they are working on it. One thing that might directly affect your planning in case you want to take the plunge and enrol for this program: Don’t take the estimated time for preparation too serious. I think it is (or was) tremendously understated with 20-40 hours. Give yourself enough time to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and JavaScript during the primer phase or, better even, before that (maybe go to Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp or the MDN tutorials and finish the intro-modules). As one of my peers and new friends remarked in her review:I promise you this extra-effort won’t be in vain. You will learn incredibly much either way, but going in with a solid foundation [allows you] to really focus on some more advanced topics and in general [helps in] not being completely overwhelmed 24/7, which is not a state of mind that lets you learn and really manifest knowledge in the long run in my opinion. (https://www.coursereport.com/schools/wbs-coding-school?shared_review=31184#reviews).  And speaking about the effort and time you should expect to invest during the primer phase, be prepared to put in a lot of extra hours during the whole program. It obviously depends on your familiarity with the technologies, but if you are not pretty experienced already or just extraordinarily quick in picking up new concepts and skills, keeping up will demand a lot of work in the nights and weekends which is not an option for everyone. During my time at WBS Coding School, a typical work-week had a good 60 hours of focused work. Maybe the numbers turn out to be different for you, but I think it is important to be aware of the time and effort you need to commit for a productive outcome. You should, therefore, honestly ask yourself and your social environment whether you can maintain this kind of energy for a prolonged period of time. If you think you can do that, great! It could still be a good idea to prepare yourself in advance by slowly increasing the amount of time you study and work on code each day during the primer phase like you would prepare yourself for participating in a marathon – which actually is an analogy drawn by our instructor at the start of the course to emphasize the importance of breaks.    Overall, I think the whole WBS Coding School team did a great job in creating this program. It offers you an extremely dense and organized way to learn state of the art technologies in a warm and welcoming community. So, if you are searching for a coding bootcamp that offers you all that, WBS Coding School should be at the top of your list. 

The course was overall well rounded, clear and a lot of information to take. 
As someone who had almost 0 coding experience (with the exception of random try-outs in some sites over the years but nothing that can be considered knowledgeable), it was a very fulfilling experience. I learned a lot and gained so many tools to continue this journey on my own. Mind you I am still learning, which is something people should have in consideration before staring this course. As some people entered the course expecting to get all the answers before hand and be fully experts at the end of it. 
They can, and they will, teach you the language, but can only do so much as to provide you with tools and the support to learn it. You should know that at the end of the course there is still a lot for you to do, but you will have the know-how. Additionally, if you are a newbie like I was, you most definitely will need more than the 40hours per week of the course. Nevertheless, I loved the whole experience as it helped me to discover a love  for coding I didn't know I have!

My only Con-  the group of 17 was  too large for just one person and a part-time assistant. However, they took this advice and added more support to the courses after mine. 

There are plenty of bootcamps these days, and curriculum-wise they more or less offer the same; so you might think at this point of your research: Why not go to Ironhack or LeWagon and just get it over with in 9 instead of 15 weeks, I will get the exact same thing in less time and potentially find a job sooner, right?
Let me tell you why: Because you won’t. The curriculum at WBS Coding School is not only very carefully crafted to reflect industry needs and current trends, it also stimulates deep learning by giving you some time to reinforce concepts other bootcamps merely brush over, expecting you to just wing it or force you to work overtime at ridiculous hours - trust me, you need sleep & rest if you want to be able to recall that stuff not only 3 days, but ideally 3 years later. Here, you are not just quickly introduced to something once and then move on to a new area a couple of hours later, you will have multiple exercises that slowly build up on each other and let you constantly revisit and practise previously learned material. And when I say “slowly”, I still mean this in a bootcampy sense of the word, but not at the speed of light as is so common for many of the more fast food-ish contenders out there.
Apart from the excellent learning material, the staff is also extraordinary. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming from the get-go, at no point does the experience feel like you’re getting piped through some soulless web dev factory - the teachers are knowledgable and engaged, the community manager and career service advisor make sure you have everything you need: They are always open towards criticism and try to cater to your needs wherever possible; and also set you up for the time after the bootcamp with many helpful resources and workshops that provide guidance for the job search. There is also a huge emphasis on community building, with regular guest speaker events vividly attended by students and alumni alike and a discord server with an active “help” channel you can use during and after the course.
Regarding campus time, this will clearly be a highlight during non-pandemic times. Unfortunately I could not afford to stay during the whole time (Jobcenter does not account for the stay if you are a Berlin resident), but spent a couple of nights there and was allowed to attend the rest of the campus phase remotely as I wasn’t comfortable with commuting each day due to the Covid situation. The campus is amazing; and you’ll be sleeping in a very cute private room where you can also work comfortably whenever you feel like you need a bit more you-time during your final project. The whole vibe is very “summer campy” in the best sense of the word, as there are numerous entertainment mediums like table soccer, pool and console games available, not to mention having the Spreeufer directly on your doorstep. If you plan on defeating your instructor in Mario Kart to make up for them constantly defeating you in programming, you might want to brush up on these skills a little bit tho - unfortunately they are great at gaming too!
I honestly cannot think of any downsides in regards of the actual “product” you get, but there is one thing that could still be improved in my opinion: With the tech industry still lacking diversity and at times even being a hostile space for women and non-binary people, I really think WBS Coding School should set an example and do a bit better concerning their hiring policy. As of right now, the dev team consists - apart from one really awesome female instructor - solely of male developers. It would be an important message towards students to try and actively change these numbers, giving a chance and a voice to those who have suffered from systemic oppression for so long. I for one, as a woman, would have loved getting insight and mentoring from a more experienced female engineer - never underestimate the power of visibility for inspiring and encouraging others!
[On a more general note: I know all those bootcamps are advertised for beginners, and it’s also tempting to believe that with the amount of money one has to disburse, you simply will get a career handed back to you at the end. Well, yes and no. Don’t get me wrong, there ARE people that without much or even zero previous knowledge strive in these environments and just “get it” super quickly. But from my experience, those are to be considered unicorns, or at least something you don’t see every day, let’s say a very pretty horse. So please do yourself a favour and get some of the basics out of the way BEFORE you start a bootcamp: GET DECENT IN JAVASCRIPT BEFORE YOUR FIRST DAY. You obviously don’t have to be in expert going in there, but make sure you can write a for loop without looking up the syntax. Do some basic tutorials, do some research on MDN, and actually go and solidify this knowledge by doing some katas on codewars or eadabit. I promise you this extra-effort won’t be in vain. You will learn incredibly much either way, but going in with a solid foundation made me able to really focus on some more advanced topics and in general not being completely overwhelmed 24/7, which is not a state of mind that lets you learn and really manifest knowledge in the long run in my opinion.]

[1] online, and also in-person
At first, I haven't considered the online coding boot camp option, but now I think it was the best option I made. The whole package what WBS Coding School offers is quite wholesome.  Being 100% online, but still from the application process to graduation, what I have experienced was how 'in-person' it has been. I know it sounds paradoxical, but I have never experienced this genuine personal care at any other institute.
[2] great curriculum, great instructor, great staff
I started from scratch and they made me build a working full-stack web app in 15 weeks. The curriculum is evolving based on market-trends and the cohort's needs and levels. Every time I hit a brick wall, my instructor, cohort, and the staff helped me out of it.  So lucky to have them.
[3] career service
The curriculum includes career service. It was hard to manage to update my CV or LinkedIn profiles in parallel with building the project, but now I know, it is also a part of training bc it is a slice of our daily life in the very near future.  Besides, the famous Friday TALK session with tech companies, recruiters, alumni, or ppl in the industry has given me insight, inspiration, and motivation.  
[4] sustainability and warm-hearted community
As an alumnus, I need to stand alone, but I get still 'ping' from the school for inviting the TALK session. And still, as a familiar community, we support each other intra-cohort and also cross-cohort. 
[5] Overall
After all, it is/was a coding "boot camp", but it was also a precious experience. I wish I could write more, but my code is waiting :)  Happy learning,  happy coding!!!

After leaving my job as a media designer, i had the chance to enter a world which i always liked : coding.

The course was really demanding, because the whole crew was very ambitious to crawl even deeper into the coding-rabbithole. And it was no problem at all to do that because of our great instructor, who was always very supportive.

Within the 12 weeks at home we went through a lot of subjects, basics and advanced stuff and had several solo-/group-projects.

The last 3 weeks at the WBS campus in Berlin where fantastic. You get to finally meet the people in person and work on the big last project.

I am glad for that experience. We now are definitely ready to enter the industry.

I took the class after leaving my job as a product owner, so i had already some technical understanding. Our class overall had a very strong understanding, so we could keep the pace up. I learned so much in these weeks, more then i thought it is possible. It was very challenging, but worth every minute. Our teacher was amazing, the campus time in Berlin was great and the staff is very supportive. The downside is what i wrote earlier, it is very challenging, so be prepared to get stressed.

I was able to get a full stack developer job within 2 months after the class and i feel well prepared for that.

From the very first day, I felt that this Bootcamp would be something very special. Starting with the 2 weeks of Primer and then diving into the Bootcamp itself, I have learned how to "learn," and that's likely the most valuable lesson I've ever learned. Our instructor, Reagan, was absolutely fantastic: he guided us through difficult topics and ensured that nobody was left behind. He was a big plus! The entire Bootcamp experience was tough, intense, but absolutely worth it! It is also worth mentioning that the Community Managers, the entire Support team of WBS and the Junior Instructors were helpful and always reliable all the time. Thank you so much for this wonderful experience! Highly recommended!

One thing I liked was how practical the curriculum was. We didn't just learn theory; we got to build real projects from scratch. This hands-on approach helped solidify my understanding of coding concepts. Plus, the small class size gave me plenty of one-on-one attention when needed. Overall, I couldn't be happier with my decision to attend the WBS Coding School bootcamp. It's given me the skills and confidence to pursue a career in coding, and I'm excited to see where it takes me next!