We Got Coders

I came to WeGotCoders after nearly a year of unemployment, trying to break into the tech world. I had just finished university (a degree in Politics, hilariously enough) and was feeling incredibly disheartened. 

I found WeGotCoders while searching for opportunities in and around London and it was the perfect place for me to get going. After contacting Carrie (Recruitment) and discussing what I wanted out of the course and moving forward, I was invited to try and complete the coding challenge; A great way to dip your toes and see what you're made of. We organised an interview and I was away.

I had a really good conversation with both Dan and Carrie and then had the opportunity to sit with Dan and discuss what I had done for the challenge, how I found it and where I struggled. Before I knew it I was signing on the dotted line and I was getting ready to start at the beautiful house just outside of London.

WeGotCoders is structured really well as the first half of the course (about a month and a half) are geared to giving you all the tools you need to get stuck into web development. I felt that it was delivered at such a pace that you really needed to be on your toes, which kept the whole experience really exciting. The vast amounts of information you take in, make the middle week so perfect as you have time to relax into a project and really start putting your skills to good use. You then present and compare this when you go back. Presenting is a skill that Dan and Carrie really help you nail down. Being able to explain your code concisely and effectively is so important in a fast moving team.

The second half of the course is focussed more on you using those skills and using them in "real world" examples. I.E. Here's a brief...here's how I want it to look...here's what I want it to do, now off you go. Constant feedback throughout this process means you're never more than a question away from the answer. Dan's never far away. 

The final project was another really good experience. Presenting your 2-week project in front of prospective employers (one of whom went on to take me and a fellow student on). It gives you a chance to show the passion you feel for what you've created.  

Dan was great at giving a really informative lecture in the morning and giving you the freedom to fail in the afternoon when we were set challenges. One of the highlights for me was in the later stages of the course when my cohort had to work as a team to deliver a product in a week. Now working in a commercial environment the skills I learned during those afternoon sessions were invaluable. Communication and planning are key. 

Lorin, the database guy, was an absolute delight and seeing him around the house during the following weeks and months was lovely. Always happy to have a conversation about code, life and the universe (Honestly. Catch him in the right mood. He's off...)

Zoe was an amazing cook and her treats (particularly the cookies) are second to none. Great to have her around to chat to in the breaks. 

It's a great course and experience that I'd really recommend to anyone whos been struggling to crack into this industry or even someone who wants to try something totally different; Everyone I met on the course (my cohort and others) had come at it from totally different walks of life (and ages). The course quite literally takes you from Zero to Hero in 3 months. You'll be totally amazed at how much you take in and how much you can start using, instantly. Even though I did a politics degree, technology and creating things has always been my passion. WeGotCoders has given me that oppertunity. To do something I love as my job.

I joined WGC with the aim of getting into a career I am passionate about, growing my skills from amateur to a professional level. Now that I have completed the course, I can happily say that they delivered, as not only we covered an incredible amount of knowledge but I got hired pretty much on the spot, at the end of my final presentation.   There was of course challenging aspects to the training, you will be coding everyday from 9am until late in the evening and feel like doing some more work during the weekends. You need to be prepared to work long hours, go beyond your comfort zone and being pushed to your limits at times, but the end result is worth every effort.   The mid term group project was a great way to get experience with working as part of an agile team, from doing morning stand ups, working in pair for debugging if necessary and perfecting your knowledge of git. The final project was also excellent, it really felt like consolidating all the key learnings from the course and gave the opportunity to lose yourself in a project you are passionate about.   Dan is a talented coder with strong business acumen, this help both understand the value of the work you are trying to do and secure a job after your training. His teaching always promote best practices and this is incredibly valuable.   Zoe’s cooking was simply delicious, I definitely miss her dishes and desserts. She is also a really nice person to chat to.   If you have the option I would highly recommend you live onsite as well, this will give you the opportunity to focus fully on getting the most of your learning experience and make it all nice and stress free. Well worth it.   Last but not least,  I met a really nice group of people while doing the course and made really good friends. Everybody was really supportive and looking after each other. A great learning environment.   A challenging but really rewarding experience. If you are serious about becoming a web developer, don’t hesitate and join in.

Speaking from experience, this is a solid choice for those who are serious about becoming a full time developer. This course is not for the faint of heart, or for those on the fence about becoming a programmer. You will be coding practically all day, every day for 3-4 months. It is hard, and you will struggle. If you persevere however, you will end up being significantly better at programming.

Thanks to this course, I landed a job only a week after presenting my final project. I'm looking forward to developing my skills even further.

For me, the most valuable aspect of the course was the guidance I received with my learning, which I would not have had if I continued on my self-learning coding journey. The curriculum was very good, covering many essential aspects of Ruby web development, often going beyond a Junior developer level towards the end of the course. Dan sometimes strayed from the original curriculum,  which I saw as a positive thing, as we were able to ride waves of inspiration or stay focused on any weaker areas of knowledge. The other students were also extremely supportive - sharing tips, solutions and encourangement. The experiences of pair coding will undoubtfully prove to be very useful.

The course was hard, but enjoyable all in all. I have found it to be great training for my first Ruby on Rails role. This course has significantly accelerated my progress as a developer.

I looked at starting trying to change career in early 2017, having decided I wanted to move into web development I started doing online tutorials on codecademy and really enjoying it. However, I needed something to help bridge the gap between an amateur with no experience and becoming a professional web developer. I decided I would go through a boot camp to try and do this as quick as possible.

I found We Got Coders through some quick googles and the premise sounded great. After a conversation with their recruiter Carrie I decided this was what I wanted to do. I was accepted and started in August 2017. I was warned before the course started that it would be intense and a great deal of work but I still wasn't prepared for how tricky it was. The course was very intensive with most days lasting from 9AM-9PM if not later and many of us working on the weekend as well. However, the work was always interesting and the days tended to fly by.

Dan was a good teacher with a great knowledge for the content as well as the industry we were all trying to get into. Industry best practices were always prioritised to make sure we were always attractive to potential employers. He could occasionally be a bit disorganised especially towards the end of the course when 2 cohorts were happening at once. However, I still left feeling I got my money's worth in terms of teaching.

The final 2 week project was a great experience with a feeling of consolidating our knowledge of the past 12 weeks and producing a product we could be proud of. This was presented to various CTOs and developers looking to hire on the final day and me and others on the cohort were offered interviews on the spot. The jobs ended up being a bit far for me too consider but Dan found me another option within a week much closer to home which I quickly took. I would say finding a job within 2 weeks of graduating was well worth the money and time I invested.

The house itself was great and my cohort was equally great. Thursday night trips to the pubs and a bit of snooker became regularly occurances and I feel I've left with a group of friends I'll keep forever. Zoey the chef was also amazing. She cooked sensational food and even better deserts. She always catered to various dietry requirements, just let her know. She is also a lovely person to chat to as well.

I graduated We Got Coders in February 2018 and after less than 2 weeks I got a job.

I decided to go to We Got Coders after a careful research, being the only boot camp that provides residential accommodation, out of the busy London, and most importantly covering a great area of Full Stack Web Development skills, it was my number one and only choice.

I would like to make it clear that you will have to work really hard, the pace of the course is very fast, it covers computer science material in only 3 months.

The usual work hours are 9AM-9/11 PM plus extra reading/studying/individual practice plus weekends (if you want of course but i would advise you to take advantage of the weekends and revise on whatever you did not fully understand or finish during the week days).

I would also recommend you to go through some of the Treehouse or Udemy courses on Introduction to Ruby and also some Rails and some JavaScript and React and maybe be a bit familiar with Test Driven Development as well.

Even if you will have to pass the groundwork and the interviews to be admitted, the above recommendations will help you a lot to have a better understanding of what you will actually do at this course, and when you will study them they will sink in easier if you will be a bit familiar with some of their general concepts in advance.

The syllabus of the course completely covers the job market’s requirements so it definitely prepares you technically and psychologically for the real-world work.

You will also be taught how to think logically, how to work in a team, you will always pair program with someone, you will be taught how to work under deadlines and most importantly how to think and understand the concepts and not expect someone to just give you the solutions all the time.

Zoe the chef is a lovely lady who I can easily call a friend, she is a very nice, smart and kind person and her food is just incredible.

She maintains a balance between healthy and delicious at the same time, not to mention her deserts are beyond wow.

I have also made some amazing friends, colleagues of my cohort and i can say i have been lucky to have met them because we have been a very united team, we helped, supported and encouraged each other so much.

The house is beautiful I was fortunate enough to have one of the nicest rooms, the conditions were very good, quiet area, beautiful back garden with a lake and a nice country road to take walks.

The house is 10 minutes walking distance from the city center of Hoddesdon where you can find various supermarkets, restaurants, take aways, pubs and stores.

Dan has an extensive experience in the industry, he will lead you, challenge and encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and explore all the sides of the technical skills you need to acquire in order for you to be sufficiently prepared to get a job at the end of the course.

These 3 months will definitely be one of the most intense period of your life but it will pay off in the long run.

Wish you the best of luck with your life and career change, you will be amazing!

Very quickly,
positives

• extrordinary locations
  • it's litterally a mansion
  • rooms are what you would find in a luxurious 4-start hotel
• immersive experience
  • you code, sleep and eat there
  • at the time, I was free to stay even during weekends. I don't know if this still holds true but ask Dan
• instructors are always helpful
  • there for you at 11am, there for you at 11pm sometimes
  • great support and very helpful advice
• great foundations (backend)
  • you will learn lots of good programming good practises
  • you will exercise your brain by learning new design patterns which are useful
  • you will learn that reading docs is good. (I still struggle with that!)
  • Dan has a great method for teaching. You've probably seen that already if you've been at any of his free workshops. He is quite knowledgable about Ruby and Rails. He is also very patient
  • Lorin is also extremely patient and with a natural talent for teaching. Very knowledgable about databases

not so positives

• I found that interest or/and expertise as far as JavaScript goes (and frameworks) wasn't the greatest

summary

• definately a great experience
• I have learned insane amounts while being there and this experience also gave me the right (backend) foundations to learn even more and even faster later on at my job (which I started 2 days after finishing the course!)
• it's a tough course but, after taking the course, you'll be ready to start as a junior dev.
• if you like / are curious about / are interested in backend, this course will get you VERY well prepeared. If you are passionate about Ruby, even better!

This course was really fantastic.  As a female in my late 30s, I wasn't keen on a frat-house environment. And given my learning style, I respond best to small classes and personalised tuition.  I wasn't disappointed on either front.  The mansion is beautiful and quiet and our chef created delicious meals.  It meant that we were able to wholly focus on consuming the large amount of course work.  Most days I was doing 12 - 14 hours coding and loving it!

The two instructors clearly cared about our progress and were determined to show us how to be exceptional developers.  They made themselves available when I needed help, even if that meant evenings and weekends.  I valued their perspectives given they have an excess of 30 years development experience between them.  They were very different to each other and that meant that we learned alternative viewpoints and styles, all within the framework of well organised content.

I enjoyed the mix of working on my own and working in pairs / teams.  I learnt a lot from the other delegates and have formed life-long friendships with many of them.

For someone who was basically a beginner coder when I started, I found this a safe and positive learning environment. As a business owner and entrepreneur it gives me great satisfaction to know that I can now confidently create well tested, well written code and I am working on some MVP's as we speak.

Highly recommend.

I was put in a really awkward position when one of the instructors (an irresponsible, cradle-snatching, American man whose name my sister has suggested that I leave out of this review) had taken it upon himself to play matchmaker on behalf of a slow-witted misogynist who had also enrolled in the course. This instructor would use mealtimes as an opportunity to make inappropriate comments about my supposed compatibility with the misogynist in question, who was a drug-addicted trainee with the IQ of a carrot, and would encourage him to treat me like the prize at the end of a video game and not like a colleague or an equal. The drug addict would regularly talk to me in a patronising tone and on one occasion, whilst drunk, the disgusting little man put his arms around me and tried to sniff my hair whilst we were alone (an idea I honestly think he could only have gotten from the cradle-snatching American)! Rather than being reprimanded, on another night, for turning what had been a normal out-of-office-hours conversation into a full-blown argument that woke the neighbours or for practically threatening me with violence after I corrected him on a mildly offensive and inaccurate comment he'd made, he was mollycoddled by a group of guys on the course (guys who must have found my intelligence, honesty, my refusal to blindly conform to some gender stereotype and possibly even my youth as I was the youngest in the cohort at age 23, far more intimidating than I could have guessed) and the Boris Johnson look-alike who runs the bootcamp demanded that I apologise to the drug-addicted misogynist (I refused as I see no reason to apologise for correcting others when they make factual errors and even less of a reason to apologise to spoilt man-children who still believe women exist primarily to service men. I apologised to our neighbours instead). I actually suspect that the Boris Johnson clone identified with this misogynist so much that he later sought ways to sabotage my team during the group project (though I will admit that this suspicion is largely drawn from circumstantial evidence and the founder's generally rather shifty nature).

I found the Boris Johnson clone's attitude whilst he was teaching the course to be rather disappointing overall. He would frequently disappear for hours on end during class time because he had "a call to make", for instance, and would generally refuse to share the code he wrote when he actually was in class. He tended to treat his students like children, nagging us all for the most trivial reasons and setting house rules that made no sense. On top of that, he seemed to have a weird fixation on my ethnicity and some of the subtext in our later conversations in particular would suggest that he views minorities merely as tools to make white liberals feel better about themselves.

Luckily, I didn't have to pay for the course upfront when I was unable to obtain a PCDL as I'd taught myself Ruby on Rails before I'd enrolled. Given the way in which the founder treats his students, the policing of people's emotions that went on and the hostile environment that I had to endure as a strong, independent-minded, and decidedly single woman, I'm rather glad that I didn't and have no intention of paying anything close to the £8000 rip-off that he typically charges. With that in mind, things were certainly more bearable when the American was teaching the course and not meddling in his students' affairs as he is the better teacher. However, the fact that he hadn't made the effort to sort out his immigration status before the start of the course struck me as a miscalculation on his part.

On a lighter note, the food - which I did pay for during the course - was great as our chef was very talented. I'm not usually one for the outdoors but I did appreciate the beauty of the garden on occasion which was quite lovely in the summer. My room was rather comfortable as well (even if it didn't have a lock). In the end, I managed to find a job at a really cool startup without the help of We Got Chauvinists and now earn more than I would have done on one of their salaries. I will leave the reader to draw their own conclusions regarding this.

This is definitely a course for someone who really wants to be a web developer. If you're only a little bit interested and fancy giving web development a try then go elsewhere because this course is not for you. The pace of the course is very fast and a lot of material is thrown your way. Be prepared to work long hours and be seriously challenged. It is also a very practical course. Don't expect any books or PowerPoint slides - a lot of stuff is live coded in front of you. There is a lot of emphasis on TDD/BDD and pair programming too. Which isn't to say that it isn't fun or anything like that - just don't expect an easy ride. 

The instructors really do want you to succeed. Their passion is clear to see and I never had the feeling that they didn't care about your work. They were always willing to answer questions and to give you help when you got stuck.

I didn't take up the accommodation option so I can't speak about what it was like to live in but of course I did attend every day and can say that the working environment is really great. No dingy classrooms with plastic seats. Rather wood panelled rooms with comfy sofas! And the food was awesome!

My only real criticisms are that the course tried to cover too much material in the time available and that the instructors would sometimes get carried away by their own enthusiasm and introduce us to stuff that we weren't quite ready for. This sometimes led me to feel that things were left unfinished.

Overall, I would say that the course is worth doing if you are really serious about becoming a web developer. It will be one of the most intense 3 months of your life but will reward you if you are willing to put the effort into it 

When I arrived at We Got Coders I had a lot of doubts about my abilities and lack of experience.  Over the next few weeks they quickly disappeared.  It’s a very intensive course, but Dan and Lorin made sure that nobody got left behind, making themselves available in the evenings and at weekends.  The fact that we were living in a mansion with an amazing chef didn’t hurt either.  In a very short time they helped me turn myself from a complete novice, to a capable web developer, managing to secure a great work placement within a couple of hours of my final presentation. I would recommend this course to anyone who's serious about getting into web development!

TL;DR Brilliant course, best in the country in my opinion. Definitely will result in a job if you work hard.

This course is about seriously learning to become a web developer. Be prepared to spend most of every day, all day, studying code in a relaxed, fun and friendly environment. While it remains focused on teaching, learning and code, it does this in a way which is relaxed and non pressured. There is great support, and the mentor is live in as well so he is available pretty much all day every day. Of course, he has his free time as well, but he is available much much more than a regular tutor would be. 
When I was on the course we spent most days coding from 9am till 10pm. This changes depending on how interested you are in the topic being covered that week. The curriculum is very varied so you are exposed to a lot of different areas of web development throughout the 3 months. 
If you focus, knuckle down, take an interest and work hard you can come out of this course a gleaming pristine example of a professional web developer. 
Being prepared for this course is also very important. I would say you should take minimum 3 months of self study to be properly prepared. The more prepared you are the more you will get out of the course.

The course itself, and it's tutors are very helpful to prospective students so if you want to know what materials to use to prepare then just send an email to the company. 
Pros: 
- They actually do help you to get a job at the end by organising interviews for job positions. 
- The topics the course covers are the most relevant to working in web development. 
- The technologies the course teaches you to use are the most up to date, and recent available. For example ReactJS, Mocha, Chai and RSpec. 
- The live in environment allows you to study as much as you want.

Cons 
- Must be prepared to spend 3 months studying.

But seriously, this course will change your life. It changed mine.

I would like to start this review by saying that We Got Coders is not just another web development course but an idea. Dan Garland, the founder and the lead instructor of We Got Coders has finally bridged the gap between developers with a theoretical background and today’s market requirements, by providing them with hands-on experience on the best practices of Agile Web Development.

During the course we were able to immerse in the ins and outs of web development by doing pair programming on cutting edge technologies and popular frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js.

The pace of the course is really fast and the expectation for all trainees is to accomplish at least 80% of the assignments which means that a prospect candidate should devote himself 100% on the course and the material to be taught.

The idea behind this is not only to evaluate the suitability of the trainee to be able to cope with the demands of today's industry, but also to make sure that he understands what he is doing, as this is a prerequisite for a successful career as a software engineer.

As far as the structure of the course is concerned, it consists of 2 phases, the training phase and the mentoring phase. 

During the training phase, we were taught the best practices in today’s industries and, most importantly, through the retrospective of a senior developer and the approach of how we can do things better than we are currently doing.

This includes test driven development, user stories, responsive and pixel perfect design, as well as learning to tackle tasks effectively by breaking them into smaller chunks.

During the mentoring phase, we had the chance and the honour to work as consultants with leading startups who take web development seriously and they would only hire top developers in the market. Alongside our instructor and mentor we were able to implement new features and performance refactoring into their codebases that we are proud of.

The last fact made us more empowered as developers as our clients were pleased by our overall performance which led into full time employment by the end of the course.

Today we are able to accomplish any given task that we are assigned to and perform over the expectations of a junior web developer which makes a We Got Coders alumnus more of a mid-level developer. This is quite impressive considering the amount of time that we spent during our training. 

Therefore, my only advise to those who are looking to get into the web development industry and are determined to accomplish their goals, is to have a look at this course as I am sure that they will not get dissapointed.

Personally, I highly recommend We Got Coders as, at least for me, it was more of a salvation through the years that I have spent struggling in order to achieve a respectable level of knowledge which was finally achieved by my graduation from the course.