Chegg Skills

Like you right now, I too scoured this and other "coding bootcamp review websites” trying to evaluate which school was the best choice for me and my situation. I am 44 years old with a 20+ year background in management and operations. Prior to starting with Thinkful.com the last time I coded was when I was 15 and teaching myself BASIC with my Commodore64. 

After researching several schools that met my criteria (fully online with a dedicated web development career path program), and speaking with prior graduates of different schools, I chose Thinkful.com because it seemed to have the strongest, and most serious, focus on preparing its students for a career in web development.

Curriculum

Thankful’s Web Development Career Path curriculum is a compilation of several classes pieced together in a logical sequence  that gradually increase in complexity and depth and build on each other.  You start at the basics in HTML/CSS and work through jQuery to JS. Then you go back through everything again but at an advanced level. After that you will then move onto advanced front and back end libraries. 

Your question to me now should be, “Yes, but have you learned anything?”  In less than three weeks I have worked in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery, and that I can comfortably say I not only know the ‘how’, but also the ‘why’. SO, yes, I have learned A LOT in three weeks. 

Mentoring and Support

Imagine having access to working professionals throughout the day and evening to ask all your questions, because that is what you will have. Like other schools Thinkful's mentors are experienced working professionals with extensive experience in the industry. But, even though I meet with my mentor 3 times a week, he is regularly available on Slack throughout the day or night. And, if my mentor isn’t available to help me outside of our sessions, there is always someone from Thinkful available on Slack, or holding ‘office-hours’ via a webinar you can hop onto. Outside of the program, Thinkful’s staff has always answered every email I have sent regarding a question or concern within less than a day. 

Career Service

During the first week their Education Director set up a meeting with me and laid out the services that will be provided throughout the course and the schedule of when they will occur. I am only into my third week and I have my first mock interview in a few days and then my program review. Yes, you will be reviewed before you can go on and continue the program. They are not just going to take your money. You have to pass a review of your work based on input from your mentor and your interview. I don;t believe it is a test so much as a ‘check point’ to establish that you are both capable and able to continue on with the program.

Summary

Overall I would say that Thankful’s Web Developer Career Path program has exceeded my expectations and I believe that when it comes time to find an employer I will have the knowledge as well as a full support team assisting me.  I highly encourage you to engage them with questions and concerns. 

Feeback

My only feedback regarding this course is I wish I had more time to go deep on JS, but the course seems focused on being more wide than deep which makes sense for someone pursuing this career path.

It's only been a month since I started the Frontend Web Development course but I've learned so much in the past month than just by studying by myself. I learned a few things here and there online about HTML and CSS but Thinkful courses really help you learn it, feel comfortable with it, and create things. For instance, I'm comfortable at making websites and know which resources to look at to learn how to do things I don't know how to do yet. I just learned to use jQuery and learning JavaScript so I can do a few things to make a website interactive. 

Not only that but I also get a career guidance counselor, a mentor who I see for 3 hours every week, and a program manager to make sure that my curriculum suits my needs. There's also cool workshops and Q&A sessions to learn more about a particular topic or just ask another mentor at Thinkful questions about your projects. You also have to do 5 mock interviews to make sure you're ready to answer any technical questions that you'll face during your real interviews. All in all, it's pretty awesome!

The community at Thinkful is really friendly and everyone is always ready to help you. I was debating about going to a bootcamp in SF but it's really expensive and even to get in, you basically have to know just as much as a junior developer and I really didn't think I was ready to do that yet. On the otherhand, you can learn through Thinkful at home, get all the support and community at your fingertip and they even help you find a job. I think everyone should at least try it and see for themselves what an amazing program Thinkful is.

Thinkful is the (1) inexpensive, (2) forces accountability with mentor 3x/week, (3) in-depth like on-campus bootcamps.

My mentor, Roberto, is extraordinary. Runs his own businesses with partners, just got accepted into a top program with one of his companies, very knowledgeable, and has offered to make himself available for help even outside our scheduled, 3x-per-week mentoring sessions.  He's proactive in helping me figure out solutions to my projects, and always helps me with best practices for writing maintainable code.

I can't rate Thinkful highly enough. I originally signed-up for an 'in-person' bootcamp with Maker's Academy in London, but needed more flexibility in terms of location, times for study and curriculum. Thinkful has enabled me to study when, where and whatever I want. Again, to contrast some other bootcamps who dogmatically stick to one technology (typically Ruby or Python), Thinkful were the only course that would allow me to customise my curriculum to suit my interests and the job market in the UK. As a base, a full-stack JavaScript course, with Ruby as an optional elective. In addition, through speaking to my mentor and having seen a live coding exercise in React, that module was then added into my course as well.

Victor, my mentor, is amazing - he's always on hand to lend guidance and moral support. The other team members I've interacted with are equally enthusiastic and helpful, with real-world advice and experience to draw upon.

Beyond the one-on-one curriculum, there's the opportunity to interact with your peers on Slack and attend group Q&A sessions and other lectures on topics which are connected to your course, again at times that suit you.

If you're looking for the ultimate in flexibility, enthusiasm, and a deeply technical curriculum that really pushes you, look no further than Thinkful.

    I'm happy I finally signed up with Thinkful. The curriculum is well designed. It introduces concepts in a stealthy way so that you don't realize you're working on topics that, relative to the material, are advanced.

    Most curriculums will start off with the basics and maintain the same boring trajectory. Thinkful makes it fun.

    Finally, my mentor, Nemanja, is top notch. I feel that teaching is taken for granted. Sure, you can self study, but having someone knowledgeable who can point our your blind spots is very valuable.

    I believe anyone will be challenged to find a great mentor that tailors the curriculum to your needs. I've definitely found that here.

I'm just over two months into Thinkful's Front-End Web Development Career Path track, and I have found it to be a very enriching experience. Not only has my knowledge of coding best practices grown, my ability to find information and use it to solve problems has improved. Programming forces you to be analytical and to extrapolate what you learn from others, in order to use it for your own purposes, which is just a generally good skill to have in life, I think. 

I find the Thinkful curriculum to be well-suited to my learning style, and the lesson format generally goes like this: there are a few sections of each lesson where you code along to what amount to tutorials, in order to introduce the main concepts of the unit, and then at the end of each lesson (or most of them) you are tasked with incorporating what you've learned into a small project which you then push up to github, and supply the link to your github repository, in order to discuss it with your mentor during the next session. The tutorials are simplified, broken-up versions of what you end up doing in the project-based parts of the lessons, which is good because they give you a groundwork for what will be needed, but then you have to do the extra work to connect the concepts to the actual implementation. Which is really what being a web developer is all about. At the ends of major sections in the coursework there are larger projects where you get to decide what to build (as long as you demonstrate your facility with the required programming concepts), which is cool because if you're motivated enough, you end up with some pretty cool portfolio projects that reflect not only your coding abilities, but your interests as a developer and as a person as well. 

Speaking of motivation, that is what it takes to get through Thinkful. Because it's self-paced and entirely online, you have to be your own motivator. You don't have a classroom with a teacher and a big group of other students that you go to five times per week like in-person coding bootcamps. You have to be mostly self-motivated (although having a mentor really helps), and since they charge by the month, it's in your best interests to get on the grind, learn the stuff, and start making killer, production-quality web applications as fast as you can so you can get out there and blow hiring managers' minds with your portfolio.

My mentor, Chad, is awesome. He's a great guy, and very knowledgeable, and has offered to make himself available  for help even outside our scheduled, 3x-per-week mentoring sessions (via email for the most part, but once via the provided Thinkful video chat room, which I thought was really cool and nice of him) (also: not sure if other mentors do this--I hope they do, because I know I end up needing help throughout the week). He's proactive in helping me figure out solutions to my projects, and always helps me with best practices for writing maintainable code. He's also a seasoned pro as a developer, and has some good advice for the job hunt.

However, despite the "we'll get you hired" guarantee, the job hunt kind of seems to be a weak area for Thinkful. You do mock interviews with other mentors, which is great, because they are all professional developers, and part of the job of a professional developer is to interview prospective new hires (what I'm saying is that the interviews seem to be realistic), and they give feedback to your mentor, which you then talk about. They also have a tuition-free segment after graduation where you meet up weekly with a career counsellor who gives you advice on the job search. This is all well and good, but I'm not sure it can compare to the practice of in-person coding schools that have tangible connections in their local job market, and oftentimes get to basically funnel students into internships. Don't get me wrong, I'm confident that I will graduate from the program and get a job as a developer in a timely manner (my skills are getting to be pretty on-point, and I'm learning some valuable networking and interview skills), but it's probably going to be a bit harder for me than for my friends who are attending in-person coding bootcamps in town, who are going to get hooked up with internships upon graduation. That said, all it really takes to get a job in this industry is a bit of hustle, and Thinkful will help you with the hustle. If you're competent, confident, you work well with others, and you go out to make friends with other developers, you'll be all right.

Overall, I'm super glad I enrolled in Thinkful. It has been an overwhelmingly positive experience so far. It's on the cheaper side of full-time coding bootcamps, and if you can commit a lot of time and effort to it, and are willing to learn not only the coding skills but the interview skills and the job-search-huslte skills, then you'll be fully equipped to get a job as a web developer upon completion (I assume--I haven't finished yet and I don't have a job, so I guess I can't say for sure. Maybe I'll update this review once I get a job!). Overall 4/5, would recommend. 

Sorry for all the parentheses, I'm a web developer, not a writer.

Thinkful has an option for those looking for part-time study. I decided to opt for this because I had some understanding of the subject. The price is $300 - $500 / month depending on the topic. 

I found the material to be very easy to understand. They nailed the core topics as well. The curriculum had interesting projects and challenges. However, I would have liked more examples and even more in-depth knowledge on how to tackle different challenges.

You are assigned a mentor who meets with you once per week. Mine was alright. Moreover, the staff checks in with you a lot which is good. 

I'm currently in the home stretch of the Front End Web Development course (FEWD) online at Thinkful. I have nothing but good things to say about my experience. The coursework is laid out in a clear, sensible way, starting with very basic HTML and CSS, then working through jQuery and from there into Javascript itself, from the basics into Object Orientated Programming. Finally, it works into AJAX and working with API's. Basically the course covers A LOT of what practical things you need to know to be a fully useful web developer tomorrow. Along the way you learn how to use Git and GitHub, which is required for vritually any gig in the web development world along with sveral other tools.

Thinkful really shines in a couple ways. First, the coursework is thorough, but it's not just reading examples and watching lectures. It's very much a project based experience, one that requires the student to learn how to use all the technologies and languages above, but also forces the student to keep learning on his own. They don't just teach syntax and technique, they also teach you how to learn. You're encouraged to explore the API's online, the specifications, the forums and resources like the MDN, Slack, StackOverflow etc. No developer every really stops learning, especially when it comes to speed of light technology like this, so learning how to learn is as important as knowing syntax and methodology.

All of the projects are useful as examples of your knowledge, and having them in your portfolio - which is a multi-stage project itself - are a great resource to have out there when it comes to impressing potential employers with your skills.

The other, and most important aspect of Thinkful is the 1 on 1 mentoring. My mentor Daniël is, to be frank, the man. He's an experienced programmer himself, and has a fantastic way of answering questions and teaching things during our weekly sessions. Most of the time my questions have to do with doing things the "right" way...ie what is the best practice or just the way that "real" programmers would accomplish something. Having access to a professional with a ton of experience is so key in this regard. Again, reading syntax is fine and all...but there are usually 90 ways to accomplish something. Your mentor helps you work through the various truly RIGHT ways to do things. You could never get that level of help reading a website or book, or watching a lecture.

All in all, I've had a great experience with Thinkful, especially with my mentor. My only complaint is not starting sooner. I plan on taking more courses at Thinkful - Angular, Node, Android, I'm looking at you.