Devschool

Thank you Gaurav Rastogi for wonderful coaching, helped me clearing my certification in one go.
Thank you KnowledgeHut for serving the best faculties. Course explanation was above mark which helped me understanding about the scrum master program. Not only for official projects I’m sure to implement this on my behaviour and in personal life as well. Thank you very much again Gaurav Rastogi and KnowledgeHut team. Id definitely consider to do further courses within your academy and will be recommending the same to my friends and family as well. It was a wonderful experience while doing the classes over the weekend. It was a non stop class with 4 breaks in between. I’m sure out of 36 Student’s batch everyone cleared the exam in one go because of high quality learning and coaching. Your coach always matters a lot while explaining to each topics. The way Gaurav explained the topics were above mark. Also he was taking quickly exams in between to ensure our learning and to execute the topic he just thought. Earlier I planned to select another faculty but when I explored about Gaurav and found he even has good experience of the industry I planned to go with his classes. Now result is in front of all of us that I cleared the exam in first attempt with 100/100 marks. Thank you very much again. 

I attended dev school last october and I knew this was going to happen. Jims practices were very questionable, now after hard work and a bit of luck I have a job a top software company in Washington DC.(Hint I work a block away from Google in DC, not thanks to ODS). To those that wish to keep learning and one day get a job I will advice you to follow this path and learn these technologies that will make sure you will get a job with at least $65k entry level salary. 

Front End Stack

HTML-5

CSS-3

Javascript(ES6)

Jquery

Boostrap

React JS

D3 JS(learn React first)

JSX

AJAX 

JSON

 

Back End

Node JS

Mongo DB

 

Versio Control

Git/Github

 

Team Methodologies

Agile/Scrum

JIRA software management tool

 

Other

Terminal

HTTP

HTTPS

Object Oriented Programming

Functional Programming

DOM

How to use AWS to host your API's

API's

NPM

Bower

Grunt

Cookies

Cache

Google Chrome developer tools

FLUX

what is MVC? and how does it fail at scale?

Asynchronous 

Synchronous

Arguments

Objects

Methods

Variables

Modules

 

visit www.freecodecamp.com and also use udemy to teach yourself, those videos are really good when learning a new technology.

I've heard many people getting jobs once finishing the course in freecodecamp. Also there is a consulting company called Remote Tiger in Maryland that takes in entry level developers and places them in companies around the United States. Their entry level salary is $60k-$65k, I've known kids getting hired full-time by such companies when their contract is over and start with salaries of $120k or $110k. For those of you looking for a job, as a developer that now is in charge of the hiring I can tell you this is what I look for in candidates:

1) Communication Skills

2) Culture Fit

3) Friendliness

4) Solid Foundation in Programming in this case it would be JavaScript

5) Confidence and the ability to adapt to a rapid environment

6) a online porftolio

7) an ok github profile with some projects

8) an online website to show those projects

9) a presence on stack overflow

10) how much is he/she keeping up with new technologies

 

Also I would recommend you to download this chrome extensions so you can keep up with tech news ALL THE TIME

1) PANDA chrome extension

 

How long will it take you to learn all of this? It took me 1 solid year on my own time(30-35 hours a week) of coding to get very comfotable. The point here is YOU being comortable grabbing a laptop and working/having fun on what you chose to do as a carrer. Also please use a Mac, no company except government contracting companies use PCs, every developer will tell you the same. USE A MAC.

You can do this, you have now the knowledge

 

Best of luck

 

**They removed "Course Report" from their reviews section on the website and replaced it with Codementor, where the reviews have nothing to do with the current school**

I was a former student at Devschool who dropped out because of incompatibilities with the program. I paid for the full stack web development track which (funnily enough), no longer exists - as the school has restructured their tracks for the third time. More on that later.

school structure

I think the single driving force behind most of Devschool's problems is the lack of instructors. They always say "us" or "our instructors" while describing the program intricacies, but they only really have 1 - 2 active instructors - including the founder. During the time I was enrolled at Devschool, it had around 21 students. There was quite some drama during my time there. An instructor went crazy and was fired, while another instructor was told to stop teaching and observe sessions to learn how to teach. I also saw a few instructor candidates come and leave the Slack channel, most likely never reaching an agreement with the school.

Due to the lack of instructors, the program suddenly shifted the way it operated. It reduced all student sessions from 2 to 3 times a week, down to 1 time a week. This was frustrating, mainly due to the fact that this change was purely due to a lack of teachers - which to me, seemed like the school did not have its act together at all. The only instructor able to teach was the founder, as they had lost most of ther teachers.

So now, I was trying to put up with only having 1 session a week, when I wanted (and was promised on the website) to have at least 2 or 3 sessions a week. These sessions were an hour long, with the rest of your week completely empty. You were told to continue to with the work done in your sessions, as well as watching a few Frontend Masters and/or Egghead videos. For the rest of the week. This is their curriculum. 

The group sessions were a nice touch, but they were very disorganized. Every group session seemed to be a completely new topic that students voted on. They were also painfully long, about two hour to three to even four hours at times. Very inefficient, as most students seem to zone out by the end.

My time at Devschool was 1 hour long session once a week, with a few two - four hour long group sessions sprinkled throughout. All done by the founder. He was exhausted.

curriculum

This is Devschool's most advertised feature. A none-structured curriculum. This is the reason why I was drawn to the school. As a student however, it's not really all that conductive to the learning process. 

First, there is in fact a semi-curriculum. While I was a student, we had to build a blog as our first project. Then for some reason, the blog assignment was scrapped, and we were told to build a text game using Javascript. It came out of no where, it was quite advanced for some of the beginner students (jumping straight into OOP), when some of the beginners didn't even know the different types of loops yet.

The problem with Devschool's promise to "crafting your own curriculum" is that most beginners have no clue what technologies are important and in demand. That's why they are relying on schools to teach them in the first place. A completely open ended curriculum is only appropriate for advanced beginners and up, who actually have had at least several months of programming knowledge.

Finally, there is no structured student-to-student pair programming. You can reach out to students, but that's about it. The varying levels of students and time zones make it a bit difficult.

track structure

This is something I am a bit concerned about for the current students. Devschool has radically changed their course tracks over the past 6 months at least three times. In fact, the current tracks on Course Report (and while I was enrolled), no longer exist at all.

Devschool originally had a track of "Ruby Web Development" and a track for "Javascript Web Development". Then, when I enrolled, it had a track of "Full Stack Web Development", and a track for "Software Engineering". They recently (as of this review), changed their tracks again, this time offering "Modern Front End Developer" and "Modern Fullstack Developer".

support

Due to the shortage of instructors, my weekly sessions were reduced to 1 a week, with the rest of my time working alone on assignments, group sessions, and the occasional video from their MOOC memberships. 

There was zero support outside of your hour long session. Group session content was reserved for whatever was being shown during that session. You could PM the instructor on Slack, but they would be swamped with other student's sessions, unable to focus their energy on you. There were no office hours - once again, lack of instructors to facilitate such systems. You could ask in the Student Slack channel - but should that really be touted as a plus? There are tons of free programming slack channels as well.

outcome

I'm glad that students in 2015 were able to find jobs. I'd be curious to see an update in 2016. They say that you are in the program as long as you want until you get a job. The only benefit there are the group sessions - which again, might have nothing to do with helping you get a job. Personalized support? With the lack of instructors or even job specialists/recruiters, you can expect almost no job support after your personal sessions have been used up.

value

How does Devschool stand amongst its online peers? I've listed out the major contenders in the online bootcamp world. I'm ignoring the contents of their curriculum - because the way in which they deliver this content is far more important. 

Devschool: Membership to Frontend Masters and Egghead, unlimited group sessions, open ended curriculum, access to group sessions until hired, 1 mentor session per week, job support during individual sessions, 6 months - 1 year duration.

Codementor: Choose your mentor, open ended curriculum, 1 - X mentor sessions a week, mentor pricing flexible, open ended duration

Hack Reactor Remote: structured curriculum, daily student pair programming, daily group sessions, office hours, job support, 3 months duration

Fullstack Remote:  structured curriculum, daily student pair programming, daily group sessions, office hours, job support, saturday CS curriculum, 4 months duration

Viking Code School: structured curriculum, daily student pair programming, daily group sessions, office hours, personal job support, tuition is paid as 18% of first year's salary upon receiving a job, 3 months duration

The Firehose Project: structured curriculum, 1 mentor session per week, office hours, job support, apprenticeship program, 6 months duration

Thinkful: structured curriculum, daily student pair programming, daily group sessions, daily mentor session, 24/7 office hours, 4 month duration, personal job training pre and post graduation, 100% refund if not hired after 6 months

Bloc.io: structured curriculum, 1 - 3 mentor sessions a week, office hours, 6 month duration, personal job training post graduation, 100% refund if not hired after 6 months

conclusion

Devschool's heart is in the right place. I support their style of teaching an open, unstructured curriculum. It just needs a lot of fine tweaking, and the students may become collateral damage during those tweakings. Hopefully the school will grow with more instructors, so that more flexible options are given in terms of mentoring hours and session numbers, as well as the organization and comprehensiveness of the program. In the end however, with the state that the school was in when I enrolled, I had to leave and pursue a different program. I wish Devschool all the best.

 

 

My experience with Devschool was nothing but awesome and accommodating. Jim is a great teacher with tons of experience and a lot of knowledge to give. Whatever your goals are Jim will do whatever he can to help you reach them. Jim would often ask his students for any feedback/input they had regarding the school and how he could make it better to suit our needs. I dont think there is another school out there that caters to the student like that. Like the site says this school does not have a set curriculum like most web development bootcamps but is catered towards the individual student and their goals. If you are looking for a step by step hand holding curriculum then this is not the school for you. Unfortunately due to a new job schedule preventing me from commiting the time to Devschool that I would have liked to I chose not to continue with the Devschool program. Jim was very understanding and gave me a pro-rated refund based on the amount of time I had spent in the school just like the website says. Within a couple days my refund was in my bank account. No jumping through any hoops or the normal BS most companies give you when looking for a refund. If youre a  self motivated, goal orriented person looking to get a personal education instead of the same cookie cutter one like all these other bootcamps are offering definitely give Devschool a shot.

I have been a student at Devschool for about three months, most of that time was spent studying and coding part-time. In that time, I have gone from knowing nothing about code, to experimenting coding whole apps, and getting contacted by recruiters regularly.

The most important skill I have learned, however, is learning how to learn. Jim's teaching style forces you to learn how to take extreme ownership of your learning, and how to enjoy that process. This is how it works: Jim serves as your mentor, giving you one 1:1 session a week, and the ability to spectate on other sessions. You get homework which you complete in between sessions. The curriculum is open, and you are free to tackle topics that interest you, all the while, being guided by Jim to ensure that you end up learning all the things you need to be succesful. 

If you are not the type to take ownership, or are not open-minded, I do not recommend taking this bootcamp. Otherwise, it will be the best learning experience you will have.

I enrolled in Devschool because of their positive image online in reviews and otherwise.  Prior to this, I was enrolled in Bloc & Thinkful but sadly their curriculum was poorly formatted and far too structured to be useful to me.  This is simply my opinion.

After months of searching I started reading about Devschool and how highly the school was recommended was from previous students who graduated the program.  I spoke with Jim numerous times and he was always patient when it came to answering my questions and concerns, and I was impressed with how Devschool was not the typical “Big Box” outfit.

Unfortunately because of an unexpected personal life-crisis I had to drop out of the program before I was able to onboard due to my hectic schedule.  And even though Devschool has a standard pro-rated refund minus some non-refundable portion, Jim made a personal exception for me due to my circumstances and refunded the full amount since I needed that money to get out of my crisis.  He delivered on the school's promise for an "Insanely Human Experience" and then some!

When in the future I can enroll in an online coding school I will sign up for their program again, no hesitation.  Devschool rocks!

I was one of Jim's first official Devschool students back in April of 2015 after having been his customer for several months previously while I attended Dev Bootcamp in NYC. I found that even after 10 hours a day at school learning and hacking, I was missing some major understanding in the Rails stack and in some of the smaller details of web development.

Through Codementor, I found Jim and made him my long term mentor through months 2-3 of Dev Bootcamp and I ended up getting a partial refund at DBC and joined the brand new (then) Devschool. I really liked how the curriculum wasn't written out ahead of time when what I wanted to build and learn was anything but static.

I would recommend Devschool to anyone who wants to cut through the cruft and really, really learn the skills they will need to build modern web applications.

I am a current student of the Devschool. I started about 2 months ago and really happy so far. The reason I chose the Devschool is that it is not a "bootcamp" as we usually understand the word - it is a mentorship mixed with a friendship and strong community. Exactly what I needed: build a real world projects of my choice using tools I want or which are really in trend today. This school is not only about WEB development. It is all about any kind of a programming you're interested in. If my dream would be to write a programms for a robotic vacuums -> I can start this kind of a project at Devschool today.

I would highly recommend Jim and Devschool for any prospective students out there! I have been a student for about 4 months and have learned a ton. Initially I wanted to find a program to help me transition from IT support to a developer and find a programmer job. I now have that developer job and I owe a big thanks to Devschool for helping me develop the required skills to get it. I originally found Jim when I was using CodeMentor.io to level up my skills. Jim was one of the top 10 Ruby/Rails teachers in the space. When I started my education with Jim, I realized that I had some gaps in my skills that I needed to work on. Jim was patient while I worked through initial bumps along the way. Jim does a great job of breaking down difficult topics into easy digestible pieces that I can understand. I am still working with Devschool to continue to level up with the latest technologies and make sure I use best coding practices going forward.