Skill Distillery

Skill Distillery is a great opportunity that benefited me greatly. You get what you put in, if you're ready to fully commit to learning how to code, you will undoubtedly get a job in the industry. The instructors are always available to make sure you are succeeding and excelling in the program.
If you do job searches, you will find that Skill Distillery provides very up to date education with all of the tools you need to stand out and get started in a Jr. Software Engineer role.
Advice: Always be thinking one step ahead and apply yourself. With mid term and final projects, challenge yourself to come up with projects that you will be proud to display as key talking points in interviews.

Skill Distillery was, simply, the best decision I could have made while making a radical career change in my mid-30s.  The staff was enthusiastic and knowledgable, the curriculum was relevant and rigorous, and the quality of my fellow students was inspiring.  A year after graduating from this school I can say, without a doubt, that the training I received there is directly responsible for much of the success I've had in the time since.  I would highly recommend this course to all students, at all levels of ability, who are looking to work hard and make a positive change in their lives.

Prior to attending Skill Distillery I spent time as a musician, bus driver, and 6 years in the Navy.  When it was time to transition from active duty toward a new career, I was looking for training in computer programming that would be comprehensive enough to get a job but wouldn't take so long that it would take me out of the job market for an extended period.  I chose to go to SD because it seemed to offer both of these: the curriculum boasts an impressive list of technologies with an emphasis on Java and the training is only 19 weeks long.  Because they also took the GI bill, it made the program an obvious choice.

I arrived at the school with previous, self-taught experience.  The training I received at the school was way beyond what I could have done on my own, however.  I was challenged throughout the curriculum, as were the other students.  But, with that challenge came a lot of employable skills.  I left the school with an Oracle Java SE7 certification and a strong grasp of OOP/OOD, Java SE, Spring, SQL, Amazon Web Services, JavaScript, Angular, Agile methodologies, and more.  

After leaving the school I had four job interviews within one month of graduation and got four job offers.  Two of the job offers were for Java developer postions and two were for python ( a language we didn't even cover at the school).  Two of those jobs offered 6 figure starting salaries.  The job I chose put me in a very interesting and fullfilling role as a cyber security web application developer for a large bank usign python/django.  Within a few months I was a lead developer.  Many of my fellow developers have no idea that I have little on-the-job experience.  Because of the comprehensive training I received at the school and the experienced I gained rapidly developing projects, I fit in rather easily.

I would absolutely recommed this school to anyone who is serious about making a change into software development.  You will be challenged, for sure.  But, if you stick with the curriculum, you will be amazed at how much you can learn.  Because this school doesn't cut corners or offer only easily-learned technologies, you will be in a great position to show potential employers that you have what it takes to make a meaningful contribution to their team!

Steve, the main core Java programming instructor, is let's just say, emotional.  I can't even tell you how many times he has yelled at our class or threatened to kick someone out in front of the class, and in some cases succeeded much to the financial detriment of the student.   Do not take this course, if you get even a little behind they will force you to quit or fall back to a previous cohort. This used to be a very good environment, it's very disappointing now, it has become a culture of fear and is very hard to learn in.

Skill Distillery first caught my eye when I saw they accepted the GI Bill, and they happened to be close to home. I'd heard vaguely about coding bootcamps, and dismissed them without much thought, figuring they were all a scam somehow. But all of a sudden I had a relatively low risk option, and decided to check them out.

What I got was far beyond my expectations. I took about a year of computer science back in college, and this program blew through everything I knew in the first two weeks. It was challenging. Java is challenging. And adding in the full stack to build web applications with SQL, JDBC, JPA, JSPs, HTML, and CSS made me wonder if I could grasp it all. And then moving to JavaScript and building these apps using a whole other suite of technologies (Node.js, Express, jQuery, AJAX, Angular...) was like climbing to the top of a mountain only to realize I was only at the saddle. Looking back I can't believe how much I learned in 19 weeks.

I started looking for a job a little later than most, but started interviewing in the last week of school. In every interview I had I would describe what I had learned and the response was always "you worked with [fill in the blank] technologies? Well that's exactly what we do here." In some cases the employer could see areas where I could show them something new. All my interviews were favorable, and 10 days after I graduated I had an offer I couldn't refuse working with a great group of people. For the first time in my life I'm turning down job offers, and making more money than I ever would have imagined.