Which would you pick, Bloc, Thinkful (company), or theFirehoseProject? Why?

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Dave Paola

Original Answer (Updated 5/28/2015 Below)


So since this one is about Bloc I thought I would add my two cents.

You should pick the program you think seems better suited to your goals. And you should absolutely look at examples of projects that students completed. People learn web development for all sorts of different reasons. A sample of Bloc students:

• 50% want to become entrepreneurs
  
• 35% Want a job as a full stack web developer
  
• 15% have a background in coding or computer science, but want to brush-up their skills

Bloc is built for entrepreneurs who want to build real web apps on their own. We don't focus on time spent or curriculum covered, we focus on the number of real, production-quality apps that you have designed, built, and launched.

We believe in 1-on-1 learning. Every student learns differently, at a different pace, and has different interests and goals. We can go deeper on JavaScript for one student or go slower on Ruby syntax for another student. You'll meet AT LEAST three times per week with a mentor vested in your success.

We believe in learning from a professional. You choose your own mentor. Bloc mentors are serial entrepreneurs and have 10 years of dev experience on average.

We believe in building real stuff. We've developed our own custom curriculum that's deeply rooted in building your own projects from scratch. You'll build versions of Reddit, Digg, Wikipedia, and Kissmetrics. You'll learn how to process payments on your site and how to integrate with social network APIs.

We're not a content company, we're an outcome company.
Our outcome is turning you into a web developer.

Bloc isn’t for everyone:

• Expect to skip the fuzzy theoretical stuff; this isn't Computer Science 101. Instead, we focus on the pragmatic skills and effective tactics used by the best web developers in the industry.
  
• Expect difficult deadlines. Follow our program, and commit the 25 hours per week required, and in 12 weeks you will become a competent junior web developer.
  
• Expect human contact. The apprenticeship model means working closely with a professional web developer and not hiding behind a screen.
  
• Expect to build something. Over your 12-week course, you will code your concept or idea into a completed project. And we'll guide you along the way.

Updated Answer

Several aspects of Bloc’s model have changed since I wrote this answer, so I wanted to provide an update. Bloc’s program is far more flexible than it was just a year ago. We now support multiple paces at which students may experience our curriculum.

At the same price, we now offer a 12, 18 and 36-week option for all of our courses. They differ in the number of mentor meetings per week and expected weekly time commitment (40, 25, and 10 hours, respectively). Furthermore, students who feel overwhelmed at the rigorous 12-week pace are free to switch to the moderate 18 or 36-week paces.

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Bhaumik Patel

Update (1/18/2014): A writer from SkilledUp went through through our Frontend course and posted a pretty comprehensive review. It's more up to date (and detailed) than my answer: Thinkful Review: Learn Coding with Mentors.

Also, a few students have shared their experience here: Has anyone "attended" Thinkful and what was their experience?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for the question!

I was former student in the Front-End course who applied to join the team two months into the course. I was hired as a Front-End intern and was promoted 5 weeks later to become Community Manager. Here's me on my first day as an intern: Has anyone "attended" Thinkful and what was their experience?

Anyways, if you're choosing between Bloc and Thinkful, I'm assuming you're in a similar position. I wanted to become a web developer [eventually full-stack] but needed a course that fit my needs. I tried using many of the free resources available on the web ( What are the best sources to learn web coding (in a short time)?) but realized I needed a project based curriculum to apply these new skills. It became quite frustrating when I would get "stuck."

Hours of research later, I chose Thinkful. Why?

Support: You'll have a personal mentor to work with you every week. The sessions are done via Google Hangout so that the mentor can screenshare and view your progress live. You'll be learning the tools of the trade (Chrome Dev Tools, GitHub) and other techniques for live collaboration (http://JSFiddle.net, CodePen, Nitrous.io). In addition to the weekly mentoring sessions, students can email the mentor and attend weekly Office Hours (also done via Hangout) to ask away any questions or just work on their projects.

Flexibility - The mentors [and students] come from are all over the world, so we'll be able to accommodate any unusual time requests. In fact, our mentor team has just reached 6 continents (thinkful: With our latest addition from ...)! What's awesome is that anyone from an absolute beginner (like me) to someone with significant experience can gain value from our curriculum. Additionally, many of our students have full-time jobs or are current college students so the recommended pace (~10-15 hours a week) is perfect for them!

The payments are for monthly access to the whole program. At the recommended pace, our students typically finish in 3 months. If you're able to spend more than that (or have prior experience), you'd be able to finish in just 1-2 months - and only have to pay for the time spent in the course. I actually just graduated two students last week who finished in a month!

Community - In addition to the mentorship, there's a great amount of interaction between our students on our communities. On our blog, I've posted some examples of the interaction (This. Is. Our. Community) and another Introducing: Student Moderators!. It's incredible learning the different goals and background of our students went the first get started:


I'm in charge of leading this pillar of enormous education value so I'm always open to feedback My long-term goal is for it to become a more social (and friendlier) version of StackOverFlow.

If you finish the course, you'll get permanent access to the curriculum. The final product of either course is pretty awesome (a Final Portfolio of the projects you've been working on for Front-End, an MVP for Python and Ruby, an iPhone app ready for the App Store for iOS). By the way, if you like certificates, we got them! Ex:
http://www.thinkful.com/student/....

I was a student, am a student, and work with all of our students. Feel free to send me a personal message (or email bhaumik[at]thinkful.com) if you have ANY questions about our program. I'd love to chat over the phone to discuss your goals as well

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Mark Brown

I'm a current Bloc student, so I cannot speak for Thinkful (though I've read and heard good things about it). But I have to say that my experience with Bloc has been excellent.

Below is just a comprehensive summary of my experience with Bloc and learning to code; I hope it helps the discussion and anyone who, like me, was on the fence for a long time:

The best part of learning to code with Bloc has been the dynamic between the challenging projects and the mentor meetings. The projects by themselves taught me a ton, and then the meetings with my mentor reinforce what I’ve learned from the projects, resolve any questions or misconceptions I have, and leave me feeling motivated to learn more. As for learning to code in general, the best part is the tremendous satisfaction I get after solving a difficult problem. That satisfaction, though brief, is highly addictive and makes all the effort worthwhile - and it’s great preparation for even bigger challenges.

The worst part of learning to code, both with Bloc and in general, is the occasional but necessary period of intense struggle. It can be discouraging, but I get through it by remembering this: every rewarding pursuit has rough patches, so they’re bound to show up; and they usually mean that some serious growth is about to happen!

As for the mentor sessions, one usually starts with me giving a progress summary, which also includes any questions I have. Then Oliver, my mentor, answers my questions, pair-programs with me when necessary, and lays out the next steps for me to complete for our next session. We also talk about best practices, new developments, and ongoing debates in the web-development world. Of course, each session is also motivating and fun; having a pro to work with goes a long way.

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Ken Mazaika

At Firehose we're focused on our student's achieving their coding goals whatever they are. We're super proud of how our graduates have gone on to crush it!

Here's how we're different from all the other online coding bootcamps.

At Firehose we give our students solid skills in algorithms and data structures. We ask our students to solve coding challenges throughout their experience in the program. While these are difficult to solve, I have personally asked candidates to solve these exact problems while I conducted technical interviews when I was growing the engineering team I was on at WHERE.com.

Completing these coding challenges gives our students the experience solving the types of problems that come up in technical interviews. Our students get experience working with linked lists, performing graph search on trees, and solving problems with recursion. Given the next step after Firehose for many students is a technical interview - this stuff is important.

Also for entrepreneurs looking to build out their idea, a depth in algorithms and data structures will allow them to build more advanced features in the applications they build out, rather than being stuck building just a simple application.

We treat algorithms and data structures with the respect. Some topics taught in Computer Science degrees are important to grow as a developer who is able to solve complex problems - that's why we teach them at Firehose.

We believe that collaborating with other developers matters. The best software in the world is built by awesome teams. That means if you're looking to land a job as a web developer having experience working as an agile teamwill be an important factor in getting an offer.

Our students, in agile teams, build a web application that allows users to play chess against each other. This is a complex web application that mirrors the type of complexity of an application you'll face when you land a job as a junior developer.

If you're an entrepreneur and your idea takes off, the experience of working on a team environment building software will give you the skills you to bring on more technical talent to scale your application when that time comes in your business.

These teams are led by a senior web developer who works with the team, guiding them to build a very complex web application.

The Firehose community is incredibly warm and vibrant. We've been lucky to have a ton of awesome students as part of our community. Our students engage with each other on Google+, Slack and frequent student led video hangouts where students talk about code (we call them lightning talks).

Many of our students interact with other Firehose students in their area in-person as well, and attend events like meetups together.

We also believe students should know that coding is for them before they pay for a coding bootcamp. That's why we have a coding bootcamp prep-course that teaches HTML, CSS and ruby fundamentals, which culminates in solving a common question that is used in the job searching process. Most students take around 2 weeks to go through it.

Apply for the Free Firehose Intro Course Here
Coding bootcamps are here to stay. The best programs out there can take someone with very little coding background to being able to achieve their coding goals. Whether someone is looking to switch careers and become a web developer or launch a tech product, it's never been more practical to pick up the skill!

[Click on the image to see the animation]

But before you sign-up and pay for any - it's important for you to do your research and pick the right one for you. Everyone is different, and maybe the right solution for someone else isn't right for you.

Here's everything we think you need to know about making the decision. I highly recommend reading it.

Reverse-Engineering the Perfect Coding Bootcamp Strategy


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Karim Tarek

I can sum my experience so far with Bloc.io (I'm a current full-stack student), as follows:

• The full-stack web development course, isn't really a full-stack as they barely cover HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I would call it Rails web development instead.
• I think it's over priced, for the money you pay you get a total of 18 hours 1-on-1 with a mentor (3 times, or 2 times or 1 time a week each meeting for 30 minutes) depends on the length of your programme, and the material for the course should be better.
• 30 minutes meeting isn't enough to have a informative session for example if you want to re-factor a simple piece of code it will consume most of the time.
  
• Self discipline is a MUST, no one is going to look after you.
• For me the office hours which is a chat room (text only), proved to be useless.
• If you don't have any questions the mentor will assume that you fully understand what's going on and he/she will move on, even if it's not the case.

In general you should know that it's going to be a tough journey no matter what school you choose.

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