Coding Bootcamp Praha

Coding Bootcamp Praha or Data4You is a 12-week basic coding class based in Prague, Czech Republic. They claim to "prepare you for a career in web development" in 12 weeks. They are one of many web development intensives designed to help someone transition... Read More into a career in tech. I will share my honest review about my experience with the most recent cohort.

Disclaimer: I decided to leave after 8 weeks of the course.

I am reviewing this class using Class Central's open-source review template to provide as much insight and value as I can to anyone considering attending this course.

Background Information

Why did I choose to attend this course?

I am an online marketer by trade and have been for the past five years. I have built a solid business that has helped me become location independent so I have been diversifying my interests into other industries and self-educating to continually improve myself. Since I have been working with software companies I have had a growing interest in tech and particularly web development because I enjoy the idea of being able to solve problems through creating useful apps and digital products. This interest has lead me down a path of self-study since 2015. After experiencing a plateau in my progress I decided the best course of action was to enroll in a coding bootcamp that would help me bridge the gap and shorten the learning curve.

I chose this course for the following reasons:

It was located in Prague, CR a beautiful city that's cost friendly to live in.
The course's price itself was also the most inexpensive out of all of the other ones I researched.
The small collection of reviews were positive.
I contacted some alumni that I found on LinkedIn and they gave positive feedback (I will address this later on).
What were my goals?

Though most people want to immediately get a job as a junior web developer I wanted to get enough experience where I could build an app end-to-end so I could solve my own technical challenges in my own business and/or fully build a prototype if I had an idea for an application. I wanted to use the program to push me past the basics and help me really develop the confidence to build a project.

History of the class

The class is organized and run by a sister and brother duo. The course has only been around for about a year and they had previously "graduated" two cohorts of students before ours. It was mentioned at the course by an instructor that they originally intended the class to be for kids but after assessing the demand they decided to create a camp more suited towards those looking to change careers. Neither of the founders have any experience in web development nor do they have any startup experience.

Instructors

On their website, they advertise that including the two co-founders they have eight instructors during the course. This is incredibly misleading information. They only have one instructor a day, and for my cohort, they rotated between four instructors. One of them is still a student who works in their office and the rest are contractors. If we're talking about competency they definitely were skilled enough to teach the subjects they were covering but they lacked the proper mentality to be instructors. To be fair, two of the four instructors actually cared about the development of the students and consistently asked for feedback on what we thought we needed to cover and I got a lot of value from one of the instructors who would start the class by always asking everyone how confident we were about the topic we were covering. The issue with the class was the format and founders, not the instructors.

My Background / skills entering the program

As I mentioned before, I started self-learning since 2015. I finished 90% of the freecodecamp curriculum amongst taking other online classes from:

Udacity
CodeCademy
CodeSchool
WatchAndCode

Just to name a few notable ones. I have a very solid grasp of the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and SQL. I’ve built a couple frontend projects before and I have also used a couple APIs for small projects while I was taking FreeCodeCamp’s curriculum. I’ve read the documentation on some JS frameworks like Angular and React and I’ve dabbled with a couple Ruby on Rails tutorials but I’ve never built an application end-to-end. I sold my first company three years ago and since then I’ve managed to build multiple profitable e-commerce stores. Currently, I focus my time consulting companies on their online marketing efforts specializing in conversion rate optimization. My clients would say that I’m dependable and very honest about what I can and cannot do.

The Course

Daily Schedule

The course is split up into 12 weeks. On their website they claim that the typical day is structured like this:

9:00 - Morning Class: Challenges of the day are introduced by the instructor through lectures, activities, and discussions
11:00 - Live-coding Game: how to write better code, Challenges of the day on practical examples that students improve
12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Simulated Work Environment: Individuals and group work on the challenges and portfolio projects in collaboration with our instructor
15:00 - Individual Progress Evaluations: Personal discussions between the student and the instructor who supports the student with specific recommendations
17:00 - Best Practices: Wrapping-up the day as a group, presenting accomplishments

If this was the typical day I believe my experience would’ve been very different but the typical days actually looks something more like this:

9:30 - Morning Class: Everyone gets into class more or less around this time.
10:00 - 12:00: We talk about the day’s topic through the instructor sharing slides
12:00 - 13:00 - Lunch
13:00 - 17:00 - Watch slides and the instructor go through coding examples

On a typical day after the third week, if 10/16 of the students were left after 14:00 I would be impressed. There are some varying degrees of this of course where they would introduce a project half an hour before we left or “practice” the concepts which were taken directly off of other sites. But for the most part, the teaching format is very similar to what you would experience in elementary school.

Curriculum

The "advertised" curriculum had me initially excited about the course. On the homepage, they claim to cover everything from the basics of front-end to learning object-oriented programming, team collaboration tools like git, and server side scripting. During my initial interview, the founder told me that we would be focusing on using PHP and the framework Laravel to build projects. During my 8 weeks of attendance, we did not cover any Laravel.

My experience

The city of Prague is amazing, the price is reasonable (compared to other camps) and the environment of being around other students who wanted to learn was nice. Most of my bad experience stemmed from the founders. Since neither of them knows how to code the format of the course is extremely ineffective. You do not spend nearly enough time coding or working on projects. The female founder especially does not take constructive criticism well. She is extremely condescending and sensitive when it comes to feedback. Her actions made it extremely difficult for any of the students to express themselves or come to her about any issues they were facing. She has passive aggressive tendencies that turned a lot of the students off immediately.

My biggest complaint is that the said founder told me during the interview process that their acceptance process was rigorous to weed out those who didn’t seem qualified to participate in the class. I wish I knew that they didn’t care about who they accepted into the class or that they didn’t know how to code. I am not against a class designed to teach someone the absolute basics but for someone who has spent two years self-learning, this was a complete waste of time for me. I tried to remain optimistic but after a direct conflict that occurred with me and the founder I decided that I did not want to be in a hostile environment. Most people do not learn web development through powerpoint presentations. Day one it was apparent that 90% of the course had never written a line of code before. There were massive gaps in knowledge. The course’s goal is enrollment and payment, not student development or education.

Can you get a job immediately after graduation?

No, I kept in close contacts with many of the students that became close associates. Many of the students have applied to multiple junior level jobs and internships with no success. Some of them are even applying to other bootcamps. Their only “Job Assistance” was inviting a local recruiter to one of the classes to talk about his own startup that places developers with local startups. Many of the previous graduates now “intern” for the bootcamp. They pretty much work for free on some of their internal projects and are encouraged to leave positive reviews for the course.

Conclusion

Coding Bootcamp Praha or Data4You is a new bootcamp started by non-developers trying to take advantage of the recent hype of coding bootcamps. Even though their price tag is attractive if you are looking for a positive learning environment you will not find one here. The city in which it’s located in is the best part about the bootcamp. I do not see this course being around for long, if you are considering attending this bootcamp I would spend a little extra money and look elsewhere. I have spoken to many friends who attended other bootcamps and their experiences were completely different from mine so I believe it’s not all bootcamps that are bad, just the ones where their focus is on making money like this one.

If you want any additional information about the course please feel free to contact me directly at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/realtimkim/

I am slightly editing my review from other places to be place appropriate.

A little background and context on this review: I attended CBP, or DATA4YOU, in their April 2017 term. I left about 6 weeks into the course. Before I left, 2 other students had... Read More left, and to my knowledge, 1 other student has since left and during the last bit of class, there were ~4 students on a regular basis attending class from a class that originally had 16 (from what my classmates tell me). Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons why I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go here but first, let’s start with the good things and work our way to the worst.

- Location: Prague is a fantastic city that’s experiencing a tech boom. 

- Students: The people coming here are in general really amazing human beings and I’m so grateful to have made friends with them. They really have a bright future ahead of them.


- Price: The price is incredibly affordable, the majority of the students all picked this course because of the price-point and location. There is a saying though that goes, "you get what you pay for". This course is a perfect example of that. 



- Instructors: Of the 4 instructors, one truly knows what he’s talking about and takes feedback into consideration. Another who teaches about 70-80% of the course, unfortunately, looks like he does not want to be there, and is constantly talking down about the students. I understand he did not create the curriculum or the teaching method yet he is also not doing anything to improve it. The other two know how to code, and they can work in their fields.



- Low Barrier Of Entry: They said the maximum class size is 15, there were 16 students. One applied after the deadline was still accepted. During the interview, I asked what level of previous experience they were looking for, and the founder said that they are looking for people who already have some coding experience since it is an intensive course. So if you have ZERO coding experience, according to them, you shouldn't be getting in, yet, in the course, there were not one, not two, but multiple people who had zero experience with code. Then there were people who have been taking courses on their own for over a year. You can't possibly have a balanced teaching method with people positioned so dramatically different. If you know zero code, then it's not a bad idea to consider here but you can find more established places within a similar price range.



- Daily Structure: The suggested overview of a typical day in class provided on their website is not even 1% close to the actual typical day. The majority of the days consisted of theory and lectures with some small exercises, essentially what you can get from Youtube and Freecodecamp. During the 6 weeks, I was there, there were about 4/5-morning stand-ups, during these morning stand-ups we suggested more coding. One instructor took this into consideration. He gave us a small project: connect the file to a database. This was something we had done previously with another instructor, yet it took roughly 2 hours for the entire class to pull it off (myself included). It was a small piece of code that took literally 5 minutes. However, 99% of the course had no idea what he was asking as, during the other instructor's class, all we did is watch him code. It was the day some people finally felt liberated that they had actually learned something. A learn by doing method is the best approach to teaching, and this style is unfortunately not what you will receive here since the main instructor does not teach that way and he couldn’t even if he wanted to since everyone was at such a different knowledge level.



- Housing: On the website, it states that there is housing they will provide you or help you with the search. Firstly, the housing is only for 3 students, so good luck. The housing is also in an apartment run by the parents of the founders. So you are paying the founders for a small room, in a small apartment. Now, if you were not one of the 3 to get housing, the way the founders will "help" you find housing is suggesting Airbnb and other similar websites. A couple minutes spent on these you'll see that housing near the bootcampp will run you roughly $1000USD a month. Some found cheaper, some found more expensive places. The general tone around housing seemed to be, "I was running out of time so I just took whatever I could". The general sentiment from one of the founders seemed to be, "Let's not get dramatic, it all worked out didn't it?"



- Cost Of Labor + Job Assistance: The average salary of a junior web dev in Czech is ~ 25,000- ~ 35,000CZK. That's ~ $1000 USD - ~ $1500USD per month. As the coding school is new and the teaching is what it is, they don’t have enough notoriety within the community in Prague to help graduates get jobs. The type of “Job Assistance” they provided was bringing a nice man from a startup that lists jobs to tell us to put our resume on his website. 

- The Branding: Is it "Coding Bootcamp Praha", is it "Data 4 You", the lack of UI/UX understanding on the website itself should be enough to deter people. 



- The Founders: A brother and sister duo. The brother comes from a real-estate background. The sister, she says she has a coding background. However, if you look at her Linkedin, it's a sales and marketing background. This really explains why the structure of the course feels completely out of touch of how to turn people into real coders.

 

- The Sister Founder: I understand what she's doing, she saw an opportunity and took it. There was a need for coding schools in the area and she must've thought something like, "I know how to do this". Originally the plan was to create a coding Bootcamp for young kids, and it was to be called Data 4 Youth, then I imagine they realized the money wasn't enough there and they changed it to Data 4 You. Overall, all my interactions with her felt very insincere and awkward. A sentiment shared amongst many students was that she was extremely passive aggressive and condescending. If you would like specifics you are more than welcome to contact me on LinkedIn.

 

- The Way They Treat Students: During stand-ups, when we said we wanted to code more, the founder's response would be, "It doesn't work that way". When we presented our ideas for capstone projects, the founder said things like, "This would never work in the Czech market", and "Why would you do something other people already have?". When one student told her, "I know exactly who I want to work with", she responded with, "You don't get to work with people you enjoy drinking with". One instructor very aggressively verbally fought with another student in the class. Another instructor sent me messages about how one student has horrible coding skills. The tests received no feedback, nor did the weekly challenges. This lack of attention significantly reduced the classes overall morale and participation. I began to not take any of the assignments seriously since none of the instructors did either.


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I would not recommend this bootcamp to anyone. Even if you have zero knowledge to start with, learn a little on your own and pay a little more to attend a more established place. However, if money is the real issue, watch youtube videos and find free courses online.

This was probably my biggest lesson and takeaway here: follow your gut instinct. I didn't have a good feeling about this place from the get-go, the branding, the website, the weird interview. But I went because I wanted to be a developer and I loved the price.

If you are insistent that you want to go, you will meet lovely classmates, and enjoy a beautiful city. However, be prepared to be underwhelmed. If you are not an EU resident or long-term visa holder. Also, take into consideration that you will have to leave the EU right after your course. How to solve this issue: look into what the Czech government requires from your specific country to grant you a long-term visa. Get all of your paperwork ready, and bring it with you. Data 4 You will not tell you this and will not help you out with this.

Final word, I don't think Data 4 You/Coding Bootcamp Praha, will last. I can break down and tear apart all of the positive reviews, both here, and on other sources and tell you exactly why it that specific person gave them a positive review (or show you how that review is fake) as I spoke to almost all of the alumni myself. But I won't, and I just hope this review is enough to save someone time, money, and stress. If you want to be a programmer, PAY for a well-established place, OR self-learn for free. Don't pay two people who aren't even programmers and expect them to provide a proper course and structure.

As always, I wish the instructors all the best, I wish the students a bright future (they are honestly a talented bunch), and I wish the founders, some luck.

Coding Bootcamp Praha has been a wonderful experience, being sunk in a driving environment with like-minded people that share the same goal of learning how to code, for three months. Perfect way to make ones laziness go away and learn !

Beware : You might... Read More dream of code.

I had quite extensive experience before the bootcamp of learning through many various online environments - or at least that's what I thought :)) but once i arrived i realized how much more is there to learn! its been an intense time, a lot of tasks and... Read More projects but i always got help whenever i got stuck. Especially i enjoyed the group work where i learnt how to start developing a complex project from scratch. I had many fantastic discussions with the instructors, which inspired me tons. I am now working for a web dev agency as a php developer and i am really grateful that the bootcamp empowered me to do that!

Although I was a complete beginner in coding, the instructors were gentle and always welcomed any questions. Since the students had similar professional experience and the ambition to change their careers, we inspired and motivated each other a lot. The... Read More environment was very international and diverse, it was really fascinating to share our life experience and ideas. The progress in these three months was huge. I'm confidently participating in some coding projects now. The moment I feel my progress the most was the moment I realized that I started to understand programming jokes.

Participating in the Coding Bootcamp Prague early 2017 was one of the best decisions of my life. It’s like pushing the fast forward button in learning. In twelve weeks I managed to master all the necessary skills to code and launch my own web applications... Read More and those of others. The curriculum, the study atmosphere, the course structure and the professional staff all contribute to making this bootcamp one of the best coding schools on the planet. The program is incredibly intensive, but for those who struggle there are sufficient opportunities to receive additional personal support and catch up. I would recommend the Coding Bootcamp Prague to anyone who is looking for an professional, effective and unforgettable experience that will kickstart a new career in software development.