Craft Academy

If you want to learn to code in just 12 weeks this is the course for you. This course has change my life and give me a whole new carrier path to focus on.

The 12 week coding boot camp will test every emotional part of your being but let me promise you... Read More this, you will come out a junior coder with the best skills to take you forward in your carrier, but you have to stay focused, committed and keep pushing through no matter what.

The highly skilled instructors will take you through every step to getting you on track to become a junior full stack developer including preparing you for future job applications and interviews.

I would highly recommend this course, you won't regret it, I don't!

Craft Academy's twelve-week program was arguably the most stressful and challenging three months of my entire life. The coding was great fun and it's always exciting and rewarding to grow a skillset. My major challenges were with the "soft skills" taught... Read More in the course - collaboration, working with remote colleagues / teachers, implementing planning tools and techniques. But the fact of the matter is no one can build anything of worth sitting alone in their basement with their laptop. I'm very grateful to the coaches at Craft Academy for forcing us to learn to work like "real world" developers - the kind who have to work in teams and who have to pair program and who are required to submit their code for review.

My background is pretty diverse - from entrepreneurship to non-profit management to the arts - but coding had always been something I'd thought about doing. I had spent a few years trying to teach myself to code in Java / Android, without a great deal of success. I know for myself that three months of 100% dedication and someone to hold me accountable is worth years of self-study and the best online, free resources in the world. Not everyone feels this way and if you are great at self-study and have the wherewithal to find communities to connect with online, that would surely be a cheaper option. For me, the investment is well worth the reward.

The first six weeks of the camp are about building basic skillsets - working with Ruby, Javascript, HTML/CSS and the Sinatra and Rails frameworks. The second half of the course is all about building projects - one after the other, increasing in complexity. I very much enjoyed this approach, though I felt there was a bit too much hand-holding during most of the first half. Some people appreciated that. I often found myself working on side projects during these weeks (and highly recommend that anyone doing a bootcamp do so with whatever free time you can scrape together).

In the last half of the camp, we built some applications that impressed the crap out of our friends: a simple social network, an online marketplace for placing food orders, an interactive "pub quiz" app that pushes out questions in real time to players, and receives their answers back. I'm really proud of what we built during those last six weeks.

I also want to note that some of my colleagues struggled quite a bit with the materials. The goal of the bootcamp is to struggle - to be pushed up to and perhaps beyond your limits, and certainly out of your comfort zone. Still, many of my colleagues didn't take the prep course seriously and they suffered throughout the bootcamp because of this, and because of an attitude that prevented them from acknowledging their faults and working to fix them. If you decide to take this or any bootcamp, it is very important to bring *humility* to the table. Acknowledge how little you know, and work as hard as you can to change that. Try to be a sponge soaking up knowledge. If a coach does something that puzzles you, ask her why she's doing it! If you just follow the instructions, you'll never get there. And if you fail to follow the instructions, you'll never develop good habits.

So all of that said, I did, in fact, love this bootcamp. I felt the coaches were actually invested in my education - really wanted me to succeed - and were fighting for me the whole way. I feel like a developer and can make all kinds of things - much more complex than I would have thought going in. While job hunting, it seemed there were *lots* of opportunities for me and having attended a handful of networking events, I can say without question that there is a strong demand for junior developers here in Sweden, and likely throughout the world.

I know it's a hard decision to spend the money, but if you thrive in this kind of environment, Craft Academy is a great place to become a web developer.

Full disclosure: Since graduating, I have begun work at Craft Academy. I tried to be as honest as possible and write a review that would actually help people decide whether or not this bootcamp is right for them.