Viking Code School

My name is Kelsey, and I was in the January 2016 Viking Code School cohort. I'd considered code schools for a while beforehand, ever since I reached a point where I felt I needed help to get to a professional level. I completed the interview with Viking,... Read More and was accepted a few days later. Even before the program started, we had prep work to do, which set the tone for the effort and reward involved.

I was in the full time program, which meant 16 weeks of writing code all day, every day. We spent most of the time pair programming, rotating between different partners, although we also had individual projects. This way, we learned more than simple coding skills; we learned how to solve problems beyond the scope of a rigidly defined exercise.

Our final project was built in teams over the course of 2 weeks, and was designed and scoped entirely by the students. Learning those time management skills, as well as how to properly scope a project, has been just as useful in my new career as every algorithm question put together.

When we started applying for jobs, we had practice interviews set up as well as weekly checkins even after the program had officially ended. I received an offer about a month after completing the program, and I've been working there for 2 months now. I still have a lot to learn, but Viking has helped give me the confidence to know that my journey is just beginning.

ABOUT ME
Hi I’m Julia, and I graduated from the January 2016 immersive program.


TLDR
Viking exceeded my very high expectations and propelled me to a career that I love. I am now a Software Engineer working in Python and Flask. 


BEFORE VIKING
I graduated... Read More from UC Berkeley with a degree in Environmental Economics and landed a project manager position at a solar monitoring company. From there, I got interested in coding and landed a software QA position at the same company. In that job, I spent 30% of my day writing automated tests in Python, and the other 70% doing manual testing and putting out fires. I kept seeking out more coding at work, and I spent my nights and weekends working through tutorials and reading Hacker News. I’m a very logical person (I love to play chess), and I find that coding presents a really rewarding balance of interacting with people and getting computers to do what I want.

WHY VIKING
I researched a large number of post-baccalaureate programs, graduate degrees, and bootcamps before making my decision (seriously, you should have seen my spreadsheet). Viking stood out immediately for the depth and quality of the curriculum, the student-teacher ratio, the remote format, and the deferred fee. Viking literally has the same aim as you: to get you hired. They fine-tune the curriculum to make sure you are job-ready, and they drill you on interview practice. You will have to work incredibly hard to get a job, but Viking is right there with you. I loved the remote format because I probably saved an hour of commute time every day (and every hour really counts). It was not difficult to stay on-task and focused because you are constantly interacting with your teammates and the instructors.

GETTING HIRED
From April-June 2016, I applied to over 100 jobs, landed 8 technical screenings, had 3 in-person interviews, and ended up with 2 job offers.


DAILY LIFE
Viking teaches you with project-based learning, and you generally tackle one project per day. 90% of the programming you do is pair programming, so you’re paired with a new student each day. Some of the projects were longer and spanned 2-5 days, letting you build a larger code base and more complex features. The days start at 8am PST and go to either 6pm or 7pm. Each night you will have 1-4+ hours of homework that requires your full attention.
The program is intensely demanding and will challenge you in different ways. You will find your breaking point. Sometimes you will understand the concepts and feel like you’re in control. Other times you will feel like you are completely lost, going to fail, and that you are the only person in your cohort who doesn’t “get it”. That feeling happened twice for me: during the unit on classes and OOP architecture, and when we started making JavaScript games. I promise, this is when your best learning will happen! Reach out to the instructors, go for a walk, and realize that you will definitely get through it.

THE STAFF
The teaching staff is amazing, and I got exactly the support I needed. I was constantly amazed by Erik’s depth of knowledge, his approachability, and his positivity (especially as our exhaustion increased and we all developed dark circles under our eyes). I was always impressed with Chris and Andur’s areas of expertise, plus their ability to jump into a room and help us solve a problem when we got stuck. They offered weekly office hours as even more support for our learning. Dara, the program director, is an incredibly positive addition to the team. I could feel how passionate and dedicated she was to each and every student’s success.

THE CURRICULUM
The curriculum is the best out there; it’s in-depth, high-quality, and never wastes your time. I don’t learn well from videos, so the largely text-based format worked well for me. One of the best parts of the course is the intermediate JavaScript section. You build your own MVC pattern, which immediately propels you from beginner to being able to understand existing JS frameworks.
Viking emphasizes a deep understanding of concepts, instead of just memorization. Like other people have mentioned, Viking teaches you how to learn. These skills will prove immensely useful when you start your first job, and hopefully throughout your career.

MY COHORT
My cohort was made up of 4 women and 6 men. I was constantly impressed by my teammates’ intelligence, persistence, and generosity. Everyone got along well, and there was never any negativity. The atmosphere was supportive and inclusive, and we still keep in touch.


SUMMARY
I cannot speak highly enough of Viking. I have recommended the course to my friends, colleagues, and people I’ve met through networking. One of my friends recently took the plunge, and she is actually in the middle of her cohort right now!

FINAL ADVICE
DO THE PREP WORK. Pay attention, do everything thoroughly, and take it seriously. It will help you get the most you can out of the program.

TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read): Attend Viking Code School. Amazing instructors, great curriculum, and fun community. It’s tough, but worth.

Hey! I’m Andrew and I was part of the January 2016 Immersive program which ended late April 2016.

Before Viking, I graduated... Read More with a masters in chemical engineering and was teaching high school students various STEM subjects. While teaching programming, I found myself pouring unnecessary amount of time and effort coming up with creative projects I could have my students do. It became pretty apparent that these ideas were the things I wanted to learn and implement, myself. I had been self learning for a few months but eventually hit a plateau where I was making no progress and wasting time. So I decided to take myself and my passion seriously and pursued this opportunity full time.

Viking was tough. The curriculum will test the very limits of what you think you can accomplish and kick it even further. The first few weeks is where the prep work they have you do pays off. It’s the life vest you can cling on to keep you alive in the hurricane that will wreck you in subsequent weeks.
I spent most of the day pair programming and coding however, and it’s during this time when I saw how things work in action. Learning by doing is great and it’s one of the best ways to learn, but having another person to sit with you to talk about the code is even better. Time just flew. Also many of projects are interesting, challenging, and rewarding to build. I think it’s the combination of a few things that helped me retain and learn skills at an incredible pace:

1. Discipline and strong work ethic

2. Demanding curriculum/pace

3. Community you can ask questions and investigate solutions

The instructors are very understanding of how intense it can get but you have to be in charge of asking questions and taking initiative in figuring out what you are having trouble understanding (which should be a given at this point). It’s generally not expected that you’ll “get” everything without practice so it’s imperative to ask questions during the SCRUM meetings each morning and ask about things were confusing in the required reading. Many concepts build on each other so it’s crucial to be on top of this for the first few weeks. Also, there will some days where you won’t get to “complete” everything on the agenda, and that’s ok. The firehose of information and the constant deadlines add to the pressure, but please don’t stress out if you don’t complete projects, just focus on learning the core concepts and “finish” them up later in your free time on weekends or after the daily readings.

Also, if you have obsessive/perfectionist tendencies like I do, dump them immediately. This is one thing I wish I would’ve done sooner because I didn’t know how badly it affected my productivity until I became more aware of it. If you’re constantly worried about writing “beautiful/best practice/optimal” code, it’ll just add to the pressure. I’ve chugged many energy drinks and lost many nights of sleep due to this self-centered egoism. Just swallow your pride, and get shit done first without worrying about “beautiful code.” If you have time, you can refactor it then. It’s great to be mindful of best practices and absorb it when you can, but it’s honestly a luxury you can go without when your priority is to learn and get stuff done. This is one strategy I adopted to lessen the impact of the waves smacking into my face every week.

I loved that Viking brought in people to come in and talk about their unique perspective in the industry. It’s a series called Viking Codecast (check it out on YouTube! It’s pretty awesome!). Some of the advice and perspective that was shared during these sessions were incredibly insightful, and some of which I keep in mind to this day.

Also, Viking has a solid job curriculum section that covers everything from discovering leads to practicing mock interviews. It’s really helped me get a jumpstart in the job search process, and helped me land an offer I was happy with!

To summarize, I’d recommend Viking to anyone who is serious, self-disciplined, and committed to transitioning into software development.

Disclaimer: I want to acknowledge a few things and it’s really one of the reasons I’m writing this review, and it’s about anxiety. People have reached to me to ask about my experiences at Viking and the common question goes something like “was it worth it?” It’s a completely fair question, I do admit that I experienced that same anxiety that asked if this investment will really pay off in the end.

When I applied there was almost no paper trail online, there were only like 1 or 2 reviews at most giving great reviews on Quora and Course Report. Imagine shopping for a product on amazon that asked for months of full time commitment with no guaranteed return on investment with 1 or 2 five star reviews, how likely are you to purchase? For me it was worth it, for reasons I’ll explain later, but honestly they won’t convince you of anything. Do your homework. Check out the Viking Blog, the Viking Codecasts on YouTube, Viking capstone project presentations also on YouTube, Viking’s twitter, etc. The jury is coming out and it’s getting easier and easier to figure out what Viking is about. I’m here to accelerate that process and give my honest review so that your anxiety can be less than what I experienced in the past. For me, it was a combination of my hours of research literally scouring the web (i.e. google..lol, Quora, YouTube, The Odin Project) that convinced me it was the real deal. I found that VCS had a consistent web presence/message and I had a very positive experience in self-learning via The Odin Project, despite the lack of testimonials/reviews (at the time I looked into Viking).

Hi I'm Deepa and I graduated the January 2016 Immersive program @ Viking Code School. Viking offers a challenging full-stack web development course which is very relevant to the industry.

Viking was an awesome program - a total eye opener!

Viking changed... Read More my perspective on what it meant to be a great software engineer with in-depth learning and application. Besides Ruby, RoR, Angular, SQL, Agile methodology and other technologies you will also learn a lot about data structures and algorithms, testing, good coding practices, reading and reviewing code effectively as well as pair programming for teamwork and collaboration.

Prior to Viking I was a dev-test engineer @ Cisco Systems with lot of automation and scripting experience. I can sincerely say that I learnt more at my 16 weeks at Viking than a couple of years at work.
I was always passionate about coding and after much research I decided to join Viking. The program was remote but interactive, so it was convenient to not commute while getting all the benefits of an in-person bootcamp. It was great to work alongside extremely talented peers with diverse backgrounds. The selection process to get in Viking program was tough but fair - this gave me a lot of confidence that Viking was as serious about giving a great education as I was about committing 16 weeks to this intense program.

I spent most of my time each week building projects, solving problems, learning to code effectively while collaborating with fellow students. It was great to work in a team on my final project because we gained real-world experience in scoping, defining requirements, task allocation, accountability, Agile development, troubleshooting and refactoring for a great final marketable product! Working in a team has its challenges and rewards and we certainly had the stories to share with prospective interviewers!

The staff at Viking is very supportive, approachable and extremely knowledgable. You will certainly gain in-depth technical and soft skills, negotiation techniques and being resourceful. I know Viking graduates will make very desirable and valuable employees.

My name is Jeff and I am a recent graduate of Viking Code Schools winter/spring '16 cohort (started in January). Viking offers part time and full time courses and I was part of the immersive full-time web engineering program.

Viking changed my life.

I was... Read More an Electrical Engineer for the past 10 years, and unhappy. I was doing something I didn't enjoy, but the prospect of changing careers to do what I truly wanted seemed daunting. Going back for another degree to college, with no promise of a decent job, and a family to provide for, seemed to put what I wanted out of reach.

In 4 months of training with Viking, I found a job as a web developer, and from day 1 I was good at it.

Viking was intense. It was an all encompassing commitment that has you eat, sleep, and breath code. You wake up, have a morning scrum with your teachers and classmates, then code code code all day. The program has you learn by doing, which worked far better then I thought it would. You'll start out writing a lot of bad code. You'll get called out for every bad thing you do, and you'll push yourself to write better code and avoid the scrum disections! The atmosphere is never negative during scrums, but you still come out with a very opinionated idea of what is "good code" and "bad code". After a full day of coding and discussion, you have a few hours of reading every night to learn new concepts for the next day's work. Every day is something new which is the hardest part of the program. You never stop to soak it in, but rather 'firehose' the knowledge into your brain and sprint to the next milestone.

It may seem, given the intensity of the course, that you simply gloss over everything and never learn much, but what the course focuses on is teaching you how to learn. Web development is anything but stagnant. New technologies, languages, frameworks, and methodologies seem to pop up overnight. Learning only one will never be enough. I left Viking understanding what it takes to be proficient in any aspect of web development. My first job has me writing in Python, PHP, Ruby, and Javascript, and to my constant surprise, I've been up to the task.

I still refer to many of the projects I built while in Viking as references, and having that portfolio has been immeasurably helpful. The 'Danebook' social network is a Rails guide I refer to often, and the Trello clone 'Djello' is my go to Angular reference when I want to confirm I'm using best practices. These are both apps I built myself from the ground up, so I'm able to quickly jump in and understand what and why quickly, so I can then apply those ideas in my regular work.

To sum up, the most you can ask for from a program is that it fulfills its promises. Viking did that and more. I came out not only prepared for my new career, but in a position to excel. I even received multiple job offers before the program had officially ended. If web development is something you TRULY want, Viking is the best choice to make it happen.

I participated in the Su '15 full-time program. The program covered a lot of material from algorithms and data structures to in depth Ruby, Rails, JS, and Angular. It's a tough schedule and pace, but made possible by amazing instructors, an extremely... Read More well put together curriculum, and pair programming with very smart peers. The project based learning helped me a lot as we built fun real world apps from the get go (scrapers, interacting with multiple API's, e-commerce backends, games etc.).

VCS emphasized building skills applicable to on the job software engineering - so everyday we used Git while pairing, in our final project we set up continuous integration and deployment, were allowed independence in using gems and API's, and TDD'd projects as well. All this while using hangouts and slack to collaborate, which is important for today's global teams and using Pivotal Tracker for planning and executing projects in agile sprints. It's an extremely well rounded program.

The deferred fees are fine - it means they are investing in us, but other programs offer this as well. With VCS however, we get to learn directly from the people that built and some that participated in the program. Everyone is so committed and bought in, there is no one left behind.

Customary NPS: 10. I am now as biased towards VCS as I am towards my undergrad and grad schools, which is says a lot for the quality and experience.

I was a student in Viking's summer 2015 full-time Web Application Engineering cohort. I strongly recommend the program to anyone who is serious about starting a career in web development because it works.

Before Viking, I was a post-doctoral researcher... Read More at UCSF. I wrote software to build computational models but the skills weren't enough for what software engineer jobs were looking for. I joined Viking in order to get a more applied skill set in web development. The week after I graduated from Viking, I got my first software engineer job offer from a Bay Area FinTech company.

During the program, we built group projects every day and the instructors were always there to ask questions and review code. The projects were not easy and we, therefore, learned a lot by doing them, including how to work on large teams and to build complex applications using Rails and Angular. I appreciated the time spent understanding algorithms and data structures, which we did most days, and which helped a lot with interviewing.

In the end, I'm happy I joined the program and I'm very happy with where my career is now.

Hi, my name is Nick, I am a graduate of Viking Code School’s first full time cohort, and am currently a professional software developer living and working in Austin, TX.

I'll start by saying I am not sure I agree with the other reviewers. They made it... Read More pretty clear that, while they don't expect you to be advanced by any means, you were expect to be at a certain level before the actual interview. This is pretty common with any reputable program. You have to show some sort of drive and self sufficiency to even get through the program (or be a developer, period).

My interview process was quite different. People talked about the interviewers being non-responsive, but that isn't really the point. They want to see how you'll respond under pressure. They want you to talk through the problems, to try to solve them, and to explain your thought process. This is made very clear before and during the interview, and actually helped since I bombed questions in real interviews after but was saved by this great advice (such as my current job).

Viking was nothing short of a life changing experience. While one of the most challenging things I’ve ever committed to, it helped get me to a place where I am now doing what I love for a living.

A bit about my back story -- before being accepted to Viking, I had graduated with a BA in International Relations. I worked for a few years in international development, mostly as a project manager for overseas communications projects in Afghanistan. The work was interesting, but ultimately I always felt like I sort of “settled” in college and this career. It was not very fulfilling, and I was always envious of other people who really seemed to love what they were doing. The old sentiment, “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” certainly didn’t apply to anything I was doing.

While doing this, I found myself needed to write small programs to automate tasks, such as scraping and cleaning government contract award data. I had never programmed a day before in my life prior to this, but the first time I wrote a program that I actually used to solve a problem, I was hooked. I had always regretted not having the money to go back to school to become an engineer, and software development suddenly gave me a very accessible way to build and solve complex problems.

I spent almost all of my free time absorbing whatever I could, but even the most “directed” resources available still left me with large conceptual gaps about how software is designed, tested, and implemented. I could write code (which is good, because it’s totally expected of your before you are even admitted), but I still couldn’t really write and deploy usable software. Between working 50+ hours and week and jumping back and forth between resources, I found myself not making a ton of progress.

When I first learned about boot camps, I was extremely skeptical. I was naturally skeptical of anything that makes some of the huge promises these programs were offering (1 month and you can make $100k!), but as I did research I found that there were a handful of very highly regarded programs out there. I decided to try and find one that might work. My criteria was as follows:

It had to have an emphasis on the software development process and not just teaching me how to write code
It had to be based around building things, since the best chance of getting hired would be to have a killer portfolio
It had to be highly interactive. I didn’t want a “mentor” telling me what to do and then checking in with me at the end of the day. I wanted to be working with people, day in and day out, since that is what would be expected of me as a developer
It had to be accessible. I was living in Philly at the time, which isn’t a huge tech city, and I couldn’t afford to move to New York or San Francisco for a few months
It had to have deferred payment. I have a ton of student loans already, and while I see the value of these programs and don’t mind paying for it, the reality was I was making about 40k a year in international development while trying to pay off student loans. I simply did not have any money

These requirements narrowed my options down pretty fast to a bunch of online programs that came up short in some important areas, usually either not being much more than a “learn to code in javascript!” school, an expensive online mentor with no interaction with other students, or no deferred payments. And the programs that did meet my criteria were just not accessible to a guy living in Philly.

And then I found Viking. Erik had created a resource I’d used a ton already, The Odin Project, and was a graduate of a boot camp himself, so I knew off the bat he had a pretty good idea of how to take that big step. Furthermore, Viking offered a small cohort of 10 students, where we’d be pair programming every single day for 14 weeks, along with deferred payment. It was everything the top programs in NYC and San Francisco offered, but with the incredible convenience and accessibility of being online. It was terrifying thinking of leaving my job to take this on, but after a few personal conversations with Erik, I was convinced this was the right thing to do.

During the program, we spent every day pairing with different people on projects. Literally every single day we built something new. The process was basically:

Go through a bunch of readings and material the night before about a new concept, technology, or framework
Meet in the mornings for a Q&A and to discuss the day’s project
Build awesome stuff that required us to use what we learned, along with a ton of creativity and Google to solve problems
Code reviews where we reviewed each other’s code as well as had ours looked at by mentors
Rinse and repeat

Honestly, one of the most frustrating parts of the course ended up being one of the most beneficial. Having graduated from college, I was very much used to classrooms where our hands were held and where everything was very directed. That is not how Viking works. You and your partner have to plan and design each day’s project. If you get stuck the team will help you find the best way to get an answer, but refrained from really telling you how to do anything. The result was we came out with the knowledge not just how to write good code, but how to solve problems. This is huge, has helped me on a daily basis as a professional programmer, and was one of the things interviewers loved to hear about.

We built so many awesome things, it is hard to even begin to list them. Early on we had to develop a chess AI that could maneuver a knight piece around to eventually capture a roaming king. We built games in Ruby and JavaScript, we built a fully functioning social network...so many interesting projects that not only beefed up my portfolio, but gave me the knowledge and experience to build and work with things I now work with every single day.

Perhaps most importantly, it gave me the creative freedom to be able to build things that I wanted in my free time. The personal projects I took from conception to reality during the course were some of the most valuable pieces of my job search arsenal, and the ability to have an idea, build it, and have people use it is something Viking taught me and employers loved about me.

But the course went well beyond just teaching you to be a developer. Their job search support and resources were incredible. We spent 30 minutes every day doing algorithm challenges to mimic interview questions, had people who hire engineers come in to talk to us about the process, and even talked about the best ways to negotiate salary. The program truly prepared me to be a professional developer more than I even imagined. They want you to succeed, and they give you everything you need to do it.

I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who is interested in taking the step to becoming a professional software developer. The program isn’t for everyone. It is extremely intensive, requires a ton of time and effort, and was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done. But if you are serious about becoming a software developer, and don’t have time to spend a few years hacking together projects after work and hoping you pick up enough along the way to get a shot somewhere, you really can’t beat Viking.

Where I'm At:
Accepted into course after:
- Initial online quiz.
- Interview where I had to solve two coding problems on the spot.
- Completing take home assignment.
- I'm doing the flex course (work in the hours that best suit you) because of work commitments.... Read More

I felt the urge to write this review because:
- When I was trying to decide whether to do this course or go another way (financial reasons and because of the other options around), I found very few reviews online about this course.
- After doing the quizzes / interviews etc, I thought it was unfair that the course was being represented as 3 stars on this site. I can understand if the interviewers weren't very patient with absolute beginner applicants. From how I see it, the course is designed for people that are quite determined and willing to self motivate, but recognise there's much to gain from guidance.

My thoughts so far:
- The instructor (I've only talked to Erik so far) seem very thorough and knows what he's talking about.
- It seems like they were honest when they said the school is selective as the number of students is small.
- There's a lot of help, but they don't like holding hands.
- I'm glad I've done it because otherwise I'd be floating around on coderbyte / ruby monk / code combat, which was really fun, but it wasn't going to take me to the next level (building usable products).

**** I know it's way too early to give an accurate review yet, but just from doing the prep work and going through the course outlay with Erik, the VCS founder, I feel like I'm entering a new world I probably never woulda found by myself and I hope someone who is trying to make up their own mind finds this review helpful.

Howdy,

So I am currently in the second cohort of viking code school, I think the structure is changing somewhat for the next cohort but here is what I've seen.

I had been self teaching a bit of ruby and whatnot on available resources from May to October... Read More 2015. I had been looking at development bootcamps, particularly with the chance to have a program that was not only quality but allowed for remote as I had to stay in my current location with work. Well, there was a good friend of mine who was halfway through this bootcamp and he had given me a hearty recommendation on it so I applied. There were a few interviews and coding tests and I was accepted.

I really think a good way to describe this program is you definitely get out of it what you put in. Every week we go through different areas of the stack and development (Rails, Sinatra, Javascript, AngularJS, jQuery, PostgreSQL, TDD, HTML5, CSS3, etc.); I have learned far more in the first 12 weeks than I did self-learning every single day the previous year.

The instructors drive you beyond your boundaries with tough love and support, and are available pretty much round the clock seven days a week.

The structure has us doing a kickoff/wrapup SCRUM on Mondays that looks over the last week's code and kicks off the upcoming week. We then have a chunk of material and SPRINT assignments to complete through thursday with SCRUM meetings wednesday and thursday night to review code and ask and answer questions and be quizzed. Friday we review each other's code on Github and get ready for the mega weekend project; we then pair up and pair program all weekend long on a much larger project. There were days I kicked off at 8am with my partner on a Saturday and before you know it it's 9pm.

This course is far and away the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life and probably the most satisfying too. I haven't been in other dev bootcamps so cannot compare that, but that was my experience. I know Erik is always accessible too if you have more questions as well!