Bloc

When I was looking for a web development program, I needed the schedule to be flexible and this program provided that. If you don't need a strict schedule to stay on track, this is a great program for you. If you need the structure of classes at a regular time, the flex program won't give you what you need. The instructors were great and you have a mentor that provides weekly guidance as you work your way through the modules. The content of the curriculum is detailed and provides you with strong web development fundamentals. The one thing I wish they provided was more video content to reinforce the content. There is a lot of text explaining concepts that can be complex. I ended up using outside resources to supplement the curriculum to help me understand concepts. The mock interviews provide you with good insight into how real interviews are structured and help you absorb the concepts of each module. After graduation, you are assigned a career coach and mine was great. She checked in with me regularly and provided valuable tips as I applied for jobs. I was able to get a job fairly quickly - a little more than one month after graduation - and think the career coaching helped a lot. There was some luck involved, but the career coaching pushed me to find opportunities. If you are a self-starter, I would strongly recommend Bloc, which is now Thinkful.

Bloc was overall a great experience. I received a job offer upon graduating, but it took a lot of work especially during the pandemic. I think the most valuable aspect of Bloc were my weekly mentor sessions. My mentor helped me understand industry standards, articulate my design decisions to stakeholders, and job search more strategically. Without my mentor, I don't think Bloc would have been worth it. I also think Bloc is great for anyone who wants to switch into UX design, but can't afford to quit their current job.

It is longer than other UX boot camps, but I personally enjoyed having the extra wiggle room to let concepts sink in more and study at my own pace. It gave me a great starting foundation for the design process, but what really helped me was going beyond the course material. Doing 48 hr. design-a-thons, working with other designers, and finding projects asap is what helped me learn the most.

There are tons of resources on UX out there, but if you don't know what you're looking for in the first place, you can get lost very easily. Bloc's curriculum does a great job of sifting out the BS from the stuff you need. Although the front end part was great to learn and add to my arsenal of skills, I do think learning React would have been more useful than jQuery. Some of the content felt a little outdated and explanations were long and difficult to keep up with at times.

Overtime, I learned that the design process Bloc teaches is used more as a guideline in the industry rather than a strict step-by-step guide, the process is going to change based on the project needs. I would definitely recommend Bloc for those who need structure and a little extra help in their studying/learning habits. Bloc is going to get you started, but you've got to be the one to put in the extra work and make sure you get the job you want.

This program consisted of a curriculum for a full-stack web developer.  It was very intensive and certainly is not an easy way into web development.  If motivation is there, I would highly suggest this program for hard workers.  It consisted of learning JavaScript and using React.js as a framework for the front-end.  The two full-stack projects were not too hard to finish with the teaching curriculum however, the direction of the projects was not as easy to come by.  Creativity is definitely a large component for building projects.

The reason that I signed up for the course was because I had been self teaching for about two years and I realized that, like most things in life, you don't know what you don't know and so guiding that education became difficult. I realized that I would need industry standard guidance and mentorship. I was happy with the various technologies that I was introduced to and taught.

Like any other education you get, anywhere, it is up to you to learn, to be eager, and to seek out the best understanding you can achieve. Bloc is not different; they aren't going to force feed you. Sure, there is a curriculum and graded assignments, but so much of the meat of the course is in between these things, e.g. not just finishing an assignment, but actually understanding what it is you did, not opening the course material in one window to solve the problems in another window. Obviously using the course material is how you learn and referencing them is good, but it is up to you when you are proficient/comfortable, not Bloc.

My mentor was amazing, he helped me out in between sessions, we had a great dialogue, and I really benefited from his experience and expertise. 

On the other hand, the grading of the assignments was often lackluster. I would submit a project I had spent over a month on and it would get a "Great job! Keep up the good work!" and that was it. Even when I do well I really wanted constructive criticism, which I often did not get. The worst case of this was when one assignment was graded and failed because the grader thought I was another student who had already submitted this assignment previously and hadn't listened to any of his feedback.

I used the experience and skills I learned in this course to land a job as a Systems / Data Analyst on a government project. It isn't a 1 to 1 use of the skills I learned at Bloc, but the back end things I learned are immediately relevant and I work with the front end team too, so I am able to move forward in my career. 

Bottom line, the experience got my foot in the door. If that is what you want, then this CAN be used to get there, but it will still be up to you!

I am a Biology major and was a tennis coach before choosing Bloc's online web developer track. You cover HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, React.js, Jest, Enzyme, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Knex.js, Express, Mocha, Chai, Supertest, JWT, and basic algorithms and data structures. The curriculum is a lot of reading and there are no instructional videos. The only videos they had were in the careers sections for talking about resumes and networking. I was hoping for more feedback on assignments throughout the program. In the beginning, the feedback was very informative but as you get to React it was a bit lacking. The curriculum was a bit confusing with React and not up-to-date with React hooks. I also wished they covered Redux as it is a popular to use with React and many companies use it. You will end up creating 2 front-end and 2 full-stack projects. I liked building and creating and my projects a lot. You will also complete 5 mock interviews over what you learned which were very helpful because you get practice talking through on live coding problems for interviews and get feedback. You have a senior developer as a mentor that will meet with you 30 minutes each week. My mentors were amazing and were able to help me with any problems and give great advice. If you have any technical issues and problems you can ask for help on Bloc's Slack channel. They have technical coaches that can help you out throughout the day. 

You can begin looking/applying to jobs after you learn React. I started applying to a few jobs during my full-stack projects. After you complete the program, they have you meet with a careers coach each week to talk about your job search. They will give you many helpful resources and encourage you to network and keep up your skills. My careers coach also helped me with my soft skills for interviewing and did mock interviews with me. My careers coach said on average people will get a job 3-4 months after the program. 

I was able to get my first job as web developer for start up company after a month and a half. I applied to many jobs, networked on LinkedIn and with local developer Slack communities, did hackathons, started a blog on Instagram to show what I was doing, and practiced coding a little each day. My new job has been nice so far. I get to work remotely and use React, Ruby on Rails, and PostgreSQL.

Overall, everyone at Bloc wants you to succeed and is supportive. The curriculum at the time I took it was not up to date as it should with React and reading the material can be a lot sometimes. However, it is a good start to get into the industry by getting advice and help from the mentors and technical coaches, doing the mock interviews, and building your own projects for your portfolio. If you are very motivated and like self-teaching you can still get a job without doing a bootcamp. Experience, passion, and staying up-to-date with best practices are big key factors in getting into this industry.

Overview:    For those of you in a hurry, here is a quick overview of Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in enrolling in their program, I recommend you read this in its entirety.    The curriculum is simplistic in its explanation of topics and has several errors in the literature. At one point, they send you to Codecademy.com to learn from them. You can pay up to $8,500 to be sent to a completely different company to learn what they should be teaching themselves.    The mentorship is inadequate, you will receive thirty-minutes, once a week, to talk with a mentor about any troubles you may be experiencing. Now if you are having a coding problem that you feel unable to solve yourself, and you would like to use the help of your mentor, this creates another issue. Thirty-minutes is an insufficient amount of time for the mentor to become familiar with your code and help you resolve the complication. It's not that the mentors aren't skilled or educated on the topics, it's simply a herculean task to resolve the problems in such a restrictive amount of time.    They give you the illusion that you can finish this program at your own pace, that's not true. You will have eight months to complete the program. During this time, you can proceed at your own pace, when the eight months expire, you must pay, per week you wish to extend your program (about $140 a week if I remember correctly). My objection to this program is that when compared to so many other websites (such as Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools, Udemy) Bloc.io falls behind in content and doesn't justify the price tag. 
The Whole Story:
    To start, I have received my certification from Bloc.io. I successfully passed all of my assessments in my first attempt. I have not written this review out of anger due to not being able to complete the program. My complaint lies mainly behind the price and its syllabus.    I enrolled in the Bloc.io program in December 2018, paid $6500 after applying two discounts. One was a thousand dollars off for paying upfront, the other was a thousand dollar scholarship program that I had received. I started with Treehouse.com, to begin my education into web development. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and began my understanding of JavaScript. After a few weeks of using other cheaper websites, I was excited to see what I would receive for my hard-earned $6500. Then my program began, within twenty-minutes, I instantly felt buyers remorse. I was met with large sections of tedious text, with an input box at the bottom of each page to write out my answers to the handful of questions. I tried to remain positive and hopeful that the curriculum would improve, I was wrong.
The Curriculum:  The first problem I noticed is how you send in your assignments. You are given a series of questions, then an empty input field where you have to format the questions and answers in MarkDown to submit it. Now, this isn't necessarily a problem, but it is time-consuming and annoying that you have to waste your time formating out your assignments. They also have a very odd design choice to not include any videos in their courses. Instead, they do live videos, like a web conference over Zoom or Google Hangouts, to somewhat resemble a lecture you would find at a college. This defeats one of the benefits of doing an educational program online. You can view the videos at a later time, but watching a teacher stumble through a lecture suffers in comparison to an edited video with animations and excellent footage like on Treehouse or Udemy. Most online programs I have experienced, have a comment section that you may use to ask questions on the topic at hand. This allows you to receive help from other students if something wasn't clear to you. Bloc doesn't include this, instead, they use Slack. With hundreds of different checkpoints, this becomes an issue. Simple questions and answers can't be related to a particular checkpoint. This leads to the same questions having to be answered repeatedly on Slack, or lengthy searches on Google for a simple answer. In the program, they will go line by line and attempt to explain the reason for that particular line of code. Here is the most important thing to remember about programming. Knowing enough to understand what the code is doing, and knowing enough about coding to solve the problem yourself is a big difference. One of the most important differences if you want to land a job. Coding takes practice, copying someone else's code, doesn't improve your skills.  The facile explanations of the topics you will learn are concerning. Through this course, you will learn what is called a PERN stack. PERN, stands for Postgres, Express, React, NodeJS, and represent the frameworks and libraries of code you will use to create websites. While only four topics to learn, they are complex and can be difficult to master. That being said, after eight months of this program, I didn't have the in-depth knowledge that I wanted on these frameworks. Bloc is more concerned about giving you projects to put on your portfolio as opposed to providing a solid foundation on these subject matters. The errors in their code are abundant and are something you will have to fight with throughout the program. It is inevitable you will create your own mistakes while following the checkpoints, and you will have to learn from them. When the mistakes are created by them, it can become frustrating and extremely hard for a student to remedy. A couple of them even confused my mentor to the point where she couldn't figure it out. Mistakes happen, but according to my mentor, they are in no hurry to fix them either.  
The Personal Touch of Bloc: Every checkpoint you submit is looked over by one of their staff. If you made a mistake in your submission you will be asked to revise your assignment. Sometimes they do give some helpful advice on your mistakes and sometimes include links to help you find the correct answer. This is nice at first, but it becomes troublesome towards the end when your submissions are extremely large. On more than one occasion, I had made a mistake on an assignment or forgot to do a certain task, and the error wasn't caught by the reviewer. Having to do assessments after each module is a nice touch. You get the feel of what it's like to do a real coding interview. Especially in the last module, where you will take part in a couple of mock interviews. This is by far the best part of the Bloc program and is worth mentioning.
The Time Restraint: What I found most concerning about the Bloc.io platform is the time frame in which you are to complete this program. You will endure six modules consisting of numerous checkpoints. At the end of every module, you must take a test conducted over Zoom (a web conferencing website) where you will be quizzed on your knowledge of that particular module and its contents. You must schedule an assessment with one of the staff at Bloc, and that person cannot be your current mentor. For the first few assessments, I was able to set a date within a few days. The last couple of assessments became a problem trying to create an appointment. Only two mentors were qualified to take part in those assessments, one of which was my mentor. That left me with only one person that could assess me on my progress throughout these final modules. One of which I had to wait over a month to be able to participate in. I was patient and didn't complain about the long duration between my evaluations. Until, the end of my eight months was up, and they told me I needed to pay them, per-week, to continue. At this point, I only needed to complete two or three more assessments to receive my certification. So I reached out to the Student Success Team, they were responsive but nothing was getting resolved until I mentioned the Better Business Bureau. The next email stated I had received a week extension. In the end, they did give me the extensions I required to finish, without charging me, but they did manage to waste an abundant amount of my time in the process.
Final thoughts: Simply put, Bloc.io will teach you the buzz words of programing and their meanings. They will also give you the code to some projects that will make your portfolio look decent. You won't come out of this with a strong understanding of web development, but you will learn enough to get by. If you were like me, and you have no experience in programming, this is hands down one of the worst places to start. Now if you have some familiarity with programming and web development, this is an overpriced, low-quality online program that will let you down after gouging your wallet. The reason I have spent so much time writing such a lengthy review is to inform you and anyone else interested in Bloc.io that there are better places to receive an education on web development. Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools all offer certifications that hold more weight, because people have actually heard of these companies, unlike Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in getting into web development, don't worry about getting a degree or certification. Learning how to write clean code is more important than any certification. There is a reason why many companies do something called "whiteboarding." It's the process of giving an applicant a coding challenge and making them solve it on a whiteboard (or something similar) during the interview process. This weeds out a surprisingly large amount of programmers, who struggle with solving common coding challenges, due to them knowing how to read code and not write it. Learn the fundamentals of web development, focus on creating unique projects that you can show off on your portfolio and go to meetups with other programmers. Those are the three steps that several of the web developers I know have followed and now have jobs without any degree or certification.
My recommendation: I wished I had paid the thirty dollars a month for Treehouse, twenty-five dollars for Codecademy. Waited for Udemy to do one of their sales, spend fifty dollars on a couple of their courses, and received a stronger education for a fraction of the price. If you decide to take that path, you will learn everything offered at Bloc.io and more.

I would definitely recommend Bloc's Web Developer Track to anyone seeking to learn how to become a full stack developer.  I had some self-taught coding experience in VBA coming into the program, but this was my first formal code training since a basic Fortran class back in college over 15 years ago.  The curriculum is great at building a good foundation and then diving deep into some of the latest and greatest concepts and strategies in use today.  The course is challenging and requires that you put in the time to learn the necessary concepts, but if you trust the process and stick with it, you'll come out the other end blown away with the new skills that you have.

The general layout of the curriculum requires you to read a written lesson and then complete a set of exercises.  Occasionally, these exercises will be reviewed for completion and accuracy, but oftentimes they are just for your own benefit and understanding.  Once per week, you'll meet over the web with your mentor.  This is a great time to help work through the areas where you're stuck or get some higher level understanding of how exactly the new skills you're learning would come into play in a real-world tech job.  In between mentor meetings, you'll have access to loads of technical coaching through Slack where you can talk to coaches or other students working through the same content you are.

It might seem like a lot to figure out and accomplish while you're in the middle of it all.  It certainly did for me at times!  Trust the process.  You can do this!

This program offers an extensive and rigorous education in full stack web development. Languages, frameworks and technologies taught are HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, ReactJS, NodeJS, PostgreSQL, Express, Mocha, Chai, Supertest and much much more. Your initial courseware starts you out by learning HTML and CSS.. Before you know it you will be learning more advanced frameworks like React and Node. You will use these technologies to build full stack capstone projects. You have a senior developer as a mentor there with you every step of the way. They are your guide so to speak and they are awesome!  Not only that, there are a ton of QnAs, workshops and other discussions scheduled all day every day throughout the platform.  Most importantly, they are completely remote.  For parent out there who really want to learn full stack dev but just can't afford to drive into a class, this is it! This is the school to check out.  The people are just super cool, down to earth and humble.  I can't speak enough about how great it was to work with them.. It's heads and tails above and beyond the experience you would get at a traditional school. Believe me, I have a couple degrees including a post-graduate. This was better than those experiences and I learned way more. If you have the drive and determination just do it. They will help you find employment and put you into a new career with confidence. You may even be interviewing before the course is over. That's pretty common actually!  Best of luck to anyone who is thinking of signing up. I can't recommend enough :) 

This program has many positive aspects to it, but there are some realities that I wish I knew before signing up.

Pros: I am very excited with my portfolio.  The effort that you put into work, definitely reflects the final outcome of your portfolio.  When I addressed my concerns and frustrations, the program coordinators were very accomodating extending my schedule.  The curriculum is constantly being updated and is accessible for students after they are finished with the program.

Cons: I went through many different mentors and grading team members and the quality varies.  Some are excellent and very professional - others had much less to offer in terms of experience and suggestions. Since the program is online, it seems that the coordination is not in sync between the grading team, the mentor, and the slack coaches - so it feels very disjointed and confusing at times.  The checkpoints are often set-up in a way where you need to finish one before moving on to the next one.  The grading team is supposed to give feedback within 48 hours, but many times for me this extended up to 4-5 days!  This was frustrating for me to keep the momentum going, especially since the grading team usually asks for at least 2-3 revisions.  I am a good student and always tried my best, so I found this scenario to be extremely frustrating.  With a goal of 3 checkpoints per week (while working and studying), this situation was not maintainable when I was waiting so long for feedback.

Final thoughts: I know the program has grown big quickly and it feels to be increasingly disconnected (especially with recent changes). I was feelling lost in a series of checkpoint revisions between mentors, grading team, and coaches, who would say conflicting things then leave me lost until the next meeting or checkpoint revision feedback.  I didn't feel like they were fully there and available for me, but rather waiting for the time to be up.  Even the slack coaches who were supposed to be available immediately, usually had a whole queue of other students to help and half the time responded with things like "i'm about to clock out! will forward to next coach." - and very often I just left the question.

These are just some things that I wish I knew going into the program because I could have better prepared myself for the experience.  I am certainly surprised by all the solid 5 star reviews - and I do recall being asked to leave feedback about 1 week into the program before I had the full experience of it - so take the other reviews with a grain of salt!  I suggest researching deeply into the various programs before choosing, so you make sure that you join a bootcamp with the cirriculum and support system that you can thrive in.

I'm surprised to see that there are so many straight-up positive reviews of Bloc. I'm a graduate of the Designer program, I can say they got some things right and some things still need work. I'll start with the not-so-great. The curriculum around front end dev felt piecemeal and choppy. I had to slow down a lot during those sections to seek out other resources because their lessons were confusing. The self-paced program made it easy to get more time to slow down when I needed to. 

I had different 5 mentors in the 14 months it took me to complete the program. Some gave constructive criticism but others just patted me on the head and said "good job". That was frustrating at points, however, it was very easy to change mentors when I wasn't satisfied, and I recommend changing if you're not getting what you want out of your mentor sessions.  

I'm the kind of person who likes to collaborate, so I felt pretty lonely in my work for most of the time I was in Bloc. I recommend engaging as much as possible with the social channels on Slack and going to events/meetups early on to connect with other designers. 

I appreciated how much emphasis there was on career prep and how much support I got in my job search. Job searching is the worst kind of boring work you'll ever have to do and it takes a lot of energy to stay motivated. My career coach was very supportive and helped me get to the point where I felt confident sending out my portfolio, resume, LinkedIn profile, etc.

I supplemented a lot of the curriculum with my own reading list. Bloc, for example, might just say "make a user survey", but not address how to approach it or what makes a good survey question. There are plenty of books and articles on the subject, so I would suggest building in some time for non-required reading and research.

UX is an emerging field that is changing all the time and Bloc is making an effort to remain flexible and change with it. I appreciate that they are really good about asking for feedback and constantly making changes to improve the program. 

Overall, I would say this program is challenging and you have to bring a lot of intention, motivation, and curiosity to be successful. You will probably be frustrated with it at some points, but the people are great and it's a good value for the price point.