Code Institute

I am a database developer working for over 20 years in this area. I love database development and I also love learning new things. I started learning web development some years ago, but I never worked professionally with it. So, I decided to take the Code Institute "Free 5 Day Coding Challenge" first and then I got accepted to the Code Institute "Diploma in Software Development (e-Commerce Applications)" course via Springboard.

From my experience and after completing the course, I can say the following.

The content of this course is great. It is suitable for both those who have no previous programming experience and those who have programming experience and just want to learn more about web development, like me.

Of course, as it is an online platform, the student must adapt to it and accept that the course is prepared to reach a large number of people. You should not assume the course will be tailor-made for you.

The Code Institute team is great, supporting anything you ask, as long as you follow the rules. You just need to take your learning experience seriously and get in touch immediately whenever you have any difficulties.

The rules are pretty clear. You must read and follow them, respecting the deadlines and contacting the Code Institute to temporarily block your access and postpone your deadlines, if there is any personal or professional situation preventing you from studying and progressing in the course, so that you have time to successfully complete the course after this situation is resolved.

My learning experience with Code Institute was very pleasant. I look forward to applying what I learned and continuing to learn.

My review is for the Diploma in Full Stack Software Development (E-commerce Applications). 

I found the course to be interesting and to cover quite a lot of useful topics, particularly for someone like myself who is quite new to software development. There were plenty of challenging moments but overall I found it to be a worthwhile experience. Over the course of the diploma, you create 5 portfolio projects that range from HTML and CSS right up to a full-stack e-commerce application built in Django using technologies like Bootstrap, jQuery, Stripe for payments, AWS S3 for file storage and more. The course structure leads you from the more straightforward concepts like HTML and CSS, on through JavaScript, Python and then onto full stack development. There was plenty of support available to help students, in the form of the Student Care team, the Slack community, tutors and a mentor. There is also the Careers team who have plenty of tips and useful advice, such as help with your CV, LinkedIn profile, cover letters and more, as well as posting regular job alerts on the Slack. 

The part of the course I didn't really enjoy was the Design Thinking module, as it felt a bit vague and would've been better with proper scenarios; I may have enjoyed it more if that were the case. Equally, I don't really plan to get into design so this may be why I didn't really engage with it. However, I found the rest of the content to be really interesting and feel like I learned some very useful skills, which I hope to be soon applying in a new role. 

The short answer is the course is a full stack program, but it's absolutely not worth the money.

I completed approx 70% of the learning material and submitted 3 projects before deciding that the Code Institute boot camp was a waste of time. 

Online boot camps have a lot of cheaper alternatives to contend with and that can present a problem for boot camps, who must have something special to bring them beyond someone seeking cheaper alternatives.

Right from the get go, the Code Institute has issues, it's HTML course is weak, doesn't cover some basic aspects of website design and has a challenge system that is too restrictively coded at times, so that correct code submissions come back with errors. Hints are generally not helpful, and time can be wasted trying to find errors in your code where it turns out they were looking for an rgba input even thought the instructions were to put in an rgb. Often here the issue is less with the coding but more with understanding what they want you do. It doesn't help that the course is often reams of text with a challenge on another page, meaning if you want to check something, you need to either dance between webpages or have multiple tabs open, which can throw off their progress system. Sure these are minor issues, but also they're generally unique to Code Institute. My overall experience of going through the HTML section was it was beyond lackluster, I opted to supplement my learning with another course. I found this second non Code Institute course to be vastly superior in all metrics, more complete content, better presentation, more coding challenges, better coding challenges, clearer instruction. 

These issues just pile up the more you go through the course. One of the more egregious issues runs with parts of the course that are out of date. More often than not there's just a quick note attached to the top of a video to ignore a chunk of it and do something else, or the video starts with setting up a legacy coding environment Code Institute no longer uses. Some of these videos are pushing 2 years, so this patchwork of fixes becomes the norm. Again generally looking at other coding courses I've conducted, and no other course is so out of date.

The coding projects aren't particularly inspiring either, rather than provide any real instruction, it's a more free from 'do something'. Issues with really stem from a lack of clear understanding of what is required for submission. Code Institute don't present examples of pass/merit/distinction of projects and the mark scheme is vague and uninformative. It didn't help that my mentor wasn't available for 2 of the 3 projects I submitted, and was only available for the last night of the other one. The overall feeling I got was to not be adventurous or push yourself, just do a simple and safe project, which I feel is a terrible way of assessing potential. 

Feedback from the project submissions is similarly vague and often questionable, but ultimately unhelpful. As someone who has teaching and mentoring experience as a postdoc, the feedback is just lazy. This should be a real strength of a bootcamp but with the Code Institute, it's just another missed opportunity turned into a weakness. 

I really wanted to use the Code Institute as the core for my learning experience and entry into coding, I was drawn into the rather nicely setup and laid out 5 day coding challenge, which is a good experience. However I came away from every module with a deep dissatisfaction in the learning outcomes. More and more I found myself going to other courses to learn material that should be covered in sufficient depth in the Code Institute subject matter.

Outside the learning objectives, there is a friendly Slack environment, but this is mainly students, and I am a member of a number of similar communities. Still it's not bad. I didn't find the career crunches helpful, this may be because I've come from a professional background and have been involved in recruitment before, but they were very basic, and ultimately not helpful. They're not at a great time for people doing the course with a standard day job either. 

I can't see any justification to using the Code Institute in its current form. There are far superior examples of learning objectives online, and I don't think any of the strengths of a boot camp really come up here. The fundamental issue is that the curriculum is muddled, out of date, and presented in a unique, but unhelpful fashion. Not enough care has been put into the construction and the over-reliance on proprietary systems frustrates more than supports. 

There are many better systems out there to learn how to code, Code Institute could get there, but it would need a large overhaul, most of the course videos need to be updated/reshot, the learning objectives need to be thrashed out, and the courses need to be bulked. More complex coding challenges, and more implementation to real world situations. As it stands there is a long way to go before the course could be recommended, even if it was free. 

Since starting the course i managed to complete the User Centric Frontend Development Milestone Project, i have then moved on to Javascript and unfortunately i've had to deal with bereavements in my family in which i needed time off from the course, to begin with Code Institute was very understanding however as time passed by they was pressing me to continue the course even after i gave them a doctors certificate, however i agreed to come back on the course not feeling 100% and to my surprise i was given less then 2 weeks to hand my JavaScript milestone in, i explained on the phone i've had a long period of time off from the course however they said you have a further 10 days after the missed date, Javascript is all very new to me and i explained i needed a bit more time however i was told i've had enough time off. Is it worth the £6k i paid for the course? definitely not. If anyone was to ask me how i would do things differently i would say, sign up to Team Treehouse Tech degree at a fraction of the cost and find a mentor on Fiverr because the mentors on Code Institute are rarely available, the best mentor i had was called Simen and the reason i say the best is because i could tell he was genuine and it pained him if you didn't aim for the highest mark.       

This course was great for teaching up to date technologies in preparation for a career change into software development. There is a really great community of students (past and present) on Slack and lots of support in case you have questions (which you definitely will!). Some opportunities have come up for me recently due to being so immersed in the community so I highly recommend it. I was required to create four milestone projects as part of this course and was set up with a mentor to guide me along the way. I started the course right before it changed so it possibly could've been a bit more up to date but as trends change in the coding world the demand changes and I understand it might be hard to fit it all in to a part time course over 12 months!

This was the second Hackathon that I've taken part in with Code Institute although this was the first time that Code Institute co-hosted a Hackathon with one of their external partners, Trust in SODA who are a UK based recruitment company. 

The theme was "Building an Accessible Workplace" and the event was kicked-off with a very insightful SODA Social panel discussion webinar, with panelists from Ecosia, HER, Mildon & Google.

I was very lucky to have such wonderful teammates who all invested a huge amount of time and effort into this fascinating topic and it was a great experience of working in an agile development environment.

Our team used our Full-Stack knowledge to create a modular plug-in app that simplifies the recruitment and hiring process and has user accessibility at its core.  Our Tech Stack for this project included: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap 5, Javascript, emailJS, Heroku, MongoDB, Python & Flask.

We used Github's project board to breakdown all the required tasks into bite size sprints and we also utilised Github Wiki pages to organise our research & planning notes. Naturally we also used Github for our version control, with each team member forking off my main repository, working on branches within their fork and then creating Pull Requests to be reviewed and approved by the team before merging back onto the main repository.

It was an amazing learning experience with a fantastic team of developers, on a topic with such a wide scope.

I'm really looking forward to the next Code Institute Hackathon as they are a wonderful way to put your newly acquired skills into practice, a great opportunity to learn from your peers and while they can be intense you do come away from them with a great sense of achievement.

I had opted to make a change in my career and move into IT. After looking through a couple of resources both paid and free I chose to enrol with Code Institute. I've only been on the course since July and through our slack community, a Hackathon event was posted inviting students of all levels to participate. Having zero knowledge of what a hackathon was, let alone limited coding experience, my gung-ho attitude of "let's do this" had me sign up. Initially I thought I had bitten off far more than I could chew, but the teams were balanced with juniors and seniors, and even though my current (hospitality) job seems to demand more time than I have in the day, I quickly found myself with a group of fun, open minded and helpful peers.

I had a great time with the recent Hackathon and the team were really amazing. I did at times feel like a bit of a 5th wheel due to my inexperience and lack of aptitude, but was still able to contribute creatively and it gave me the opportunity to play around with the wireframes, which is something I hadn't done before. We utilized Kaboom, which I found at a base level, very intuitive. Overall, I got to experience what I can imagine it must be like working in a live dev team, with a real world problem to a real world deadline/crunch, which I think more than anything is invaluable ,especially at the start of the course. And of course to share a win is incredible!  

I had only been attending my Full Stack Software Development course for little over a month when I decided to apply for my first hackathon. A decision I definitely not regret. It was a really fun experience and I already feel that it has given me tools which will help me through the course. It taught me a lot about working as a team together in Github and I had to push my limits when it came to coding. 

My teammates were super and so supportive of us who didn't have much experience.
 I will definitely sign up for as many hackathon as I can during my course at Code Institute and I recommend all coding students to do the same.