Craft Academy

I was bored of my job and life in Iceland, after a short google search about how to become a developer I found Craft Academy and decided to go for it! Left my job and home in Reykjavik and moved to Gothenburg to pursue my dreams.

This journey was definitely not easy, the first weeks were very tough and I felt so stupid for not getting it instantly. The pressure was high and it’s an emotional journey, the second week of the bootcamp I felt so stupid that I broke down in tears and told Thomas that I was giving up and would leave the bootcamp. That was  probably the best thing that has happened to me because we had a really good talk and he inspired me to keep on going and that I could do this. At that point I could really feel that he cared and everybody at this school supported each other through thick and thin. Emotion will run high as the pressure builds up, but the team sticks together. Together as a team we will make it!

My dream to become a developer has already come true. . I got a job as a junior developer before I graduated and started to work the day after graduation. As for landing that job one of the most important factors my employer saw in my experience was good coding habits, to work well under pressure and in a team. My employer is very impressed by how much you can learn in 12 weeks of this bootcamp.

Thank you so much Thomas, Raoul, Gustav, Faraz, Hanne, my cohort and everyone at Craft Academy!

Best investment I have made in my life.

Best Regards

Ólöf

You can attend this bootcamp no matter what background you have. The only important thing is that you stay and fight. It will be confusing and you will feel stupid - but you're never alone. 

You will rely heavily on the other team members and the coaches - and they will have high expectations of you. It will be hard, but it will also be a great experience. 

Apart from learning how to handle a new programming language and framework, we also learned how to plan & keep track of a project, run design sprints, do lots of testing, and work with a client.

This school cares about its studens, but also about making the world and the coding community a better place. They try to improve every day, and will always listen to your suggestions or comments. 

This is an excellent Bootcamp.

I went from an accountant to a web developer in 12 weeks with absolutely no coding experience since before.

The course started with a 1-month long prep-course going through basics as HTML, CSS,  Ruby, and Javascript which laid the foundation for the rest of the Bootcamp.

The Bootcamp focuses heavily on Ruby on Rails and the coaches are relentless that one should follow good coding practices, pair programming, and TDD.

Although many of our projects were only made specifically for the course our final project was made for a real external client and is used to simplify their business.

You shouldn't enter this program with the expectation that you'll have free time a day over the run of the course. The course is tough and mentally demanding. The material is challenging, but there's a friendship that forms in the cohort as you're struggling along with others to achieve the same goal. There is a colossal time investment, and it is punishing if you fall behind.

I recommend this course very highly.

This bootcamp is a great first, second and third step in to the world of coding.

Trying to learn to code on your own is a daunting task. What should I learn? Where should I start? Why doesn't this work? What if what I'm learning is redundant?

At Craft Academy the coaches are genuinely invested in your future, as long as you are. You will get back multiples of what of what you put in. But do not go in to this thinking it's going to be easy, this WILL be your life for 12 weeks.

There are no nice GUI's here, there is no Dreamweaver. This is real, this is Notepad (well, not Notepad, check your Windows at the door and get a real OS).

The prep course is CRITICAL. I have seen a few people not take it seriously, and by the end of the first week of the bootcamp you can see the fear and regret on their faces. Do not float through it either, learn it, understand it, this is how you will get the most out of the bootcamp.

It took a while to get used to the discomfort of trusting in what I was doing without fully understanding how it was working but believing that it would eventually become clear as other pieces fell in to place (which it did), but when I did it was like a weight off my shoulders and my progess increased dramatically. I felt this was another key, PLOUGH ON, don't worry about the understanding all of the intermediacies of where you are, they become clear eventually through continuous immersion, not through static concerntration.

The other piece of advice I would offer is "Always be coding". I would be in the office for 8-10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, then I would get home and work on my own projects using my new skills for a couple more hours most evenings. By the time the final project came around, I had learnt some things outside of the camp that I was able to integrate in to it to solve complex issues quickly. Always be coding.

Oh, and do not be afraid of failure, failure isn't failing, it's just giving you a direction of what to do next.

The coaching staff are A+, Thomas, Raoul, Andy, Rodrigo, they are always, always there to help. Often I could pose a question on a weekend or a rediculous time of the night, and I would always get an answer back as soon as someone was online. After the conclusion of the bootcamp, you are a part of the family, you can continue to ask for help whenever you need, and you too can start to offer help to those just starting on their path.

This was and continues to be a great experience. I would fully and absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a coding bootcamp in Sweden or South Africa.

I tried to learn how to program by myself at first from different online tutorials, but I often found that what I was trying to learn was unstructured, complicated, and it was awfully hard to get the grasp of it.

Coming from a business background with a variety of different start-ups, some successful / some not; these 12 weeks has been the biggest challenge of my life so far. 
No other education have ever given me so many 'ahaa!' experiences as Craft Academy,
note that I've been to (at the time) one of the most prestigious business schools in northern Europe. But all those years spent studying business, I found Craft Academy being the most challenging, but also the most giving education I've ever received.

I've always been amazed about programming and its potential straight from a business perspective.
What tools can I make use of to build something great and make a bunch of money?

I've the ideas, I've got a good nose for business-potential, but what next?
Craft Academy gave me not only the tools to build, and what to look for within software development, but also a very good way of structure your own thoughts in order to achieve what you want. A good strategy often makes your life much easier -especially in coding!
It's always easier if you have a plan, and writing it down might be one thing, but putting it into action it's a whole other story. The boot camp provided me with the know-how to continue being an entrepreneur while at the same time being a valuable asset on the job-market.
My plan for now after graduating is to work as a junior-developer while at my spare-time, turn my ideas into realization.

During the boot camp you will learn:

• Sort-out what's valueable to know in a structured way
  (everything is up to date with the latest, so you don't have to worry about learning anything old and outdated)
• Test Driven Development (Sinatra, Jasmine, Rspec & Cucumber during my year)
• Ruby
• Javascript / Angular
• HTML
• CSS
• Ionic framework
• Rails framework
• Build real-life Apps for Android and IOS with backend API
• Pivotaltracker
• SCRUM 'developer technique'
• GitHub

By teaching you the latest, sorting out what's valuable and not, and what is being searched for by companies within the development-sphere, most graduates will become confident junior-developers after only 12 weeks, landing a job without spending 5 years and $87.000 at a U.S University. After the Boot camp you will be amazed of the knowledge you have learned and you will be more than eager to put it into practice!

Make no mistake, this is a very challenging education, but if you just have the right attitude you will definitely make it! 
Those 12 weeks has been amazing and frustrating at the same time. There are times where you'd want to smash your head into the wall because you're not getting it, but with an excellent curriculum, supporting teachers and students you will get it and success if you just put down your soul and mind into it.

You also learn how to collaborate as a team, there are many different ways of achieving your goal in programing, CA delivers an excillent BMP (Best Management Practice) off how to do so.

At the end of the course you will be building your very own app together with your team, my team made it almost without any help from the coaches! Our team functioned very well together, so I bet you will be making very good friends as well!

That decision to quit my white collar IT job to attend a coding bootcamp at Craft Academy is by far one of the best decisions in my entire life.

Having spent 8months just learning the theoritical part of development, it was really difficult to delve into the actual practice, writing my own code or working on a project. I couldn't achieve this and it just felt like "Forever", trying to learn to build something from scratch myself and not just relying on already built "off the shelf" applications.

Trust me, It wasn't an easy journey, It was tough, challenging, and at some point I "hit the wall", due to the workload, expectations and amount of stuffs we had to learn but thanks to the coaches who helped me pick up again. Craft Academy drilled us really hard with high expectations from every students. I guess thats why it's called a "Bootcamp". I even think it should be changed to "Craft Academy Coding Military Bootcamp". IT IS THE REAL DEAL!

The experience at Craft Academy was life changing for me, learning web & mobile development using test driven and behavioural approach. The anthem at Craft Academy is "Agile Software Development, TDD & BDD". Well structured path of learning. Great course content material. From day one of resuming the camp, you start coding right away. You have no choice, you just have to code, code, code, code daily.

At some point in the camp, we were asked to build a personal portfoilio site for ourselves and I was amazed at what I was able to do in week 3 of the camp. I felt so proud of what I built. Several other projects, real life projects/apps were thrown at us to develop and I feel so confident to take on any challenge out there. 

I feel really confident to pick up other programming languages and work on any project in Ruby on rails or javascript. 

Great team of coaches and I personally had a fantastic team in my co-hort, we had great pair programming sessions where we learnt alot from each other. Watch out for the next big startup coming out of our final project from Craft Academy. 

The coaches were always there to answer your questions, review your codes and lead you the right way. "Someone is just always there to help you".

This was a fantastic experience, feel EXTREMELY HAPPY with the skills I acquired at Craft Academy.  

My strong advice to peope out there considering attending a bootcamp, make that leap! it's a risk worth your time and sacrifice.  Don't hold back, start coding, write one or two lines of code yourself even if its crap, the bootcamp will teach you the right way of doing it. Get into a bootcamp to lead your path in a more organized and structured way to learn coding.

Using the words of one of our coaches, I say to you all, LIVE LONG & PROSPER!!

This bootcamp was the hardest experience in my 20 years life but I'm really happy that I kept fighting with the coding because at the end of the course I realized that I have learned so many things. Before this bootcamp I was like "what is development?", "what is coding?" and with that in my mind, I think this bootcamp is the perfect way to get into the IT business because today I can build fantastic Rails applications and I can build phone applications with Ionic, I can style other applications with HTML and CSS and I can create so many things that I didn't know about. 

But the knowledge is not the only important thing here, I had the honor to work with an exellente cohort and I'm really thankful for that. We also had really awesome coaches who helped us with everything all the time and that's been really good for our team.

This bootcamp is perfect if you want to get into the IT business. I decided that it was the right way to go for myself and I decided to apply to the CraftAcademy course. It has been tough, there have been late nights of coding, sometimes you feel like you're on the edge of insanity but in the end it is all worth it for sure.

I had the pleasure of working with a great cohort and excellent teachers. CraftAcademy offers a great education if you're willing to put in the time and the effort that it requires.

This course is one of the best things I´ve done in a long time. It is really intense and you really have to devote yourself to the course. They teach you the best practices when it comes to programming these days. The coaches are really devoted to the craft of coding and I noticed that the first day to the last and that´s extremely important when it comes to teaching. I haven´t been much for school before but this is an entirely different way of learning that I like a lot. 
The last project of the course was a group project where the whole cohort produced an app and web-based service that was really good and we did it in only two weeks, which is cool and impressive both from the cohort and the coaches. No matter who you are I would definately recommend you to do this course. 

The bootcamp is really challenging...after sleepless nights of doing multi-tasking from my part-time work and studying at Craft Academy, I can say that it is all worth it. You will feel the fulfillment and self worth everytime you make your program running.

It  is nice to know different programming languages, tools and frameworks every week that makes coding easier and fun. I can say that the prep course for one month is importatn to familiarize ruby, javascript, html and css that is the foundation for you to cope up with the main cohort. 

Learning Ruby on Rails is really interesting, this is new to me and I found it super friendly to web developers. I was happy to discover that there are a lot of gems you can use to support your application. Furthermore, Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development are very interesting topics, I have experienced software testing before but only thru the use of some paper form where you can write your test script. At first, I found it as a burden since I am used to just make a program and run it and that's it. But later I realized the importance of using TDD and BDD. I have learned a lot of things but for me the best thing I have learned is the technique on how to solve a programming problem. During pair programming with the coach I have learned the best practices on how to find resources in the internet to solve any blockers. 

Aside from the topics I learned from the course, I also appreciate the coaches and the design of the bootcamp. I was amazed how they can bring out the programming skills of the participants from different backgrounds in just 12 weeks. I appreciate the support and guidance of the coaches, they are always there to help you if you are stucked with your code, you just have to approach them and they are always willing to give a helping hand.  

During the bootcamp, you are also free to express your thoughts about your own experience. The coffee chat and retrospective is a good opportunity to agree on things and how to solve some issues. This part of agile mindset is useful to achieve the main objective of the bootcamp and everybody will be happy during the course.

This is indeed an awesome experience, working and collaborating in a group of people with exactly different beliefs and culture is pretty interesting. Being the only woman in the cohort is quite difficult but as long as you are determined to learn and achieve your goals, you will find a way to cope up with it. So, I am encouraging all the women out there not to be afraid of coding and for those people who wants to make difference in their life, accept the challenge and join Craft Academy to bring out the programming skills in you:)

This bootcamp has been one of the toughest experiences of my life, and I am so happy that I enrolled. I've learned so many things. Not only how to code, but also where my strenghts and weaknesses lie. 

During the camp you will learn to work with Ruby, Javascript and HTML. With frameworks such as Rails, AngularJS and ionic. And you will also combine them to make webapps which are also restful apis, and connect them to mobile applications. 

Our cohort got the opportunity to to build a mobile app for a real client as our final project. This was a really valuable experience, since we had to work very closely with a non-technical partner. And I could not see a better way to end the bootcamp with an experience like that. We ended up completing the MVP app with almost no help from the coaches.

It is very important that you put as many projects aside as you can to fully imerse yourself in coding. And if you put in enough energy and time, you will be able to confidently build awesome web and mobile applications after 12 weeks.

The week after my graduation I started my first job as Junior Developer at a startup called ItsMyStyl. I am confident that these 12 weeks has given me the knowledge I need in order to develop my skills further and learn new programming languages and frameworks. I am grateful that I got the chance to participate in this bootcamp. It has changed my life in many ways.