Hack Reactor

Hack Reactor is a school that cares about their student's success and well-being.  I would definitely recommend this program to anyone who wants to start a career in software engineering and thrives in a fast pace environment.  Everyone here genuinely cares about what they are doing.  Working among talented, smart, and passionate people in such an immersive program cultivates an environment for success.  I found myself more motivated than ever.  Hack Reactor also puts a lot of care, thought, and dedication into creating the best possible program that will help their students reach their full potential, and welcomes constant feedback from each person, to constantly improve and adapt to student needs.  The program is incredibly rigorous and designed to foster the kind of growth and autonomy needed to succeed in software engineering.  I entered the program expecting it to be very difficult, but what I didn't expect was how much fun I would have.  Ultimately, I came away with the skills necessary to land a job, an amazing experience, and entire cohort of friends who I genuinely cherish.

Let me start off by saying that Hack Reactor is not for everyone. It costs a lot of money, takes up a lot of time and energy, and you are pretty much foregoing 3 months of your life to be without family, friends and a lot of sleep. It will be a mentally, physically, and perhaps even emotionally draining experience. However, if you are okay with all of that and feel the need to make a career switch into programming, there is no better alternative than going to Hack Reactor. 

Personally, Hack Reactor has been a life-changing experience. I feel that if you choose to go, the people you meet at Hack Reactor will probably be the smartest, nicest and most outstanding people you will ever have the chance to meet. And not only will you be able to meet them, but you will also have the opportunity to work together and form very close, lasting friendships. 

On top of having a great community, Hack Reactor also has an excellent curriculum and fantastic staff. Every morning you are given a toy problem to solve, and over the course of the program you will get really good at solving problems and devising algorithms. After the first 6 weeks, you will become a master at JavaScript, and over the next 6 weeks, you will have developed 4 applications of your choosing. This is guaranteed, thanks to the support provided by the staff, who always make themselves available if you seek assistance. 

My time at Hack Reactor has been the most incredible 12 weeks of my life. If you are willing to invest the time and money, I can't think of anywhere better than this magical environment.

The staff: They pour their hearts into the students, curriculum and in general into HR, always looking for ways to improve. My tech mentor (shout out to Beth!) knew the curriculum inside and out and could get you going on the right path in just a few minutes if you were ever stuck. Lectures from Fred and Allen were all like mini master classes.

The students:  Tons of smart people, many were engineers from fields other than computer engineering. My cohort in particular really bonded...like REALLY bonded, and it made being at HR 13-15 hours a day fun. There were Nerf wars, bar nights and after class toy problem sessions to help us all get through it alive. 

Culture:  Well think about it, you’re surrounded by the same people for 3 months, coding all day, changing your lives…it’s not a typical environment. There’s a great vibe at HR, but it’s hard for me to describe.

Job Support: I would like to update this part after I’m employed. I’m currently in the first week of the job search, and the support so far has been great. FYI, it’s been proposed to us that it’s not an easy task to find that first job and that rejection is the norm. But, after graduating HR you will have value that can be monetized, it just takes getting your foot in the door and proving yourself.

Apply to HR, if you don’t get in immediately apply again. 

This place is intense. When your moment comes, will you go capture it or let it pass? I've never been pushed so hard (productively, with a lot of support) in my life. And I'm proud to say that my cohort has succeeded and it's exciting to see what we'll do now.

I guess some others below didn't like the focus on becoming an autonomous learner, but I found this aspect of the course to be very rewarding. Since being a Software Engineer is a career in lifelong learning, it makes sense that a critical skill to gain would be independent learning. It's true that there aren't as many lectures as a traditional learning environment, but the lectures we did have were top-notch, and really focused on making sure everyone in the room was engaged and on-board. To me, it didn't matter at all that there were relatively few lectures, the rest of the material was amazing too and kept us quite busy.

There are many other accurate reviews of the curriculum so I'll just mention that they just overhauled their last week of curriculum, focusing it to align more with the types technical challenges we are likely to face, and gave us a LOT more material to study up on going into the job search. I feel very well prepared for it and confident in my abilities, with a clear roadmap to keep preparing.

A few things I really enjoyed learning here:

• Asynchronous programming in Node.js and Promises
• React Native
• ES6 syntax
• Pair programming
• Docker, microservices and service-oriented architecture principles
• Designing a RESTful API

Hack Reactor consistently met or exceeded my expectations over the course of the program. They start with an emphasis on the fundamentals of javascript and move on to provide a thorough walkthrough of the full stack over the first 6 weeks. From there, students enter a project period where they have the freedom to adopt new technologies for their apps or to further expand on technologies covered earlier in the course.

As a whole, I felt that Hack Reactor delivered a complete package. I found the curriculum to be very well constructed and taught by passionate instructors that take students' concerns very seriously. If students feel that they need extra help on a subject, they can submit a help request or schedule time with their tech mentor. Hack Reactor even takes care to assign a counselor to each class that helps to provide emotional support and general guidance. Students are frequently asked to give honest feedback about anything on their minds, which helps to form a stronger curriculum moving forward. In addition to the normal curriculum, tech talks are often held after-hours where industry professionals or alumni present on new technologies and developments.

I was initially skeptical of 'bootcamps', as most people are, but after speaking with an old friend who had found success after taking the course, I decided to take the plunge. Looking back on it now, I'm glad I did. I am now a capable sotware engineer with the right tools and the know-how to use them effectively in the industry today!

Hack Reactor is extremely attentive to our feedback as students, using what we say to improve, refine, and polish its curriculum. This iterative approach to education makes so much sense for we engineers who will, for our careers, employ an iterative approach to problem solving. As good as the course is now, it'll only get better through the efforts and commitment of its admin and staff. 

Also, the people you meet there are amazing, coming from all walks of life, all sharing common traits of extreme motivation and being very bright -- and often hilarious, I laughed a ton while working nonstop. 

Give it a shot!

Also, as a last word of advice: I definitely think my experience was optimized by coming into the program with a solid background in non-JavaScript languages, and then also having taken a month or so to develop some projects using vanilla JavaScript and Node (and HTML and CSS). Even though you will learn everything you need to know to succed by completing the mandatory Precourse curriculum before your start date, having a headstart on JavaScript fundamentals, with a focus on common data structures, will be extremely valuable. 

When I first heard about this program, I didn't know what to expect, and I was a little skeptical. I read some reviews and decided to try Fulcrum out. I started to really enjoy what I was learning and could tell that the staff really cared about my understanding. I decided to take the plunge and found whatever means I could to gather the tuition funds. Making that plunge was one of the best decisions of my life. This program was well worth it and, maybe even worth a little more. The curriculum is top notch, and it really helps to get you up to speed with the rest of the industry. The staff and the students make it one of the most welcoming learning environments I have ever been apart of. If you have the chance to go to this program then GO! You will be doing yourself a disservice if you get in and don't go! 

At first l was skeptical. I wasn't sure what to expect but my sister who had found recent success doing a different bootcamp told me to apply here and that "it's the best". I'm really glad that I took her advice. I am honestly amazed at what I have accomplished in 3 months and can't wait to make the HR community proud out in the industry. Aside from an amazing curriculum, HRs staff and support are unparalleled. They really care... like truely care not only about your success but mental and physical wellbeing as well. I'm already recommending this program to many of my friends! HR in my opinion is the industry standard when it comes to teaching their students how to become productive software engineers. 

I'm graduating today and couldn't be happier with the investment I made 3 months ago. For the sake of full disclosure, I'll mention that I was chosen, and happily agreed, to take one of the Hacker in Residence slots for my cohort. So some might say I'm biased... but I'd respond that I'm in the best position to speak about Hack Reactor as I have the perspective of a student and a freshly minted temporary employee.

Reviewing from a high level, Hack Reactor is an intense, immersive experience in coding. My cohort and I were quite green at the start of our term... now we are capable software engineers. Since we haven't really ramped up the job search yet (that'll start next week), that might seem like a dubious statement. But we all feel prepared to take on the challenge because we've spent the last three months tackling problems that seemed, at first glance, impossible. Anecdotally, of the previous cohort who graduated 7 weeks ago, about half already have jobs in the industry.

When I was mulling over which bootcamp to attend (or if I should even attend one at all), I thought all the reviews for Hack Reactor sounded like the folks writing them were brainwashed. I found it hard to believe so many students could gush about how great the school was. It seemed like a trick. But here I am, doing the thing.

HR is divided into two 6-week portions dubbed junior portion and senior portion. For most of the first half, our time is divided into short sprints where we focus on learning a different technology or programming concept. I remember around week 3 or 4, I was mentally and emotionally drained each night as I crawled into bed. My head throbbed and I dreamt about coding and frontend frameworks. I spent all my waking hours at school and saw my wife and daughter only briefly in the mornings if they were up. It was the worst... but I knew it was a small sacrifice. You get out of it what you put in.

The entire second half was spent working on various projects. It was in this portion where we put our new knowledge to work while also learning more in depth about system design and achitecturing apps to scale. My cohort's thesis projects included technologies like WebRTC, machine learning, block chain, Python, computer vision, IoT... one group coerced Amazon's Alexa into a daily journeling device. It's crazy what people accomplished. 

It was during the senior portion, as well, that they prepped us all for the job hunt. The outcomes staff worked with us to clean up our digital selves (linkedin, angellist, etc) as well as making sure we had the soft skills necessary to get past each step in the the interview process. 

Some folks in my cohort were unhappy with the second half. They thought there wasn't as much value since we weren't in lecture or churning through new curriculum as much as the first half. While I can see their point, I also remember how annoyed I was when my group had to pause our work to attend a lecture... even though the content of said lecture was crucial to some aspect of programming or the job hunt. So... could we have just as easily sat in the nearest cafe and coded on our own? Probably. But we would have lacked the guidance of the technical mentors as well as all the more dev ops-y lectures towards the end of the course. Plus... I learn by doing, not by sitting in a lecture. I'm far better prepared for applying for jobs now, instead of having to spend time after the course is over practicing my new skills.

In addition to the regular curriculum, there are some bonuses that HR provides. We study a new toy problem everyday which helps all the students prepare for the types of technical interview questions we'll see in the wild. The alumni network is incredible and all grads get job hunt support for life. Probably the best thing about HR, though, are the people here. The students are all diverse, smart and driven. I could accomplish more just by rubbing shoulders with these incredible people each day. The staff are super devoted. They sometimes stayed late to help us after hours... or they'd come out for a drink after a particularly tough day.

Finally, the leadership of the company has created a teaching philosophy that works wonders and they stick to those principles. I know bootcamps have a reputation for being fly-by-night money-making machines. While it was clear that Hack Reactor was a business, I always felt that our accomplishment was their top priority. This was especially evident when a much admired, non-technical staff-member quit their job during our cohort to study and take a stab at the entrance interview. This person had worked at the company for many years, had intimate knowledge of non-student-facing procedures and culture... and they decided the time and money were worth it.

Wow... look at me. I'm one of those gushing reviewers and I kind of feel bad that I can't be more objective. But this place is the real deal. If you are on the fence, go for it. Study study study to pass that entrance interview and keep trying if you don't get in the first go around.