SPICED Academy

TLDR: good instructors and curriculum, diverse and cool peers, space is changing but was bursting at the seams before, school is grabbing any and all students it can get and must stay vigilant to protect brand/reputation, job assistance needed improvement but is also being worked on

As a previous reader of these reviews, I think there are a handful of things to consider when evaluating a coding bootcamp:

1. Is the curriculum and instruction intense enough if completed to get you a job? 

2. Are your peers going to contribute or detract from the experience? 

3. Is the school and space going to be conducive to excellence? 

4. Are you committed enough and interested enough in coding to commit above and beyond the school's offering?

5. (for Americans) Is the program good value for the money?

6. Are you supported in the job search?

I will answer those questions in order:

1. Is the curriculum and instruction intense enough if completed to get you a job? 

I will start with the positives: David is a very experienced instructor in coding and even some of the frameworks/materials are slightly dated versus what I have seen since starting as a developer, I am almost certain it is impossible to stay 100% current at the pace things change. The materials and information are highly focused and I think you are taken on a deep dive through older frameworks jQuery that then gives some insight into the current state of affairs. I might shift more of the curriculum towards the frameworks, structuring of applications and software development best practices around Github/workflow, but there is no way for a 12 week curriculum to do anything but give you a taste of most things and not exposure.

Classroom flow was very positive and asking questions there was the move. Read all lectures in advance of the courses and pose your questions then. I found the ability to get questions answered was more limited once you actually were working through problems and projects. There were simply a lot of students and fewer instructors than needed.

In regards to the negatives, outside of the first week of courses, you will not receive a code review. There simply were not enough instructors to provide this meaningfully. I did not expect a review a week, but I think 2-3 thorough code reviews to identify poor patterns, structuring etc. would have been helpful. I have no sense of whether this is offered anywhere else, but I imagine it is.

Bottom line: I do believe the school gives you enough to get you a job if you are commited. Due to various concerns and differing backgrounds, several peers took much longer to find jobs, but those who actively applied and hustled found jobs eventually (emphasis on hustle). There is plenty of demand. I'd recommend aspiring beyond just getting a job, and instead getting a great, high potential and supportive job, but there is also only so much that you can do if you are coming in from a non-traditional background.

1. Are your peers going to contribute or detract from the experience? 

For context, after quitting a decent paying job in the USA, I left everything behind to give my entire life and focus for 6 months to become as strong a coder as possible in Berlin. I am not sure this is a realistic commitment for many and that is ok. The school has a broader mission than just people like me and that is part of its appeal. However, since the school's affiliation with the German Job Agency, many students are entering on free training programs to Spiced. This has dramatically increased the number of students and exposed the limitations of the school's structure and staffing. 

Everyone is super chill, we get along very well, and the group chat has stayed active months after graduation. I can't really give a clear assessment what the impact of the massive expansion of students is on student quality beyond anecdotes. I was extremely committed and motivated to get a job right away due to my personal financial commitment. I found surprisingly that almost no peers stayed and leveraged the space provided for the 6 weeks of job search after graduation. Paying my own money made the urgency of finding a role very high, and I was not sure that was the case for all students. However, those who persevered found opportunities and the market is still favorable enough although increasingly saturated. 

Concerning students, my main concern is that Spiced must stay vigilant to protect its brand and quality of incoming students lest the coding landscape become saturated like the United States (numerous bootcamps have gone bankrupt and job placement has plummeted). Bootcamps risk becoming a dismissed and commodity credential with Spiced simply being another certificate mill unless there is action taken now to continue maintaining the reputation and brand.

3) Is the school and space going to be conducive to excellence? 

The space was just a big open office, but I found it to be pretty calm and was able to take a quiet room for my coding when needed. The classrooms and monitors were great and I loved the lectures. The room was essentially overrun with students and there wasn't enough space if everyone had stuck around. They have moved spaces now so I am not sure this feedback is relevant. However, I would note that the space to keep searching and preparing for a job was completely inadequate and not taken advantage of for that reason. I had nowhere else I could go to for free with WiFi, but this certainly weighed on post-grad outcomes. Again, everything I am saying may now be irrelevant with the space change. The plus side is there was a coffee machine and kitchen. I had no complaints about living there and even sleeping there on one fateful night for 12 weeks, 7 days a week. Others might disagree.

4) Are you committed enough and interested enough in coding to commit above and beyond the school's offering?

Many are not aware of the annoyance and detail oriented nature of coding before attending the school. This is simply laziness. Thousands of coding resources exist online and can be completed. Complete FreeCodeCamp, Udemy courses (focus on highly rated offerings from: Colt Steele, Max Schwarzmuller, Stephen Grider, Andrew Mead, Angela Yu), Code Academy... The pre-work the school provides is the bare minimum. If you are goign to commit months and years of your life to this, do your homework. This is not rocket science, but it requires persistence. I was shocked at for how many peopel the course was the first time opening an IDE. Frankly, without a real sense that coding is fun and something you are passionate about improving in, I would recommend delaying your enrollment in the school.

This bootcamp, and for that matter any bootcamp, will not make you a developer. Without months of silent commitment to improving yourself and a tolerance for being puzzled and discouraged for hours, you will fail at becoming a developer or maybe you're clever but still you will you achieve far less than your potential. I don't think these abilities are genetic by any means, but I also don't think you get all the answers in 12 weeks, so prepare like a madman in Javascript, and the school should just help with the details and frameworks. The team are not miracle workers, and if you do not have work ethic they can't solve things for you.

5) (for Americans mainly) Is the program good value for the money?

This is a special comment for Americans, but I think this school remains fantastic value for the money as it costs 50% of a comparable American bootcamp. Admissions standards are going to absolutely be lower than most comparable bootcamps in the United States and you can see that up front in what is covered in the curriculum. I would recommend you stack the curriculum at a few open-sourced bootcamps against Spiced and you will see there is about a 3-4 weeks of preliminary material that is done as pre-work for other bootcamps. Just raise your level, prepare aggressively, and you'll be fine.

6) Are you supported in the job search?

I had fantastic relationships with the career support person (previous employee), but she wore many hats including admissions etc. The secret of getting a job is networking and strategically continuing your learning, and I freely offer my insight into what that entails to anyone who asks. I mostly achieved these tasks myself and there were some helpful sessions peppered throughout, but they assume you are starting as a relative neophyte.

No career center can help you with all the prep/hustling this process entails but they can tell you where to apply your energies if you lack savvy. I expected a bit more structure in the prep offerings and interview support, but again, this takes personnel and money. There is a bit of a staff shortage, but I think that the new expanded support team will only improve in this area and based on my conversations, I see reason for optimism.

It was maybe the toughest thing I ever have done, but it was an amazing experience. First things first the teachers and the people who work at SPICED are amazing and that made the whole experience much better. Before I visited SPICED I was thinking if I am going to go to a coding Bootcamp or to a university for a bachelor's degree in software engineer. The decision going at SPICED was the best decision I have ever made. A couple of months ago I wouldn't believe that I could learn so many things and change my life in so short period of time. I would recommend coding Bootcamp over the university and especially  SPICED to anyone.

­­If you are looking to learn full stack development, SPICED Academy is the right place to do so. 
I have been wanting to learn how to develop for a while and if it wasn't for SPICED probably I would still be stuck in the online tutorial loop. 

As a SPICED student, you will learn valuable, cutting-edge technologies and deliver code every day, in a very fast and intensive pace. Your portfolio will grow each day with interesting projects.

The teaching staff is very supportive and passionate: they will do anything to keep you moving forward. Each one of the teachers manage to teach extremely complex topics in a fun, accessible way.

The SPICED community works as a team. Your challenges will be your colleagues challenges. 

Regardless of what your level is as a developer, the course is built in such a way that it will demand the most of you. Expect to be constantly challenged and fully committed to the course. 

At the end, the knowledge and portfolio you will build in only three months is worth every moment spent at SPICED.

I have had the plan to switch work sectors for a while now. And since trying to teach myself on top of a fulltime job was tremendously slow and not overly rewarding, I decided to take a more drastic step and focus on coding fulltime. So I applied for the boot camp at SPICED, which turned out to be one of the best steps I took.

I joined the boot camp as an absolute JS beginner, while I had dipped my toes a little into other programming languages and concepts, I had never connected the dots in the way that I did over the course of the three months at SPICED. Plus my coding skills were super limited by the time I started the boot camp let alone develop full-stack applications. Those 12 weeks of classes and projects basically took me from writing simple blocks of code to writing full-stack applications. That being said, coding is a constant learning process and by the time you finish, there is definitely still a hell lot to learn. However, those weeks truly show you, what you are capable of learning in a short period of time, if you set your mind to it, dedicate your time and keep pushing - and by that I mean basically code, code, code.

SPICED is intense and hard. I had days that felt wonderfully easy, where I felt completely on top of what we were covering followed by days where I simply felt like I was never going to fully get it. Thankfully you are in an environment, where

1. you are not the only one going through these feelings but there is a whole bunch of you going through these things at the same time 
2. there are teachers there to guide you through it and they are incredibly helpful and supportive in catalysing your learning progress.

I am still amazed and proud of what I learned to build in this short amount of time. During the first half of the course, you cover a lot of different aspects of web development and build up the fundamentals to start full-stack development projects during the second half of the course. Once you have graduated, you can still come to campus and work there so you will still be able to ask for help in the six weeks after you have completed the course.

The boot camp provides a great environment for you to learn and grow, but you are the one that has to do the learning and growing, no one can do that for you. This might sound rather silly and obvious, but the bottom line is, you have to pull your own weight. You have to get comfortable with not knowing everything, sometimes not understanding everything straight away, and most frustrating of all: learn how to ask the questions that help you figure development problems out, when all of this is completely new to you.
SPICED is quite fast paced and pushes your comfort zone of how much you are capable to learn, absorb and take in. For me maybe one of the most valuable takeaways is not necessarily how much can code by heart today, but having build up the skillset and confidence in myself that I will be able to figure things out and learn the things I don't know or understand yet. Basically, SPICED teaches you the skills needed to jumpstart a continuously ongoing learning process.

Altogether I highly recommend SPICED as an amazing starting point for anyone that wants to learn how to code and pursue a professional career in this field, but be ready to push your comfort zone of learning.

Had a super time at my bootcamp with SPICED. 

Speaking of my cohort in Oct2018, they had selected a diverse range of students. 
For a total of 18 weeks!!! (12week bootcamp + extended 6weeks) you are free to use and stay at the facilities as long as you wish and receive help by the teachers.

This is important for the time after the course bc you should be able to master coding challenges to prove you are familiar with your craft while you're on the job hunt. 

The curriculum is always up-to-date and according to the needs of the industry. 

I only had wished to learn things about pair-programming or working on a project as a team. 

David and his team are very committed to support and provide a holistic and contagious coding environment/ learning experience. 
+ you get to meet a community of kind (and smart) people.

In the end it's up to a students entitlement of what one gets out of this bootcamp. 

I learned myself the hard way and can't stress enough to be really prepared for the course with their prep material (JavaScript in general) and during the course to ASK AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, since these are prerequisites you need anyway to work in software development. 

Enjoy your journey. 

Attending SPICED Academy was one of the best decisions I have made. Since I was moving from the US to Berlin for this course, I did a substantial amount of research in order to find the right school for me and I ultimately chose SPICED. I applied in March 2018 to start in the October 2018 cohort and during that time I completed the prep course work several times to get a good grasp on the concepts. I joined the bootcamp as a complete beginner and once I finished the course, I was amazed at the incredible progress I made, how much I learned, and the applications I was able to build. The teachers are incredibly helpful and always willing to help you work through a problem but also ensure you understand why that problem occurred in the first place.

That being said, this course is also incredibly demanding - it is a bootcamp after all! I spent an average of 10-12 hours every day at school for 6 days of the week. This is a fast-paced learning environment where you are challenged on a daily basis and expected to learn by doing. One of the first things I learned at SPICED was getting comfortable with certain parts of your application not working and how to patiently troubleshoot and work with your peers to figure things out together. This is all part of the learning process! There were times when I was incredibly frustrated and other times when I was overjoyed because I made something work on my own.

In all, I absolutely recommend SPICED for anyone interested in making a commitment to learning programming. It was a gratifying experience that provided me with the skills necessary to apply to the workplace as a junior developer. You just have to be willing to put in the work in order to truly see progress in your abilities and get the most out of this course.

Graduating from SPICED Academy is truly a life-changing experience. You will learn an insane amount of things in encouranging and motivating atmosphere, you will master soft skills as well as tech skills necessary to land a job, you will always find support from the staff and you will work really really hard -- and in the end it's all gonna be worth it. You will get everything you need to get an entry level job -- provided you are willing to work hard and be proactive. Even after graduation you can always ask for help. 

Every day I went there with excitement and joy about what I'm going to learn and build today. I was never bored and always challenged. I absolutely loved it and had no trouble finding a junior position.

I recommend preparing beyond the prep course they provide you with though and mess with a code a bit beforehand -- it will make your life much easier.

Stuff to improve: more teachers and including more materials on git, testing and production environment.

I am already recommending SPICED to many friends, so why not share my experience  here: 

If you feel like you want to know how to code and get a job as a developer, you should put them to the top of your list.

I did extensive research before opting for this bootcamp and can honestly say that ,while there might be good alternatives, SPICED was the perfect choice. 

Things to highlight: 

1. Up-to-date curriculum & tech stack

2. Staff that cares about your personal & technical development

3. Great help through the staff & alumnis even after graduation

If you are looking for an awesome atmosphere, super central, comfortable and impeccably equipped space, a knowledgable and friendly staff that excels at lecturing just as much as in private tutoring and more than anything else: sharing an intensely satisfying learning experience with a group of like-minded peers who are in this together  - look no further! 

It would have been great if the bootcamp had 2-4 more weeks so more content could be thought and get the students extremely well prepared for the job marked (in 12 weeks you got to "well prepared" status). It would have also been really swell if it was possible to do frequent code reviews for each student multiple times (which demands a lot of manpower, something no bootcamp that I know of has). But going back from fantasy into actual reality - SPICED do the absolute best with what they got.

p.s The career workshop was really awesome. Learned and grew from it just as much as I did from the coding lessons.