The Firehose Project

... I have taken the 'free course' for quite a few online programs.  My biggest fear is paying a bunch of money, only to find out my learning style doesn't match up with their teaching style.  So after some codecademy.com courses (great, but just a first step) and three 'free preliminary courses', the one that I keep comparing the others to is the firehose project.  From day one, before you have given them a dime, they answer your questions and analyze your code.  When ever I felt lost on 'ruby basics' problems, they would answer my questions and offer support- for free.  If they are this involved before I have paid for or enrolled in the main course, I know I will be supported throughout.  I also like how the curriculum thus far is very, very incremental- which is very important for noobs.

I graduated from the Firehose Project a couple of weeks ago and had a great experience! Ken and Marco do a fantastic job and are incredibly dedicated. Each lesson has a built-in Q&A which you can consult as you work. If your question hasn't been previously asked and answered, you can post one with a screenshot and description of the problem/link to your code on github and someone from the team will respond almost instantly-- it never takes them more than a couple of hours to get back to you, no matter the time of the day or day of the week. 

That way, you're never stuck with a stubborn error message or broken code and can progress throughout the week outside of your mentor sessions and office hours. I also liked the way a good number of self-directed lessons are sprinkled throughout the tutorials to keep you on your toes and challenge you to learn faster.

The algorithm challenges also push you along in your journey to become a web developer. They understandly will take time to solve but with help from office hours and your mentor, you will get through them and be more prepared for the technical aspect of job interviews. 

Another great feature is Ken and Marco's dedication to continually reviewing the course content for opportunities to improve. For instance, they have recently revamped the chapter on TDD in a way that vastly improves students' skills and practice with Test Driven Development. Since access to the course content remains after graduation, alumni were also notified of the change so we can now go back to work through the lessons and benefit from the change. 

Finally, I'll say that with everything you get, the program is really reasonably priced and gives you great value for your money.

I highly recommend the Firehose Project! 

12 weeks ago, I had no idea where I would end up. I had no idea what I was doing. The only thing I knew that it was going to be a start of something new and exciting.

12 weeks later, I find myself obsessed with coding. I code 5~10 hours a day and wake up everyday excited about learning more and creating more. I often times find myself not wanting to sleep because I want to code.

Learning how to code has changed my life in a great way that I never thought was possible. It has given me not only a useful skill, but also an identity.

 

My initial motivation to start coding was complicated.

I spent my sophomore year thinking that I wanted to be a business man, maybe a consultant of some sort, eventually create a business, and basically invest my time and energy for going that super “ideal” route. I declared as a Business and Economics double major and I thought I was going to be right on track.

Meanwhile I was interning at a small consulting firm and also doing some translation at the company as well. I saw a gap in the translation market, decided to test the idea out, and it worked. I started up a business and within 6 months I was making $3,000 a month in profit a month, which was pretty good for a college kid.

And within 6 months, I was exhausted. I realized having money was nice, but I wasn’t passionate about money. I liked translating because I was creating something and helping other people. I liked giving my friends jobs because it gave them money. But could I continue this for a lifetime? Did I wake up excited about my business?

The answer was no. You might say, “Well that’s the way it is. You barely even know business anyways, you’re still a college kid.” Which was probably true. But instinctively, I knew that even if I went out into the “real world”  of business, I would still be more passionate about creating things.

I learned a lot about myself during these times. I learned that I love supporting people and helping people, but I suck when it comes to aiming for higher profit just for the sake of getting more money (if there is a mission I would be passionate about it), or anything along those lines. On the other hand, through translating, I learned that I really liked creating things for people.

I thought deeply about what kind of career would make me happy. I always thought that it would be awesome if I could code, but I thought it was too late to learn it.

In my freshman year, I tried CS50, the online Harvard introductory computer science course. It taught programming in C with pointers and memory allocation, and I was just confused out of my mind. It gave me the impression that coding was this super difficult skill to obtain.

But one day in July, I saw some kind of article talking about “coding bootcamps” that train you to become a coder in a span of 3 months. 
 

At first, I was skeptical.

Coming from a slight economics background, I thought to myself, how could this be? If programmers are so high in demand and so short in supply, this must mean that programming is a highly specialized skill which is so hard to obtain that there is a supply in shortage. If it were that easy to learn coding, then the gap between the demand and supply should have closed by now, therefore it is probably a scam. Right?

Wrong. I first looked at the statistics and realized that there was still a HUGE gap. Then I looked at some of the blogs of graduates of these so-called bootcamps. Some of them were indeed getting jobs after graduation.
Gradually my trust towards bootcamps increased and I decided to take a look at the options.

There was hackreactor which looked promising, but then I looked at the tuition: $17,780. Intriguing, but impossible.

There was bloc which was also promising, but then again: $9,800. Still impossible.

Then there was The Firehose Project. I did a lot of research about them and didn’t see any negative reviews at all. I read the blogs of students and graduates, and they all seemed to be super satisfied. The price? $4,500. A lot, but possible.

This was the bootcamp I wanted to enroll in. I signed up for the 2 week prep course and finished it within days. I then had to persuade my parents which I wrote about in this blog post.

Since then, a lot of things happened in my life.

1. Changed my major from Business/Economics to Business/Computer Science
2. Got my first job as a web developer at a local start up (Week 7)
3. Won 3 awards at my first hackathon (Week 9)
4. Selected as a finalist for the Capital One Software Engineer Summit (Week 10)

The way I spent my time, the people who I hang out with, and the way I see things have completely changed.

I realized that with the power of coding you can do and create so many things. If you have an idea for a business, you can now create it. If your friend needs some help for a website, you can help him.

For a professional coder, this may seem like old news. But for me, it is still an amazing feeling to have the skills to create something cool.
 

The Firehose Project has been an amazing experience for me.

My mentor pushed me to learn things beyond the curriculum and I couldn’t have asked for anyone better. The curriculum went through the solid fundamentals of programming. The coding challenges involving advanced computer science algorithmic problems were extremely difficult, but through the office hours, I was able to receive amazing help and support that enabled me to solve them. I’m still on my team project (they allow you to continue on the team project even if you have graduated), but I know this will also be another learning experience as well.
 

Here are three things I loved about The Firehose Project

1. An active and welcoming community
The community at The Firehose Project is very active, with people constantly asking questions on the Slack channel and posting valuable information on the Google Plus group. Alumni still hang out in the community (many of them working as a web/software developer) and they help out in solving advanced problems. I've made a couple of buddies in this communities and we sometimes even work together on problems and pair program as well.

2. 1 on 1 Mentor Sessions
At The Firehose Project, each student will have a 1 hour mentor session every week. How you choose to spend your time with your mentor is completely up to the student. For me, I always listed questions I had during the course work, or other advanced topics that I couldn't figure out. I couldn't ask for a better mentor. He gave me extra meaningful work/exercises and really cared for giving me the insight to improve as a programmer. Even after the program is over, I want to keep in touch with my mentor because he was such a great educator.

3. Coding Challenges
The Firehose Project provides many coding challenges which students will go through. These challenges are common interview problems or computer science problems and are very difficult. As a computer science major, I know that just learning Ruby on Rails isn't enough to become a good developer. Logical thinking skills are essential. As I am developing a complex website for a local start up, I find myself being able to solve problems and obstacles faster than before because of the countless hours spent banging my head against the wall trying to solve these challenges.

 

The Firehose Project has given me the knowledge to learn coding on my own. It has given me a skill that I can turn into a profession. And mostly, it has given me a lifelong passion.

I have documented my entire time with The Firehose Project in my blog.
I highly recommend this bootcamp for anyone who wants to become a programmer and join a community of enthusiastic and friendly people.

Good courses, wouldn't recommend to people on the west coast though. They seem to be unable to accommodate people's schedules who are not in the same time zone. I am unable to participate in group meetings or office hours because everything is based in EST time zone. It's not like I work late, I'm off work by 3PM, but that seems to be when everything starts. They seem to think that 4/5 group members in a meeting is good enough, and that I have to work around it. I'm sorry but I didn't pay $4000 bucks to be at a disadvantage over other students. Overall it's a great program, I just wish they were cognizant of people not living on the East Coast

Choosing the Firehose Project was one of the best decisions that I’ve made.  Before deciding to drink from the Firehose I was weighing a bunch of options (from free to paid, online and in person).  Bloc was one of the original bootcamps I found that started me on the path to an online bootcamp a little over a year ago and I thought I would end up enrolling with them. With my professional experience being mostly in email marketing, their emails, cadence and content were pretty much on point ever step of the way, but even with those great tactics that I knew should be driving me to convert, I was never sure that I was going to get more from them than I could just by making myself sit down and review free resources and tutorials. I had come across the Firehose Project early on in my searches, but for some reason, I didn’t consider it. When I got serious and decided it was time to jump in I luckily checked them out again.  I watched a recorded info session and immediately I knew I would get more from this than any of the other programs I was considering because of the foundation of fundamental programming skills (algorithms and data structures) and problem solving built into the curriculum.  

Ken and Marco understand that it’s not about just being able to copy/paste code and follow instructions - it’s knowing how to break down problems and find solutions.  This is something that isn’t just for Ruby or Ruby on Rails or even basic HTML and CSS.  Understanding the fundamentals gives you the ability to work with any programming language out there as well as tackle other problems you may encounter that don’t necessarily involve writing code.

The group project at the end of the program gives you an opportunity to interact with a remote team of other developers and experience what working on a web application in the real world is like.  You’re given some direction on what needs to be built, but ultimately the features are yours to build and it’s up to you to decide how to best implement them while applying those fundamentals you worked on building leading up to the project.  In the past I’d worked alone on some of my own projects, which is great, but it doesn’t really compare to the considerations, challenges and achievements that you encounter while working with a team - something that I really had never considered up until that point (and something that is very important when switching careers). 

The last thing I’ll mention about the Firehose Project is the community.  It is an amazing group of current and former students that you have access to in addition to your mentor and Ken, Marco and team.  From the discussions and knowledge sharing on Slack and Google Plus to the fantastic office hours, there is a wealth of information and tools available to ensure that you succeed.  

I wholeheartedly recommend the Firehose Project to anyone considering a coding bootcamp.

Going to try and make this review as short as I can.

Background

Before theFirehoseProject, I was a recent digital marketing graduate that was working in web analytics and as a digital marketing assistant for an educational web app. I had my hands in SEO, PPC, email marketing and I also helped create landing pages while revamping my company's website. So in a way, I already knew HTML/CSS/jQuery. However, that didn't matter as much since what I was going to learn there was way more in depth.

Why I Chose theFirehoseProject

The points of interest for me (and the ones that would eventually help my decide) were

• 1. Mentor sessions once a week that are flexible
  2. A community that encourages learning and helping others (fellow Firehose students)
  3. A Capstone project where you will work in real-world conditions
  4. Price point was much better than most courses I found

1. Having a mentor in general is always great for learning. The one hour I had in mentor sessions a week was enough to cover any concepts I wasn't sure about in week of learning. Sometimes my mentor (Federico) would even go past the one hour just to make sure I understood what I was learning. And even if you don't get it by then, you can probably always email your mentor or ask in our dedicated community channel (which brings me to my next point).

2. The community of Firehose consists of people from all walks of life who all share the passion of learning to code. You can usually ask questions in our group chat and someone will answer (both the founders Ken and Marco can be found lurking there too along with the alumni). What's also great is that people will share useful resources or tips in the channel that will definitely help you as you go through the course. It's always better to feel like you're learning with others as opposed to going solo.

3. The capstone project was to build a chess game with Rails alongside 3 other students. This will definitely give you an idea of how to work with other developers and understand team workflow processes that professionals use. Getting to this point, you should have completed 90% of your course and are now ready to take on a real project.

4. I can't really say much about this other than that it was a 3rd of the cost of one of the other bootcamps I was looking at (Flatiron). 

The Perks

• Office-hours (6 PM EST) is a live video chat where you and other students can ask Ken and Marco questions in regards to either the courses or a general programming question. If you get in early, you'll probably hear Ken and Marco talking about random things (they're super nice and funny!).
• Practice your lightning talks with the community. This is where students can give short presentations on specific topics such as a framework or concept. (Made possible by fellow Firehoser Colin)
  
  P.S. Presentations are suggested to have many puns and uses of gifs
• Access to all the materials even after graduation.
• Challenge problems in regards to learning algorithms and data structures (which I don't see being taught much by other bootcamps).
• An entire section dedicated to job preparation.

Final Thoughts

When I started theFirehoseProject, the one goal they really emphasized in their curriculum was getting to the point where you can learn to teach yourself new things. With the amount of languages, frameworks and concepts out there, it's hard to condense that into a lifetime of learning let alone a 15-week course period. This is exactly why they train you to become a self-sufficient developer. 

When I finished the program, I was confident that I could teach myself anything. As a developer, you should always strive to be learning new things anyway. For that, I'm glad I picked theFirehoseProject and would definitely recommend over the bootcamps that claim to get you a high-paying job as soon as you graduate (seems unrealistic to me). 

If you're still unsure about what bootcamp to go to, this post was helpful: The Definitive Guide to Choosing a Coding Bootcamp. This should say a lot about the company itself when they write a guide to help choosing the RIGHT bootcamp (even if it may not be their own).

I’ve had a few days now to come to terms with the fact that theFirehoseProject is all over. It’s been an amazing ride over the last 3 months and the skills I learned will leverage me into my next career pivot. I’ve met some really great people, experienced horrible frustrations, and felt amazing triumphs. I’ve went from slowly trudging through the Rails tutorial sea of mud to learning how to be a web developer. To have been able to accelerate my skill acquisition in this way would have been damn near impossible had I continued to do it on my own. It truly has been an amazing program to be a part of and it is easily one of the best decisions I have ever made. In a lot of ways the Firehose Project has brought me a significantly higher quality of life than I had prior to starting.

The program starts off at a slow pace but quickly ramps up in progressive succession. By the time you are done with the program you will have a simple quote generator, a business/restaurant review site, a two sided video streaming marketplace, and a complex chess application. You’ll also get the taste for writing JavaScript, in depth understanding of object oriented programming, test driven development and learning complex algorithmic processes with the difficult coding challenges that the Firehose Project provides. Oh the coding challenges, they will be the most difficult thing you will do. You will want to, at times, bash your skull in with your keyboard out of frustration but when you get it, and you will, you will have the most uplifting and reassuring confidence boost you have ever experienced.

In addition to the coursework you will be assigned a mentor. Some how Marco and Ken knew exactly the right mentor for me. They paired me up with a seasoned veteran of the software development industry who spent a lot of time developing video games such as Bioshock Infinite, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2. We jumped into our first call and it was super easy talking to him about basically anything. Over the 3 month program my mentor and I got to know each other pretty well and it felt as much as a friendship as it was a mentorship. He helped me through my frustrations, gave me insights into the industry, gave me advice about jobs and the hiring process, pushed me to keep coding more and more difficult things, and taught me information that went beyond the Firehose Project and into the foundations of computer science so that I could fully understand the impact I would have on the systems I’d be interacting with in the real world. My experience with mentor was very much a highlight of the Firehose Project and I was super fortunate to draw the mentor that I did.

When you look at a bootcamp you look mostly at two things, the course work and the mentor. What you will often overlook and not even consider (myself included) is the community and the social interactions within that community. The Firehose Project community is a caring and supportive community encompassing founders, mentors, alumni and students. When you join Firehose you get access to the private G+ community and the Slack channels but on top of that you get office hours, the weekly meeting of students, founders, and mentors to go over things we may have struggled with throughout the week. Access to these social/community channels, if taken advantage of, will give you access, insight, support, friendship with the other Firehosers, and an ability to level up. My experience being a part of the community was a special one for me, many of the digital communities these days are toxic, hellish, and negative battlegrounds of vial opinions but not with the Firehose Project. You don’t see all the negative things that you would in the wild on the internet but what you do see is an overwhelming level of support and kindness to the other Firehosers, something truly special in today’s digital communities. Every one of my interactions in the community were positive and in kind I did my damnedest to return that kindness and support in magnitudes of order. I think communities are as strong as their weakest contributors, if you have a supportive and active community, then you have a strong community, the Firehose Project is a strong community. The community was already primed and welcoming for me to contribute before I began. To play my part I wanted to amp that community up and give my all to it, I want the new students to feel as welcomed as I was when I started. The TL:DR; the Firehose Project community f-ing rocks!

Interacting with the founders was also a great experience. Ken and Marco make everyone feel welcomed from day one, they’re supportive, and they’re completely open to feedback. I have never felt from either one of them that I was simply a dollar figure to them and have always felt, even from the first time I met Marco or Ken, that I am a welcomed and contributing member of the community and the program. To me that speaks volumes for the caliber and quality of character of the founders and honestly was one of, if not the primary, reasons why I joined the Firehose. If a founder or founders truly believe in their product and see their customers as parts of their family and not just dollar figures I know they have a solid product that I too can believe in. Of course they’re selling something, it is a business after all, but what happens is they undersell and over deliver in EVERY aspect of the Firehose Project. From even the pre-work course you get the feeling that they’re not in it to churn out as many students as possible so they can make the highest profits possible. Then when you start the program you realize for them it’s all about empowering people and sharing their passion and joy for programming, that excitement is infectious. I have zero disappointments in the experience and no regrets or hesitation saying that the Firehose Project is worth 10 times the cost of admission!

Continuing in the same vein of community and the founders I’ve got to say everyone is welcoming, open to trying new things and open about improving the community. When I suggested Firehose Project Lightning Talks to the community I thought I would get a “sure, that’s a good idea but it’s not something we can really do right now because we’ve got a lot of things up in the air already” instead I got “That’s a great idea, lets do it!” Everyone seemed excited about it and we had our first ever Firehose Lightning talks in less than 2 weeks after suggesting it, the feedback was positive and it had a great impact on the community. We’re about to hold our second ever community lightning talks this week. In addition to the talks we’ve also got a community Firehose Project blog where students can contribute as writers or developers on the open source environment that we have created for the students. That’s what I mean by the founders are open to ideas and improvements, I never thought I would’ve had the feedback that I had about the lightning talks nor did I ever see it happening that quickly but the founders saw it as a great way to increase the quality of the program and saw the impact it could have on students by getting them comfortable talking about technology, public speaking, and encouraging them to explore beyond the curriculum. That mentality says a lot about the character of the people running the show and how much they care about the community and ecosystem they created.

Those are basically just the highlights reel of my experience at the Firehose Project, if I wrote everything that I have experienced and felt about the Firehose Project I would have a short novel because it truly has been a wonderful experience (you could also just go back through my blog and read my week in review posts). There is a sense of bittersweet sadness accompanied by joy and accomplishment that I have with the Firehose Project and to me that is a sign that it is something truly special. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, I’ve accomplished just as much but very few things upon completion have been accompanied by a feeling of “I just don’t want it to end” most the time it’s “Hell yes, finally it’s over, now I can do this!” With just that mixed bag of emotions I can truly say that this was something special, that the Firehose Project is something truly unique and special, and it will be one of the greatest experiences that I have ever had the great fortunate to be a part of. When I look back on my time at the Firehose Project I can see the leaps and bounds I have taken in pursuit of my new career and passion, I can see the great relationships and friendships I have made and the promising future that is in front of me because of this experience. The best part of the Firehose Project though, I don’t have to leave, I can stick around and contribute, continue to help and improve the community, give my support and encouragement to the new students and do whatever I can to continue to help make it a great experience for everyone who joins. This ladies and gentlemen this is what makes the Firehose Project great, I still want more. More coding, more community, and more Firehose. A big CHEERS and THANK YOU to Ken, Marco, Kevin, Ben, and the whole damn Firehose community! You folks all made this one of the best damn experiences I’ve ever had.

I've tried 4 other onlince boot camps and was accepted into Dev Bootcamp in NYC. I'm beyond happy that I chose to learn from The Firehose Project. These guys truly care about your education and honestly want you to succeed. The owners are very successful programmers and not just entrepreneurs who jumped on the boot camp money train. They're also very active on a daily basis with students.

They offer a free 2 week course and after taking that, I couldn't sign up fast enough. The teaching is just incredible!

Highly recommended!

I started my first job as a developer right after the firehose bootcamp and was
lucky to observe a team of really experienced professionals at the new company.
Thinking about what makes a developer a good one I came to the conclusion that
firehose taught me just about everything a good developer needs to know. 

Divide and conquer
The whole learning experience of firehose is based on projects with increasing
complexity. Each and every step in the development process is broken down so one
can easily follow through and understand the required steps. The knowledge gets acquired gradually and with the experience one’s confidence grows as well.

My daily tasks as a developer require this exact skill. Breaking down the problem into tiny and manageable pieces and learn new things on the way. Through trial and error you finally arrive at a suitable solution. 

Be humble and work with people
Our knowledge as an individual is really finite. I think that our combined knowledge as group or company is near to infinite. There are times when you don’t know what the next step is or how to tackle an even simple problem. Here comes the magic of being humble and working with other people. By being humble I mean not being afraid to acknowledge that you don’t know something and ask others. So far every time it yielded a better and/or quicker solution and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself.

This experience was a cornerstone of the firehose training as well. Weekly office hours were the highlight of each weeks’ learning process. While going through the material on your own every one encountered similar problems others did only 1-2 week prior. It is a valuable time to share one’s perspective on the assignments and learnings as well.

But this team experience got even stronger and more valuable when working on the group project. The group project is a perfect simulation of the future work environment. You are not restricted to the assignments everyone needs to get through anymore. You are on your own, but as a team. As a team you decide where the project will go (which by the way may or may not be the case on the real job - thats what the product manager may do for you) but more importantly you start to think about the implementation of the new unknown. Real questions start popping up and your team is the place to go to aks for a second opinion and feedback.

Have a mentor
I recently finished reading a very interesting book: “Self Leadership and The One Minute Manager” by Ken Blanchard. One of the ideas presented in the book was that on different stages we all need a different leadership style to help us grow. Basically there are four skill development stages and four corresponding leadership styles:
 

1. Low Competence / High Comitement needs Directing
2. Low-some Competence / Low commitment needs Coaching/Mentoring
3. Moderate-high Compentece / Variable Commitment needs Supporting
4. High Competence / HIgh Commitment needs Delegating

Without going too deep into the theory, here is how it translated for me in my firehose process. 

Before beginning the course I certainly was on the first level. My commitment had no limits and the competence was pretty low. You dive into the learning process and celebrate your first results (the first app is done within a few days and it feels great). But then real problems kick in, self doubt comes up and works against you. Thats exactly the time when your mentor comes into the game and guides you (directing) through the learning process. On the next stage he gives you valuable feedback on how to learn better and what to focus on practicing. 

Why is it important for a developer? Well, development is a skill and a craft in one. We have to learn form the best and study from the mistakes of others. A mentor is someone who has the needed perspective on where you are and is able to guide you through the learning process and point out the connections you just didn’t see before.

To sum it up - chunking the problems into small pieces, working as a team and asking questions and having a trusted mentor who will support you in your growth are in my opinion the things which help being a good developer. The firehose bootcamp certainly incorporated all of them for me and helped me continue those practices not only on my job but in other areas of my life as well.

Thanks guys.