The Firehose Project

I started looking into bootcamps in 2015 while living in San Francisco. I went to a few locations like Hack Reactor, App Academy, and a few others I can't think of right now. Anyway, I could not figure out how to make a decision until I read somewhere in Quora that the best bootcamp will be the one where you can stay the longest because 2 months just isn't enough. I had ZERO coding experience other than doodling with HTML. So I knew that I needed to find something longer than 2 months and I could not find it. So I went with freecodecamp.com which was awesome but felt a bit unprepared as I didn't really have any support and had not built something that I could actually explain to someone else but it did give me the confidence in myself to know that I had the discipline. So, then I considered Viking code school and Firehose. After some careful reading, it was really tough, but what sold me on Firehose was the mentorship. The mentorship part of the program is AMAZING! You'll get to talk to someone for 1 hour about your code challenges and your projects. Really amazing to get all those questions answered; get back on track if you get lost; keep you motivated, all that good jazz, for the 6-month course. I've not heard of any other bootcamp like this. Very awesome experience so far; I am in the middle of the course and working very hard every day.

The Firehose Project is an amazing online bootcamp that treats each student with respect. It doesn't matter if you have a ton of experience or none, Firehose lets you learn at your own pace. At the beginning of the course they assign a mentor to each student who is able and willing to help you, allowing you to customize your learning style. The Firehose Project is a great bootcamp for those who want to learn, and for those who want to increase their knowledge of web programming. I can't wait to continue my course, and when I finish I'll be able to look back with fond memories.

i just finished The Firehose Project's online bootcamp. It was pretty close to a perfect experience! Because of my location outside the U.S., an online course seemed like the best option. Firehose mixed solid lessons with weekly mentor support and a challenging international group project. The focus went beyond Rails basics into algorithms and data structures, and my mentor was particularly helpful for introducing me to real-world topics and best practices outside of the course material. I was consistently challenged and it truly changed the way I think. Highly recommended!

The Firehose Project is a phenomenal investment. I had come into the program with a CS background, but its curriculum is certaintly flexibily enough for beginners as well. Because of this flexibility, and my fantastic mentor, Matt, I was able to not only get a very thorough background in web development, but was also able to tailor more advanced learning to my specific needs and interests. 

The lessons are concise and powerful. To this day, I still frequently go back to old lessons (for fun) and to brush up on aspects on Rails that I haven't seen in awhile. This resource carries with it tremendous value beyond just the designated weeks of learning: you get access to an amazing network of passionate new (and experienced) programmers as well as to great new learning materials as they update the program.

Above all, I think The Firehose Project is worth your time if you're passionate about being able to build something meaningful. It gives you the tools to control your own destiny. Because of The Firehose Project, I've been able to go out and pursue my dreams every single day and I couldn't be happier that I chose this appreticeship program.

(I enrolled and graduated back in 2015.)

I had gone through several interviews with other bootcamps before finally choosing the Firehose Project. While some of the bootcamps that I interviewed with gave me the impression that they only cared about my tuition payment, Marco and Ken (the cofounders) were different: they really seemed to care about my interest and success in programming. Their passion in teaching was really evident upon talking to them, which ultimately led to my decision in choosing the Firehose Project.

Students of this program will build several web apps using Ruby on Rails through tutorials which they can work through on their own pace. Marco and Ken might challenge you to add on additional features to the web apps should you complete them too fast. Students will be given a deep understanding of how code works while also learning important topics including OOP, DRY, TDD, etc, by building the web apps and working through several tough coding challenges.

Should you run into problems, any questions you ask will likely be answered promptly by the Firehose Project community. (Ask as many questions as you can!) There are also weekly office hours where students can attend whether or not they have questions. In my opinion, it's best to attend them even if you don't have questions because you will likely pick up something you didn't know about from other students' questions.

For the final project, I worked in a team with 3-4 other students, and together we built an online chess app. Ken, along with another experienced developer acting as the project manager, assigned us tasks to complete each week and guided us along. This part of the program is simply fantastic because not only will you get to work in a team with others like in the real world setting, it is also a time where you can make mistakes, learn from them, and learn how to fix them. It truly was a tough but very rewarding project.

One of the highlights of the Firehose Project is the weekly mentoring sessions with a senior developer. I was paired with an incredibly friendly and knowledgable developer, and the time I had with him was truly invaluable. He not only answered every question I had, but he also taught me how to write better code. I have used and still use to this very day the knowledge he imparted to me.

Although my focus is no longer Rails specific (currently working with iOS and Unity), the knowledge I've gained through the Firehose Project has made the transition into other programming languages/fields so much smoother. I am truly glad that I went with the Firehose Project over other programs, and I would never trade my experience with them for anything else.

My background:

I had virtually no coding experience prior to this bootcamp, apart from some free courses that I had dabbled in online on Codecademy and edX. I also did the free 2-week prep work offered by FHP before deciding to enroll in the bootcamp.

Lessons / Video instruction:

You are going to build some pretty cool stuff just by following the lessons online. A Yelp clone, a quotes generator, and an online marketplace that integrates payments are among the prescribed FHP projects. The lessons themselves are very detailed. There are also video lessons on topics like object-oriented programming, class inheritance, and asynchronous programming. If you have no idea what these topics are about, don't worry, neither did I. You will learn all about them by following the video content and asking your mentor or Ken (the bootcamp's founder) at office hours. 

Data structures / Algorithms:

On top of building cool web projects, you will also be asked to solve a series of algorithms throughout the course. Some of these are classic computer science problems that I imagine every CS undergrad would solve. The algorithms will be challenging but will leave you with a better understanding of data structures. Unless you have a prior background, you will probably bang your head against the wall a couple of times, but it's okay, it will be very rewarding once you get to a solution. Don't be afraid to ask your mentor, Ken, or even peruse the office hour recordings to help you solve through these challenges.

 Chess Project:

This is the really cool part. You will learn a lot from working on a team with other junior developers like yourself, under the guidance of a senior mentor (may be different from your regular weekly mentor). There were 5 students in my group (including myself). You will be assigned "tickets" (or tasks) to do each week and you will check-in with your team once a week at a "stand-up meeting" where you will report on what you worked on, what you accomplished, and what obstacles you faced. You will bang your head against the wall a couple more times while figuring out how to build out cool features for your app. But it's okay, because if you actively participate and challenge yourself, it will all be worth it once you see the results. I wanted to get better at using jQuery (a Javascript library), so I chose to work on all the tickets related to that. I also wanted to learn how to use Firebase (which allows you to see your opponents' chess moves happen in real-time), so I assigned myself to those tickets. You get the idea. You will pair up with other students in your group to work on these tasks, which is pretty fun. 

Office Hours

Go to them. Even if you don't have a question, you can sit in. Ken and Marco are awesome, super encouraging and very patient.

Weekly Mentor

My mentor was extremely experienced, helpful and encouraging. He even made himself available to answer any questions outside of our weekly one-hour session via email. You can work on anything during your sessions. If we were not working on algorithm challenges, we worked on building out specific features for whichever app I was working on at the time. We even did a whole session on using the command line in the Mac terminal.

Community

The FHP community is unlike any other. You can chat with other students (and mentors) in the Slack channel and post any questions you have. There are quite a few active members in the Slack group (some are former students who are now devs) and they will try to help you out. There was a ton of communication with my chess group when we were working on our project, via Slack and sometimes also Google Hangouts.

Outcome

You will not become an advanced web developer by the end of this program, but assuming you come in with little to no prior coding experience, the bootcamp will give you a very solid foundation in programming. You can then apply this knowledge to advance your skills in Rails or pick up other programming languages and frameworks (it will be easier to pick up other languages once you have a basic understanding). After the bootcamp, I wanted to learn more about mobile development (which is not covered by the program) so I set out to learn Swift. If I had not gone through the FHP bootcamp, it would have been much harder for me. Additionally, I am using Rails (taught in the bootcamp) to build out apps on my own that I am using in real life.

Conclusion

The best part of the bootcamp is the community, who is there to guide and encourage you. Learning to code on your own is hard work and the drop-off rate can be high. FHP gives you a super excellent foundation to excel in whichever coding endeavor that you choose.

I wrote a blog about how I chose the Firehose Project:

How I Chose The Right Coding Bootcamp For Me

Full disclosure: I took advantage of the Firehose Project when it was a 15 week program for $3500.

That being said, I am very grateful I decided to drink from the firehose.  I was clueless about the world of software development at the beginning of 2016.  I had been working at Trader Joe's for several years after graduating from university in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in Biology.  I got a taste of coding taking a handful of city college computer science classes, but there was no context on how these coding skills applied to building real-world applications.  My motivation for jumping aboard the Firehose Project is I wanted to get the technical training required to land my first tech job. 

The first half of the program (at the time) was dedicated to learning the programming language Ruby and building Ruby on Rails web applications.  These are skills offered by many bootcamps/online resources.  What drew me to the Firehose Project was the emphasis on algorithms and data structures, which is something that I needed to be exposed to if I expected to make it through a technical interview.  This is where the Firehose Project shines - they matched me with an experienced professional programmer to help me understand how these algorithms and data structures work.

This is a blog post I wrote to help me understand a data structure, the linked list:

Demystifying Linked Lists for Ruby Developers

As I mentioned in my blog post above, I had taken a time out during the middle of the program to move from northern to southern California.  I appreciate that the FHP was very flexible and made it easy for me to take a break from the program.  I wanted to make sure I would be able to dedicate myself 100% to the chess web application project.

A lot of other programming resources teach you how to make basic CRUD (create read update destroy) web applications.  This is nice, but is rarely that simple in the wild.  Hence why building a chess web application with an agile development team is such an amazing part of the program.  It gives you a taste on how projects are actually built in "the real world."

Here is a very extensive post I wrote about the group project:

Building a Chess Web Application with an Agile Development Team

To wrap up, what makes the Firehose Project unique is the group project and the quality of mentorship.  I am incredibly grateful for the mentor I was connected with.  He pushed me to learn how to use tools beyond the scope of the FHP coursework that allowed me to stand out as a job applicant.  He also was willing to act as a job reference, which was incredibly helpful.  I also was able to use my chess project mentor as a reference as well.  These two professional developers were both patient, supportive, and yet pushed me far outside my comfort zone.

I will also say that a bootcamp cannot just hand you a job at the end of your program.  One thing I learned early on that helped me feel comfortable with engaging with an online bootcamp is you need to network for yourself in order to get a job in tech.  I hustled for months, going to as many meetup groups as I could, in order to land my job today.  I had worked as a QA Engineer for several months after the Firehose Project.  In the meantime, I taught myself another programming language (Python) and data analysis.  I now work as a Big Data Engineer for a startup.  I am incredibly grateful I decided to push myself to learn how to code and get a job in tech.  And I am very grateful the Firehose Project helped me in the process.

Pros:

• fantastic mentors
• great community, very easy to get help and feedback from peers
• clear timeline and projects
• good curriculum
• fun and relevant projects to work on
• group project

Cons

• price, although it is not outrageous given the quality of the mentors
• for our group, the group project did not really live up to its full potential
• the algorithm and computer science part covers the basics, but will leave students with a stronger comp sci background wanting more. To be honest, I haven't needed any of the comp sci stuff in my job.
• job assistance is somewhat limited. I did not mind, but some people might

I have programing experience from self-learn for my work but always feel I lack a good approach to programming. So I took this course for the purpose of learning software engineering skill and get to know industrial experience from course mentor. The course was not too expensive as other online courses and flexible (I can freeze my program whenever my day job gets too busy).

I think The FireHose Project has its own unique ways to explain new concepts and break them down into small steps. I learn not only Ruby and Rails but also some basic algorithms commonly used.

One of special things about the course is that it has office hours where students can ask questions directly to Ken and Marco. Unfortunately I rarely attend such meetings as they are during my working hours.

I get opportunities to talk with my mentors throughout the program and facilitator for final group project. The mentors was chosen to match my background. All of these are valuable learning opportunities. I wish I have more time to explore deeper some concepts and make better use of my time with my mentors.

Main drawback I think is that the old FireHose platform used to have search capability. Unfortunately the newer platform removes this search capability, making it difficult to search for relevant topics when I want to review them.

For new students, FireHose program is a good starting point to enter web development career. However there are lots of others things to learn and pratice to become a capable developer. It is crucial to work hard through the course and learn more than just what the course provides.

The Firehose Project was amazing; from the intro building a cool splash page in HTML, to the algorithmic challenges in Ruby, to the all out grind of building a chess game in Ruby on Rails in 5 weeks. :) In all of my other endeavors learning how to code, I always felt that the projects were too small. However, building that chess application was such an incredible learning process as it was the first big project I was working on, and it forced me to work with a team. That's what I loved the most. Before The Firehose Project, I understood HTML/CSS/JS syntax and how to use it, but my websites all looked like Word documents. I wanted more out of my development skills and that's precisely what I got. With The Firehose Projects 24-week program you will get exclusive weekly mentor sessions from a fun, intelligent person that genuinely wants to see you succeed as a developer; experience using the latest tools and resources used in Web Development today(git, GitHub, Heroku, Rspec, Trello, and more!); tons of Job Preparation resources and guides to your first job; the necessary skillls to breakdown a large complex problem into smaller, managable pieces; weekly office hours with The Firehose Staff; endless help from Firehose Ambassadors, Community Slack channel, and Ken (the ultimate programming ninja the slices through bugs like butter); and at the end of it you will have a great resume, personal website, and the skills necessary to contribute to the wealth of knowledge and information on the web. I love The Firehose Project and you will too, because everyone in our community is there to help with every problem and make you feel included.

You can go to The Firehose Project right now and sign up for the free 2-week intro to see if you like the way it works, I'm fairly confident you will.