DEV Community

Discussion on: Code camp or self-learning

Collapse
 
stacy profile image
Stacy Montemayor

If you haven't already, take a looks at Ada's Developer Academy in Seattle. I've heard nothing but super positive things about the program - there's no cost and it's six months. Then you get a paid five-month internship in Seattle following the course. It sounds super competitive to get it, but it's outstanding once you get in.

As I kind of mentioned the other day, I'm self-teaching. I'm only a couple months in, but I'm doing a wild combination of freecodecamp, Harvard's CS50, and a pretty solid front end Udemy course. Once, I'm done with the Udemy course and have a basic front end foundation set, my plan is to really target my learning with classes to learn very specific things. The main resources I think I'll end up with are treehouse, a youtube JS guy that people have great things to say about, and some google/udacity classes. Not that I know what I'm doing, but it's what I've settled on for now. The idea is as I try to build something new, I'll take a free/cheap class that teaches around that topic. And the plan is to just build, build, build.

Also, fwiw, I ultimately decided against (online) bootcamps because once I really looked into their employment numbers for their grads - even at "the best" schools - the numbers didn't seem to justify the cost for me (the numbers would reveal things like only 50% of the people who started the program graduated...), plus I think I'm a little slower of a learner, and I didn't think I could keep up with the 20-year-olds! Or, at least not without losing my mind in the process.