Bloc

I’m doing the web developer track at Bloc and my first month has been an awesome experience. I like that it’s self paced and I get to make my own schedule. It’s challenging but they have mentors available everyday to help answer questions. My personal mentor Jacob is the best. He patiently answers all of my questions and helps me get through any kinks in my code. They also have group discussions you can sign up for that’s related to your course. Signing up for Bloc has best the best personal decision I’ve ever made and I’m confident that I’ll be job ready when I graduate! 

This was my first time taking an online course, and I was worried that I wouldn't get as much out of it or wouldn't be able to connect with my peers. Plus, I'm working full time while going through this course, so I was worried about flexibility and falling behind. But at Bloc, that's not the case. The 1 on 1 mentor system is critical. My mentor is great, keeps me on track, answers my questions, and gives me real life advice about the career trajectory I'm looking to get on.

In addition, Bloc is continuosly improving their offerings to make it easier to connect with other students and get feedback from multiple mentors. The slack community is very active, they've just implemented group video chats open to all and focused on specific topis like design critiques, UX, Front-end dev fundamentals, etc and switched up the grading system so that you get feedback from various experts and not just your mentor. 

The curriculum is solid and the courses are easy to understand, but challenging to complete. I'm thankful to have a mentor and slack community of other students to get me through the tough parts. Overall, I highly recommend Bloc. It may be on the expensive side for an online bootcamp, but you get what you pay for, with the added flexibility of being able to take these courses from home or on the road. 

I've been in the UX Design program with Bloc for over a month  now and honestly, I'ved never been so motivated to learn. The content is broken down into checkpoints and after each reading you complete an exercise to practice what you've just learned. For those who are visual/kinetic learners, this is the BEST way to absorb new material. You can work at your own pace and they give you plenty of resources if you need help. Besides tutorials built into the checkpoints, you have a personal mentor, grading team and a slack channel all dedicated to helping you do your best work. After investing so much time and money into college, I was devastated when I couldn't get a position in my field. But with bloc, you learn content that is relevant to the design field right now and I'm confident that I will get a design job when I finish, if not before. If you're struggling with your career and what to do next, I HIGHLY recommend checking out the different programs with Bloc. I would've skipped college altogether if I had learned about Bloc sooner. 

I started the Bloc Designer Track in December 2017. I decided to quit my previous job and make a career change. I did some coding on my own but I would classify myself as a complete beginner. Bloc has been an awesome learning experience. I decided on the Designer Track because it is a mix of User Experience, Visual Design and Frontend Basics. 

The curriculum is set up great in my opinion. Bloc gives you the resources but they also make you work to find some more answers and complete projects. I like the online aspect because for me I pick up some skills quickly and others I need more practice on (like Javascript). I have had awesome mentors who give you valuable feedback throughout your time at Bloc. They are constantly upgrading the curriculum and adding to it.

I am about 30% into my program and they are already preparing me to start my job search. The support is awesome and I would highly recommend the program to anyone looking for a career change or advancement.

When I decided last year that it was time to double down and enroll in a coding program to level up my web development skills, I looked into a number of schools. I do not recall any other program offering a part-time track that would allow me to keep my current gig. I know it's not important for everyone, but I absolutely do not have time to stop everything in my life for several months, as many bootcamps demand. So, for me, the availability of a part-time track was the stand-out feature, and the single most important reason I ultimately chose them.

That being said, there are plenty of other reasons I've come to deeply appreciate how Bloc works, now that I'm 8 weeks into their Web Developer track. The fact that Bloc's programs are based on mentorship is absolutely crucial to the success I'm having, and brings home the importance of personal relationships to the profession of web development. I feel that too many bootcamps promote the "lone genius" stereotype, and it's refreshing to see networking and emotional intelligence given their due. Also, the mentor helps you keep pace. Some online coding schools are entirely free-form, and let you work at your own pace. If you're like me, that could mean putting off assignments...forever! Knowing that I will see my mentor on a regular basis, once a week, helps keep me honest.

Another benefit of Bloc's mentorship model is that it is failure-positive and non-shaming. It's great to learn that failure as a coder or designer is simply unavoidable, and that it's not the end of your world if you need to reach out for help. 

If you sign up for Bloc's web developer track, as I did, you may be pleasantly surprised that you can learn a React/Node stack as well as Angular/Rails. This is a relatively recent development, and not all of their branding material makes this clear. I am just getting started in React, and couldn't be more delighted about it! In a similar vein, expect to learn to use up-to-date tools, like git and Atom, that are used in real world workplaces.

Finally, they're serious about helping you find a job. Basically, there are assignments that force you to identify potential employers and to reach out to them. This is just what I needed to get over thinking "they'll never hire me".

Oh, one more thing: financing is flexible. Love that!!!

I researched the best UX design courses for weeks before deciding on Bloc and I honestly think it was the best decision I've made in a very long time. It's been six weeks since I began the Bloc design track and I'm very satisfied with the program so far. After being a digital marketer for a couple years, I decided to transition into learning everything within design, specifically within user experience design. The program supplies each student with a plethora of resources to learn about each aspect of the design world. From mentor meetings to tons of supplementary links to step-by-step video tutorials, Bloc arms you with the knowledge you'll need for the real world.

The one-on-one mentor meetings are incrediby helpful and thorough. Be ready to have your work critiqued and undergo several iterations before turning in the final submission. You'll also need to utilize outside help like the Bloc community Slack channel and the internet to get through some checkpoint assignments, but it's all a great learning experience and the Slack channel helps you build a pretty good network of people who are all in the same industry. At the end of the day though, it's those "stuck" moments, mentor critique feedback, and iterations that teach you the most about each assignment/checkpoint, so I honestly welcome them with open arms. Very happy with my mentor Angie Ellis who is an incredible teacher and very knowledgeable about all the subjects we've reviewed so far. 

I'm currently on the 25-30 hour per week track and I'd say I'm putting in 35+ hours per week. It's definitely not a breeze. You need to put a lot of work into it, and if you take learning slowly like me, you'll want to devote more time. Regardless, in general, I'm very happy with the amount of material I've learned so far even though I've only gone through the UX and Visual Design fundamentals portion of the course. It's all about the journey though! Very excited to see what else is in store for the remainder of the course. 

I have completed about a quarter of the program so far, and so far I have learned a lot more than I was expecting. I think the most important thing to be aware of right away is that Bloc is challenging. There has been times when I wanted to punch my laptop screen repeatedly. But Bloc is also very much as rewarding as it is challenging. After all, there is a demand for the kinds of skills that Bloc teaches.

I did alot of research on other online bootcamps, but I was sold on Bloc because of it's well-rounded curriculum; The Designer Track focuses not only on design, but front-end development as well. This understanding of development will totally leverage your knowledge on collaborating with developers and understanding the process. The Designer Track provides structure to the projects as if you were dealing with client work, which ultimately leads to a polished portfolio piece. From understanding user experience, to implementing design, and finally development, you have insight of every part of a project. 

The one-on-one mentorship is very essential in a challenging program. A huge advantage of personal mentorship is the accountability. My mentor is aware of my career goals and my desired outcome of Bloc, and he leverages my learning to accomodate that. I respect and trust his feedback and advice as he is a working designer in the field. 

Overall, Bloc is awesome. It has taught me how to be discipline and consistent and especially how to learn. And it accomodates to a busy adult wanting a career change. 

Hi, 

I started looking into a bootcamp style online web class after I wasn't feeling challenged enough at my current job. Though what I do now is related to the web, it only approached it from a marketing perspective. I'm about half way through the Bloc course now and I am loving it! 

It does a great job at starting out slow, building the fundementals, but then once you are comfortable, it really kicks it up, and you start coding awesome projects that always tie to real-world use cases. 

If you are thinking about doing an online web dev course, and you want to leave each lesson feeling accomplished, Bloc is for you! Though there have been times I wanted to rip the computer off the table and chuck it across the room, my mentor and the team has always been there to support me and turn those moments into learning experiences.

Would recommend: 10/10

Thanks,
Bobby

I'm going on my 6th week and I have nothing to complain about other than being forced out of my comfort zone (not a bad thing). Before Bloc, I've tried learning on my own with Udemy courses and other resources. It was not my best way of learning. After careful evaluation, I decided to invest myself in Bloc Design program. It was a hard decision since I just graduated college and don't have money laying around. 

This program worth every penny. I love how the course is designed. Contents are not overwhelming. I feel like I'm reading an article rather than textbooks. The program entails mostly on doing assignments and projects, which is a great way for me to apply what I learned. 

But the most important part is that Bloc gets me out of my comfort zone. There's a Slack community where mentors are online every single day to answer questions. Even the program director is online to help as a guide rather than as a director himself. Everyone is very approachable. It's encouraging to engage to help others with their assignments, like participating in surveys, usability tests, preference tests, etc. 

I also have a meeting with my mentor every week. We talk about future assignments, reflect on old ones, and explain my reasoning for approaching problems. This helps tremendously to become a UI/UX designer as I'm not very skilled at explaining things.

Overall, Bloc Design program helps me grow into a professional while sharpening skills I lack. I learned so much in such short amount of time. I'm excited to finish this program and start my journey as a Designer.

Before getting into my review, I'd like to inform you that I was enrolled in another coding bootcamp February-August. I was very frustrated because I just wasn't grasping the thought-process and problem-solving technique of a developer.

Fast-forward to October 2017 when I enrolled in the Bloc Part-Time Web Developer Track - I've learned so much in 8 weeks and I feel confident in my coding abilities. My two mentors so far are very helpful and want to make sure that I understand before adding more material. I am really enjoy it and I'm starting my portfolio and career search. The cirriculum is comprehensive and thorough - that's beneficial to anyone with little or no coding experience. 

I'm starting with week 7 of Bloc's software developer track and I couldn't be more happy with my choice! Coding has been an interest of mine since I got my first exposure to programming during my doctoral degree in environmental sciences. Having spent time as a university educator, I have specific criteria in mind regarding an educational setting. I was accepted into several bootcamps and decided on Bloc for several key reasons: the mentoring, the strong emphasis on software engineering principles in the curriculum, multiple projects to showcase in your portfolio, the open source apprenticeship, and the career support. Where some schools have you submit coding exercises in a Test Driven Development (or TDD) setup, your code at Bloc is reviewed by your mentor. TDD is a great thing to learn (I'm certainly not knocking it) and we also get exposure to TDD at Bloc. However, I like knowing that my mentor looks at my code personally because TDD won't tell you if your code is DRY, if you're following other good practices in programming, or teach you about the readability of your code. I also appreciate that Bloc has you getting started with command line, Atom, Chrome Dev tools and other tools that you'll use as a developer from day one. Instead of pre-recorded lectures, your education is self-guided. You read through assignments, ask questions to your peers over Slack if you get stuck and discuss it in greater detail with your mentor during your weekly meetings. To me, this better prepares you for the work environment. This is not to say that there are not also videos and supporting reading materials in the curriculum, but that it's more of a self-guided approach to problem solving. I also like the flexibility of working remotely. There were other bootcamps that I could have attended in person or online, but Bloc's curriculum, one-to-one mentoring, and option to work from home made it the ideal fit for me. Additionally, Bloc's money back guarentee if you don't get a job after graduating signals its commitment to students and confidence in its program. So far my experience with my mentor has been fabulous! She is an amazing educator and really knows her stuff! Bloc staff are friendly and responsive.

If you are just starting out the search for a bootcamp my advice is to really think about your learning style and what school can help you achieve your goals. There are several good schools out there and everyone is different. Google the "VARK" learning styles if you don't know your learning style. Good luck, you're going to have fun and be glad you took this step!