Codesmith

I graduated from Codesmith in June, was hired on as an Engineering Fellow by Codesmith for a three-month contract and am now preparing to end my Fellowship and move on to a full-time job as a GraphQL Full Stack Engineer with LexisNexis. From the first time I set foot into one of Codesmith's free public online workshops, I was impressed with their teaching style, pedagogy and above all empathy. They built a positive, ego-free environment where people worked hard at a difficult thing to better themselves, and always with an eye towards enthusiastically helping one another to understand the technology on a deep level. Other Bootcamps gave me the impression that I'd be going through the motions and simply 'making the code work' but Codesmith taught me to think deeply about my mental models and the language that I use to communicate what is happening technically so that I could share that mental model. 

I found interviewing for jobs after Codesmith to not only be un-intimidating but often a real pleasure - it was fun to share my understanding with others and describe what I knew! And because Codesmith encouraged me to always consider other engineers, I leave now feeling that I can continue to grow as a mentor as well as an engineer and human being. Codesmith is a really special place that is kept running by some really dedicated people and I admire them and am proud to have counted myself among them, even for a brief while! 

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Nancy Kousholt, Katrina Villanueva and Grisha Levine-Rozenvayn, all of them former or current Fellows, Lead Technical Mentors and Engineering Instructors who showed me what it means to be an empathetic engineer!

After working on Codesmith's free JavaScript lessons through CSX and attending a few free workshops, I was ecstatic to win a free weekend intensive of "JavaScript for Beginners" (JSB). My instructor was Sophie, and I can't say enough about the whole experience. Sophie was kind, patient, and knowledgable. As an educator with 23 years of experience, I appreciate the methodical way Codesmith breaks concepts down and gives you ample opportunities to practice and apply what you learned before moving on. The main thing that sets Codesmith's approach apart from other workshops I have attended is their emphasis on technical communication. Both during interactive lectures and through pair-programming, you learn to communicate clearly and concisely about your code, which not only helps you communicate, but helps solidify the information so that you own it. The course culminated with a group project, which I was nervous about. Despite being a teacher and knowing the value of group projects, I have traditionally not enjoyed doing them myself. I couldn't wrap my head around how "coding by committee" could possibly work. I am happy to say the group project was one of my favorite parts, and Codesmith made it easy through their pair-programming system. I can't believe I actually enjoyed a group project and built a product with my awesome team-member classmates. I can't wait for more! Thank you, Sophie and Codesmith!

Codesmith is a tier above many other bootcamps for one simple reason: They don’t just show you what to learn. They show you how. They encourage hard-learning and how to overcome  the very same roadblocks software engineers face on a day-to-day basis. Their fellowship program offers residents a way to connect with recent grads who understand the struggle / learning process.
 
Also, the culture of the program is truly special. Let’s be honest-doing the kind of mental gymnastics a bootcamp requires can be overwhelming and exhausting. Even in the current remote setting, Codesmith scheduled moments to socialize and unwind. These kinds of connections with your cohort-mates and emphasis on community are in many ways just as important  skills to learn as the technical ones. 
 
The career program is an added bonus most bootcamps overlook. Codesmith gives you an opportunity to hone your resume, practice system design and general interview technique, as well as connect you with recent grads at large companies for networking days. I actually got my current job from my cohort’s networking day, so I’m proof the system does in fact work. Before joining Codesmith, I was naturally skeptical of their numbers, but I quickly saw that they back up their talk. The 3 other members of my cohort’s project group all snagged six-figure jobs well-within the first 3 months post-grad. 

There aren’t enough good things I can say about the entire program. This time last year, I had lost my job, had zero technical background, and was just starting to apply to various bootcamps. A year later, I snagged a dream salary at a major national company.  The technical elements, commitment to diversity and inclusion, community, and median salary for grads sets Codesmith apart from the rest. 

If you're looking for a career change over to software engineering, then definitely consider Codesmith. After attending, I gained the confidence and competence to build a full stack application, understand dev ops, and system design.

There are two main components that make Codesmith work: the production project and career support. Of course, the lectures, exercises, algorithm practice all matter in terms of building the foundation of your competence as an engineer, but the meat of the value lies in those two earlier things I mention.

The production project is about a one month long open source project that you work on with a team of 3 other people. Its main objective is to produce a some sort of tool that bring real-utility to the developer community. It not only showcases that you can solve hard problems with code, but that you think deeply about problems that matter to real engineers. This is what sets this project apart from just any final project from a bootcamp. Just go to the Codesmith website to see that many of the open source projects made by its students are being used by actual developers.

The career support is the other piece that is so important to landing mid- to senior-level roles. They prepare us for the job search very thoroughly from resumes, job profiles, applications, phone screens, technical interviews, etc. This itself is an entirely separate skill that warrants its own focus, and Codesmith works very hard on this part of it. They will continue to provide support after graduation and into your job search. But make no mistake, you have to put in the work both during Codesmith as you learn and also during your own job search. It took me about 2.5 months before I landed my senior software engineering role. Others have landed their roles sooner, but it all depends on the individual's self-discipline to keep at it. If you've got that and really want to break into software engineering, then you'll be ok.

And as a side note, the CIRR reports are accurate.

Codesmith has made a world of difference in my career, and I could not have done it without them.   UPDATE: I finished Codesmith in 2021, but it is still helping with my career long afterward.

Even though one might think that having professional experience should make getting the next job easier, I had completely forgotten all the lessons learned from career support 2 years ago. Nearly all of my applications were rejected, and I was having trouble getting through the 2nd round of the few interviews I did get. I needed to go through 9+ revisions of my resume, overhaul my interview narrative and responses, and practice systems design thinking all over again before I finally started getting to the later rounds.

The only way I was able to steadily improve my interviewing results was through the help of the Codesmith support engineers. They are Codesmith alumni who now work as part-time support engineers, giving advice and feedback to anyone in their job search. The 1 on 1 sessions are so helpful, since it's personalized to my situation and sometimes to the job that I am trying to interview for. And they are highly experienced professionals. They conduct interviews in their companies and have helped many other alumni over the years. So they are  skilled, well-practiced, and experienced in knowing how to handle these nuances of the interview.

And of course, there is Eric, the secret weapon. If you want to know more, just read all the other reviews that mention him.

Given the current state of the market, I took much longer to land a position this year than I did in 2021. But with the help of the support engineers, I kept learning what I needed to handle the next interview and the next and the next. I not only gained the confidence to comfortably go through the interviewing process, but I became more optimistic that I would eventually find something, regardless of what else is going on around me.

Choosing to learn a new skill was the best decision I made in 2020. It got me through a lot, and I got a great job. I have Codesmith to thank for that. The program taught me things I didn't even know that I needed to know. They pursue hard learning with empathy and all the understanding and open-mindedness in the world.  For the program, I applied myself vigorously, and I got back so much more confidence in my knowledge because of that.  They teach you an entire stack, so focusing and dedicating your energy to learning what they are teaching you is the key, but there is a great wealth of knowledge to be learned and applied here. More importantly, they care that I did a good job. They were just as keyed into my education as I was, and they helped me every step of the way - with helpful guidance that changed my understanding of software development, and sharpened my skills as a technical communicator and a teammember. With the confidence I gained from Codesmith, I got a job in 4 months. I applied myself, and focused, and filled out applications just like Codesmith told me to.  

(Disclaimer: As far as I know, the program is virtual-only at this point. I was in an on-site program pre-pandemic so some of this might not apply)

A big reason I decided to invest my time, energy, and money (lots of money) into Codesmith was because I subscribed to the same philosophy of hard learning. Everyone is going to have a different experience in this bootcamp, and some of those experiences might have negative aspects. But for better or worse, Codesmith pushes you to be detail-oriented. This is the program for you if you're into seeing how the sausage is really made, as in knowing how your code is ACTUALLY working behind the scenes. You're not just learning languages and frameworks. You're being exposed to all the adjacent tooling surrounding them, like version control, containerization, state management, etc. That being said, Codesmith does hire people who only recently finished the program, to support and teach other students full-time. While some of these mentors are awesome, you obviously can't expect 100% accuracy from them all the time.

Codesmith works because it's somewhere between a college course and a 9-5 job, in that it simulates a real world environment with your peers who are all in the same situation as you. You have meetings, projects, deadlines, happy hours, etc. Once you finish the program though, the hard part is actually putting all that knowledge and experience together in a cohesive package and selling it to an employer. Codesmith provides excellent support in this area too, especially in the salary negotiation stage, but in my opinion you need to do a lot of this work yourself. Nobody knows how to market your best qualities like you do, so you need to fine-tune the narrative you're presenting in interviews, see what works and what doesn't. It's an iterative process.

While the course is always evolving (even as I was midway through the program), the team of engineers behind the curriculum are brilliant, and can be trusted to keep the material fresh and relevant to employer needs. There are some times where you will finish a lecture and be absolutely lost, but I believe the people most likely to succeed in this program are the ones who are persistent. Show up to Codesmith's events consistently, learn on your own consistently, ask questions consistently, don't be afraid to break things, and be ready to work a full day (and sometimes nights) for months straight. This is absolutely not for everybody, but if you are committed to putting in the work to make this your career, it's definitely attainable.

If you're an aspiring dev, good luck on the path, and keep learning.

As someone who has never worked a full time job in the US, I have to say that going to Codesmith is the best decision I have ever made in my life. I got a freelance offer of $55/hr within 2.5 months of graduation, which I left in a month after because the codebase had way too much technical debt. Within another 2-3 months, I landed 2 other offers - 1 from an acquired start-up with TC at around 120-130k and 1 from a tech unicorn with TC around 140-180k - and I ended up taking the latter because of the technology they are using.

Codesmith has a huge emphasis on technical communication, deep understanding of Javascript and helping students to become what the industry called a T-shape engineer, where you develop a strong domain knowledge in one technology. That is the real reason why Codesmith grads were able to land Senior Engineer roles straight out of the program. The best part about Codesmith teaching philosophy is that it makes every graduate of the program less of a cookie-cutter than their peers and I believe that is also what makes the placement rate and salary of Codesmith grads much higher than every other programs (according to cirr.org third-party-audited data) because everybody ended up with different strong domain knowledge in the end - some become expert in testing, some in React, some in Vue, some in GraphQL, some in gRPC, some in Deno, some in databases and some in microservices.  

In this 12-week program, the portion with a curriculum (we call it the junior portion) really only spans 6-7 weeks and the rest of the remaining weeks (senior portion) are spent on tech-talks and projects where students have the time to learn certain technologies really deeply in groups. Curriculum-wise, I honestly wouldn't say this is a 5 star curriculum program, its more like 3.5-4 in my book. Within the first 6 weeks, lectures are very short and are around an hour each day, and we spent the most time mastering our skills by "hard-learning" and doing exercises that are very difficult but achievable through pair-programming. However, what makes Codesmith's teaching really stand out is its teaching philosophy and that REALLY justifies the 5 stars I give to the curriculum here. The curriculum is more about teaching you how to learn and be curious with new technologies so that you know what to learn and can learn them really fast and really deeply all by yourself without going through numerous tutorials. Almost all of us ended up implementing different technologies by ourselves that weren't taught in the curriculum at some point for half of our projects. The teaching philosophy of Codesmith is so solid that I think the quality of the curriculum is probably purposely designed to be not too perfect so we can fill in the gaps by ourselves, which I am surprised by how well things just magically worked out in the end. 

Before we graduate from the program, Codesmith allocated a week for the hiring portion, which I personally think is the best career advice I have ever had. That portion alone is worth at least half the tuition. We learned how to job-search, negotiate salary, write resumes and cover letters, reach out to recruiters and network effectively on LinkedIn with other working engineers. We also have an alumni channel where alumni would throw job posting and give referral to those who reach out to them and have the right skills set. 

Overall, I would say this is an imperfect program that gets everything worked out perfectly and Codesmith will forever have a place in my heart. 

I attended CS Prep to help level up ahead of my technical interview for the Full-time immersive course at Codesmith. Honestly, I was quite blown away by how much I managed to learn in those two weeks. Self-teaching JavaScript is a slow process but with the help of Matt and Greg ( the course leaders), I was able to get my head around some concepts that I was having a hard time committing to permanent memory like Closure and Recursion.  For the money, I think it's good value and is really helpful if you were to apply to any boot camp afterwards, not just Codesmith. The only con I can think of is that the hours were quite long but that's primarily because I'm based in the UK and so I had to shift my body clock to attend the course that takes place after work PST and late evening EST.

My experience at Codesmith was a solid 3.5/5, but I would definitely round up to a 4. The community is probably one of the best parts. Everyone is super friendly and supportive. The staff are probably a bit overworked, but you can tell that they genuinely want the best for all of the students. I was a happy student and I ended up finding employment.

I will be separating my review into pros and cons, as follows:

Pros:

• Strong, supportive community. Readily available and friendly staff. I made some pretty good friends during my time here.
• The production project is a great opportunity to work on something that will, without a doubt, deepen your understanding of the technologies that you choose to work with.
• Very solid curriculum. The technologies that you learn are very relevant and high-demand. They also teach systems design and machine learning, although the latter is just a very short introductory unit.
• Remote stipend for office setup.
• There is a pretty solid network of alumni. 

Cons:

• Needs-blind admission. At the time of admission, I was a low income applicant and I received zero financial assistance. While there are scholarships, the vast majority of them are diversity scholarships and were not applicable to me.
• No job guarantee. This is something that other well-established (and even newly established) bootcamps offer.
• The instructors are mostly former Codesmith alum. While this is not exactly necessarily a bad thing, I noticed none of the instructors have a computer science degree or any real-world experience as a software engineer. Does that mean they're bad problem-solvers? No. It does, however, mean your instructor or fellow will most likely not utilize or understand best practices when writing code and designing lessons/codebases.
• Despite the great curriculum, the React unit is in sore need of a revamp. Codesmith does not teach Hooks, which is a must-have for any React developer.
• The job searching unit was pretty good overall, but I wish Codesmith was more specific about listing the production project as experience. A lot of job searchers are kind of left to figure things out on their own as far as that goes. I also think it would be nice if Codesmith made themselves available as an educational institute on LinkedIn. Being a bootcamp grad is not a shameful thing and giving alumni the option to list Codesmith on LinkedIn would be great.

Overall, the experience was great, but there is still much room for improvement. I look forward to seeing how Codesmith evolves in the years to come.

A quick overview of my experience: I attended Codesmith from Febuary-May 2020, worked as a fellow until August, and started my first engineering role at the end of August, after applying to jobs for 1-2 months.

(If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, scroll down to the Conclusion section at the very bottom)

I was drawn to Codesmith because I already had a little under a year of self-taught experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I wanted to attend a bootcamp that had a higher level of entry for its students. After narrowing my choices down to Fullstack Academy and Codesmith, I ultimately chose Codesmith due to the appeal and quality of its in-person workshops. In particular, the Hard Parts series elevated my understanding of JavaScript to a new level — even after I thought I already had a decent understanding of the basics!

I had high expectations coming into Codesmith, and generally speaking those expectations were met. However, I should point out that our cohort switched from on-site to remote instruction halfway through the program due to the pandemic, which affected the cohort's experience for the second half of the program.

Codesmith's curriculum was divided into two halves when I attended (and I assume it's still fairly similar):

• Full-stack instruction: an intensive series of lectures, pair programming exercises, and projects teaching essential full-stack technologies like React, Redux, Node, and SQL/NoSQL databases.
• Production Project & Hiring: students build a developer tool over six weeks, and they also attend a series of lectures and workshops preparing them for the job search. They'll also put together a resume with the guidance of a fellow. Some supplemental lectures and exercises are also included here, touching on topics like AWS basics and CI/CD fundamentals.

In addition, we also had an assessment or algorithm exercise each morning.
Curriculum & Lectures
Overall, the first half of the program was by far the most engaging and fulfilling for me. I came into the program with some frontend experience, and after the first half I felt confident building basic applications with servers and databases. Our lead instructors knew what they were talking about and gave their lectures in an engaging manner.

At some points I did feel that the curriculum could be updated a bit (particularly in the second half - there was an AWS update that wasn't covered in the instructions, and we lost several hours as the instructors worked to find a solution), but I understand that the curriculum was updated during the latter half of 2020 and possibly later. It would also have been helpful to cover modern practices such as React hooks, linting, best practices for codebase architecture, etc. before going into the production project — these would make good quick additions to the curriculum if they aren't already included.

Projects
Possibly the biggest part of Codesmith's appeal is the "production project" - a development tool that a group of residents work on (4 or 5, for my cohort) over a span of 6 weeks. Before tackling the production project, we also completed a handful of other projects, ranging from a Chrome extension to several fullstack apps, which did a lot to prepare us for this project.

While the production project our group built from scratch wasn't exactly what we'd call "production-ready," we did have the opportunity to iterate on several past projects and refine the codebase while adding extra features, which in retrospect might have been the better option, since it's closer to what most engineers do at their jobs!

One aspect of the production project that was a little less than ideal was the group dynamics. In my group as well as others, there were conflicts where some members "led" the project and created a less equal learning environment for others, or in other instances some members were unwilling to make meaningful contributions and instead preferred to chat. I expect that this is always a risk when forming groups (not to mention in the actual workplace), but this did detract at times from the experience. To future students, I highly recommend getting in touch with your group's assigned fellow if any conflicts or issues occur - I don't believe it's worthwhile trying to solve them on your own when the experience is something you're paying a significant amount of money for.

Hiring Portion
Without a doubt, the best part of the hiring portion for me was the resume. I came out of the program with a dense, polished resume that I didn't feel embarrassed sending to employers - in contrast, the resume I wrote before CS might as well have been written by a child.

I had high expectations for the hiring program because I had heard past grads praise it, with some even say that it was worth the cost of tuition on its own. I was 30 when I attended the program and had worked a number of non-technical jobs previously, and I didn't feel that the instruction regarding the job application or interview process broke any new ground for me. I've spoken to some other grads who are around my age and felt the same — I suspect that the people who get the most out of the hiring program are in their late teens to mid-20s.

For me, one thing I would have changed about the hiring program would have been to include some engineers in the workshops and lectures who had experience interviewing and working outside of Codesmith. While our instructors did make a solid effort to cover the standard materials for these lectures, sections like the system design portion would have been more engaging if they were led by an experienced engineer who had gone through or given SD interviews, rather than a fellow who had only completed this same unit weeks earlier. Likewise, I would have gone into the interview process a bit better prepared if I had been given more concrete details about the typical interview process, common exercises, etc. This is something that I had to do on my own time, through speaking to other grads and going through interviews.

Disclaimer: since we had just switched to a remote format at that point, there were issues with timing that caused several hiring lectures to be rescheduled, and unfortunately Will wasn't available to give his usual lectures. I'm assuming this isn't the current experience.

While it's true that you only get better at interviewing by interviewing, some more concrete guidance would have helped immensely, as some lectures felt a little vague. When I attended the program, we were able to interact with full-time engineers at three different points: during an alum Q&A session, during an hour-long mock interview with an alum, and during a 15-minute (I believe) phone call where we went over our narrative with an alum. When I began applying to jobs, I was uncomfortable about reaching out to the hiring support fellow for advice — while they were doing their job to the best of their ability, I felt more comfortable reaching out to someone who had gone through the hiring process themselves. I'm aware that Codesmith now gives graduates the opportunity to book time to speak to past graduates who are now employed as engineers, which is great. I think bringing engineers with this type of lived experience into the hiring program would also be a huge win for everyone involved in it.

Conclusion
Based on my experience, I'd definitely recommend Codesmith to anyone who has decided that a bootcamp is the right choice for them. Codesmith helped fill in the gaps in my engineering knowledge, and it also gave me the chance to work on an in-depth project with a group of other developers. My production project was likely a big reason why I was considered for the first role that I got hired for — I built a GraphQL tool, and GraphQL was a big feature of the stack I ended up working on.

Overall, I'd say the hiring portion was the only part of the program that didn't meet the expectations I had coming in, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Still, a hiring program alone won't help you get a job. After the initial lectures, Codesmith provided me with an environment to push myself to improve, and a community of graduates that supported me as I moved on to the job search and beyond. Without Codesmith, I definitely wouldn't be at the engineering level I am today.