We Got Coders

I really recommend this course if you are looking to properly learn and have a great start in the web development industry. Overall, you need to be prepared to work hard and interact with other peers during the course. The interaction part is very important, not only because you can learn new software development techniques such as pair programming, but also because you will work better in a team, discussing diverse approaches.
The course is intensive and well organized, every week you learn lots of new concepts and have interesting projects to work on.  Also the size of the classes are perfect. In this way you can be offered an individual tutoring and feedback. 
My favorite part of the course was the group project, since it is a great preparation for your first web development job and also for your final project.
If you are determined to change your career or get practical experience using good practices in web development,  this is definitely the course you should go for.

This is definitely a course for someone who really wants to be a web developer. If you're only a little bit interested and fancy giving web development a try then go elsewhere because this course is not for you. The pace of the course is very fast and a lot of material is thrown your way. Be prepared to work long hours and be seriously challenged. It is also a very practical course. Don't expect any books or PowerPoint slides - a lot of stuff is live coded in front of you. There is a lot of emphasis on TDD/BDD and pair programming too. Which isn't to say that it isn't fun or anything like that - just don't expect an easy ride. 

The instructors really do want you to succeed. Their passion is clear to see and I never had the feeling that they didn't care about your work. They were always willing to answer questions and to give you help when you got stuck.

I didn't take up the accommodation option so I can't speak about what it was like to live in but of course I did attend every day and can say that the working environment is really great. No dingy classrooms with plastic seats. Rather wood panelled rooms with comfy sofas! And the food was awesome!

My only real criticisms are that the course tried to cover too much material in the time available and that the instructors would sometimes get carried away by their own enthusiasm and introduce us to stuff that we weren't quite ready for. This sometimes led me to feel that things were left unfinished.

Overall, I would say that the course is worth doing if you are really serious about becoming a web developer. It will be one of the most intense 3 months of your life but will reward you if you are willing to put the effort into it 

I was in the January 2015 cohort of WeGotCoders. Working for years as a linguist, I joined the course with the aim to make a career change and enter the web development industry. It proved to be the right choice. One year and a half later I have a full time job as a web developer and I plan to keep progressing in this field.

The course was really intensive and sometimes hard to keep up with. People interested in the course shall be prepared to fully commit for these three months and focus solely on learning how to code. However, it definitely pays off! The curriculum comprises of all the necessary knowledge that a junior to mid-level developer needs so as to score a good job. 

Dan, the instructor, was very helpful, always there when the trainees needed him. He used to urge trainees to experiment with code, cooperate with each other, exchanging knowledge and opinions and, in the end of the day, coming up with a solution for every coding challenge. This process simulates the way that a real development team works and that is what makes this course so unique among all the others.

I also had the chance to live in the residential house which helped me a lot to focus on the course. Not having to commute every day, having things like every day food being taken care of, proved to be very beneficial and time saving. Thus, I had more time to sharpen my problem solving and coding skills.

The final week’s presentation resulted in me getting placed to a job only a week after the course ended. So, it goes without saying, that I would highly recommend the course to anyone interested in web development.

I was in the January 2016 cohort and it was one of the best experiences of my life. 12 weeks of intense web development, we worked hard and we played hard and we all emerged as web developers ready to work in the real world. I'm writing this review as a full time employed web developer in London, this program works! 

Being able to live in a mansion during the course is not just amazing but highly recommended, as I genuinely believe that being completely immersed with highly enthusiastic developers is a great motivator and pushes you to do better.

The mentors were amazing, both with many years of experience in the industry and both highly vested in your success.

If you're serious about becoming a web developer then this is the best way of starting. 

When I arrived at We Got Coders I had a lot of doubts about my abilities and lack of experience.  Over the next few weeks they quickly disappeared.  It’s a very intensive course, but Dan and Lorin made sure that nobody got left behind, making themselves available in the evenings and at weekends.  The fact that we were living in a mansion with an amazing chef didn’t hurt either.  In a very short time they helped me turn myself from a complete novice, to a capable web developer, managing to secure a great work placement within a couple of hours of my final presentation. I would recommend this course to anyone who's serious about getting into web development!

TL;DR Brilliant course, best in the country in my opinion. Definitely will result in a job if you work hard.

This course is about seriously learning to become a web developer. Be prepared to spend most of every day, all day, studying code in a relaxed, fun and friendly environment. While it remains focused on teaching, learning and code, it does this in a way which is relaxed and non pressured. There is great support, and the mentor is live in as well so he is available pretty much all day every day. Of course, he has his free time as well, but he is available much much more than a regular tutor would be. 
When I was on the course we spent most days coding from 9am till 10pm. This changes depending on how interested you are in the topic being covered that week. The curriculum is very varied so you are exposed to a lot of different areas of web development throughout the 3 months. 
If you focus, knuckle down, take an interest and work hard you can come out of this course a gleaming pristine example of a professional web developer. 
Being prepared for this course is also very important. I would say you should take minimum 3 months of self study to be properly prepared. The more prepared you are the more you will get out of the course.

The course itself, and it's tutors are very helpful to prospective students so if you want to know what materials to use to prepare then just send an email to the company. 
Pros: 
- They actually do help you to get a job at the end by organising interviews for job positions. 
- The topics the course covers are the most relevant to working in web development. 
- The technologies the course teaches you to use are the most up to date, and recent available. For example ReactJS, Mocha, Chai and RSpec. 
- The live in environment allows you to study as much as you want.

Cons 
- Must be prepared to spend 3 months studying.

But seriously, this course will change your life. It changed mine.

I had recently graduated university with a degree in Computer Science and was looking for some practical experience in Web Development. I found this course and applied hoping to gain the skills required to work professionally in the area and left with a job as a full stack web developer. The instructor Dan took us from the basics of Ruby to building multiple fully tested applications. His approach of gradually building on each layer of the stack helped the entire cohort gain an in depth understanding of how these type of applications come together as whole. Both the back and front end were covered in depth ensuring we were job ready within three months and all who completed the training are now happily working in the industry thanks to Dan's support. I can't recommend the course highly enough, if you've got the drive to work hard and want to fast track your career in web development I can think of no better place to apply than We Got Coders.

I went to WeGotCoders as part of University work experience and came out of it into a well paid job as a full stack Ruby on Rails developer. Having been taking part in Computer Games Development at University for 3 years, I had some of the basics down, but by 6 weeks in everyone was on the same level, and by 12 weeks in we covered most of my University course, and were all immediately employed after the end of the course.

I would highly reccomend anyone, regardless of their computer experience or knowledge, to participate as long as they are willing to put the work in!

I would like to start this review by saying that We Got Coders is not just another web development course but an idea. Dan Garland, the founder and the lead instructor of We Got Coders has finally bridged the gap between developers with a theoretical background and today’s market requirements, by providing them with hands-on experience on the best practices of Agile Web Development.

During the course we were able to immerse in the ins and outs of web development by doing pair programming on cutting edge technologies and popular frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js.

The pace of the course is really fast and the expectation for all trainees is to accomplish at least 80% of the assignments which means that a prospect candidate should devote himself 100% on the course and the material to be taught.

The idea behind this is not only to evaluate the suitability of the trainee to be able to cope with the demands of today's industry, but also to make sure that he understands what he is doing, as this is a prerequisite for a successful career as a software engineer.

As far as the structure of the course is concerned, it consists of 2 phases, the training phase and the mentoring phase. 

During the training phase, we were taught the best practices in today’s industries and, most importantly, through the retrospective of a senior developer and the approach of how we can do things better than we are currently doing.

This includes test driven development, user stories, responsive and pixel perfect design, as well as learning to tackle tasks effectively by breaking them into smaller chunks.

During the mentoring phase, we had the chance and the honour to work as consultants with leading startups who take web development seriously and they would only hire top developers in the market. Alongside our instructor and mentor we were able to implement new features and performance refactoring into their codebases that we are proud of.

The last fact made us more empowered as developers as our clients were pleased by our overall performance which led into full time employment by the end of the course.

Today we are able to accomplish any given task that we are assigned to and perform over the expectations of a junior web developer which makes a We Got Coders alumnus more of a mid-level developer. This is quite impressive considering the amount of time that we spent during our training. 

Therefore, my only advise to those who are looking to get into the web development industry and are determined to accomplish their goals, is to have a look at this course as I am sure that they will not get dissapointed.

Personally, I highly recommend We Got Coders as, at least for me, it was more of a salvation through the years that I have spent struggling in order to achieve a respectable level of knowledge which was finally achieved by my graduation from the course.

Here I gave a talk trying to answer this same question...(9 mins) https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/5709-learn-to-code-in-12-weeks 1) Tell us a little bit about what you do in your current job. I am currently about the start a Masters programme in Advanced Computing Technologies. For the last month I have been contributing code to open source rails project Diaspora* alongside other WGC graduates. 2) Why did you decide to to attend your program? I decided to attend We Got Coders due to their focus on work experience as well as training. This approach felt most like an apprenticeship, which is what I was looking for. I wrote some fuller notes on my decision here: http://dan-mi-sun.github.io/wegotcoders/why-code-with-we-got-coders/ 3) What challenges did you overcome to get to where you are? Prior to WGC I had not written an independent line of code, in any language (except through online resources such as Treehouse, Codecademy etc). Despite this, for 5 years prior to enrolling with WGC I had successfully ran a self-employed business ‘building’ and hosting Wordpress sites for various SME’s, academics, community groups and individuals. For the 6 weeks leading up to the WGC course I had pair programmed with a friend to bump the Ruby version of open source project FreeHub. We would sit next to a London canal on a Tuesday (synchronously next to a narrow boat called Ruby Tuesday) and go through the process of upgrading the software. Through much of this experience my friend would steer, but I had yet to form the cognitive framework to grasp all the components involved in what we were doing. These experiences coupled with the experience of running my own self employed business had set the foundations for my basic software writers’ tool box; fluency in Vim, being comfortable on the command line, setting up servers, hosting projects, having exposure to testing code and having a self-directed and motivated methodical working approach. 4) What plans/dreams do you have for the next 5 years? To keep coding, keep learning, and have some fun whilst earning. 5) Any advice for students looking to join a learning program like a bootcamp? My final project was the first time in my technical career where I have had the experience of delivering a prototype that closely resembled my vision. Prior experiences (with Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal) had revolved around finding an ‘off-the-shelf’ version that was as close as possible to the client spec. The skills developed during the training period allowed me to compose a framework (Rails), with developed functionality (gems), with other systems (external APIs) by gluing them together (with pure Ruby). This is a deeply rewarding practice. 6) What motivates you in your career? A love of learning, and constantly question how to do things better. 7) Do you see bootcamps replacing college for parts of the population? I honestly think this apprenticeship model is the way to go. 8) What were the people and culture like at your program? A very diverse bunch. 2 female, 3 male. Between the 5 of us we represented 5 different countries, etc etc. We all shared the desire to become engineers, so a common theme was our drive to make a start in this industry. 9) Any advice for recent graduates looking for a job? We Got Coders offers free training for graduates… make the most of opportunities like this to skill up to the expectations of industry…. 10) Is there anything else you’d like to share? http://dan-mi-sun.github.io/wegotcoders/why-code-with-we-got-coders/ http://dan-mi-sun.github.io/wegotcoders/reflections-on-12-weeks-with-we-got-coders/ http://dan-mi-sun.github.io/wegotcoders/reflections-on-12-weeks-with-we-got-coders/

After self-learning Web Design I've also wanted to self-learn Web Development at home which proved harder/slower than I'd have liked it to be. I've wanted to speed up the learning process and have thoroughly researched all the intensive web development bootcamps in London area. We Got Coders was the only one offering a 3-month paid mentorship phase after the completion of the 3-month course (of course you'll have to show motivation and dedication to be granted it). The groups are kept small so that's more face-time for each student with the tutor. I've graduated in a group of 5 people, just imagine if the tutor's time is divided among 20 students... The syllabus covers Full-Stack Web Development and more (check website for more info), expect to work hard and then some more but you'll become a more confident player in the job market. The tutor (Dan) is extra patient, easy-going, approachable ("there are no stupid questions"), he's got bags of experience and knowledge and he'll always be pushing you to learn as much as you possibly can, you can thank him later for preparing you for real-life work environment from day 0 (expect to be involved in planning and stand-up meetings too). Tip: put as much effort as you can in the course pre-work, get fluent as much as you can with the Git and terminal commands, you'll reap the rewards during the course!

I started the We Got Coders course in April 2014 and after much research, I decided that this was the place for me. Other similar coding courses offered the three months of training but seemed to offer very little when it came to acquiring a job after. We Got Coders' three month mentoring phase, including giving paid work experience (which I am currently on) and higher chance of a full time position after, is what sold it for me. The intensity of the course is high, the rate at which you're expected to pick up material is high, however, Dan (my instructor, and founder) made it a point to ensure us that it wasn't necessarily about how much information we absorbed in one sitting but our ability to quickly grasp concepts and search for the answers using other resources, if need be. Because of the high intensity, Dan was always on call, making himself available on weekends and after hours when needed. He didn't just give us the answers when we got stuck but gave us tools and skills to find the answers ourselves, which I appreciated. Also due to the intensity, I find that now, in the mentoring phase, when we are applying for full time positions, employers are very impressed by the level and standard of my work. Many have stated that they didn't expect me to be at the level I am because many boot camp grads they have come into contact with are not where I am. Although I am a junior developer, I am working at a mid-developer level. My work has been accepted into different global, open-source projects such as Diaspora* & the gem 'acts-as-taggable'. The process has been difficult but satisfying, Dan has been very helpful and sacrificial along the way, he doesn't just want to fill seats, he wants to create great Ruby developers.