We’re setting out to jailbreak the traditional bootcamp model and give graduates the platform to continue evolving their skills well after they land their first developer job. We’re launching the Firehose Advanced Programming Course, the first graduate coding course for coding bootcamp graduates. The course is designed to help new programmers accelerate their growth and become highly-valued contributors on their teams far more quickly than their peers.
It’s for anyone who wants to maintain the accelerated bootcamp style learning while in their current position. Students will learn the latest technologies, brush up on industry best practices, and constantly evolve their skills. Let me tell you about how we got to this point.
Programmers are a special breed. In most professions out there, you move up the ladder by following a process like this:
- Earn a degree in the field
- Reach a base level of skill to land a job
- Learn on the job to improve your skills
- Perform well and network with managers at the company or outside the company
- Earn a higher position
Almost all of your learning happens at work. Programming is a little different. If you’re a programmer, you never stop learning outside of your day-to-day job. New technologies are always coming out. Your job can often depend on your ability to learn these new technologies. This doesn’t scare programmers. It excites them.
If you’re a programmer, you want to seek out new technologies and figure them out. It’s what you do. The problem is...if you’re a programmer who graduated from a structured educational program like a coding bootcamp or university and recently started your first software job, you don’t really have anything to guide you forward in your career. We wanted to change that.
That’s why we’re launching Firehose Advanced Programming.
We packed it full with lessons teaching cutting-edge technologies and new concepts, including:
- ES6 & the Future of JavaScript
- Clean Ruby – Algorithm Refactoring Done Right
- RESTful API Design & Development in Rails
- React.js & Advanced Javascript
We’re also working day-in-and-day-out to release new advanced lessons each month, covering topics like Node.js, a deep dive into database manipulations using SQL, and potentially cutting edge frameworks like Phoenix and Elixir.
As always, students will receive dedicated help from our engineering team through our QA support channels, so getting unstuck is one click away.
The regular price of the course is $250/month. Firehose graduates who sign up during the early enrollment period (by May 20th) will get access at the discounted rate of $200/month. Current Firehose students who want to dive into advanced materials not required for the job hunt can get in at the discounted rate by signing up before their graduation date.
Right now, the course is only available to Firehose graduates and Firehose full program students who want to get a headstart. Moving forward, we might open up the course for a small group of select students. If you want to be part of the early access list, let us know on Twitter.
Reflecting on the past, it was a long journey to get here. Let me take you through the 4-year journey to launching the Firehose Advanced Programming Course. I’ve always had a passion for teaching people.
I started in South Africa teaching English as a second language to elementary school kids under a straw thatched roof. After that, I improved the educational outcomes for 2,500+ native Hawaiian children working together with Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii. Later on, I led and trained the user experience team at peerTransfer/Flywire to build an international tuition payment platform handling over $1 Billion in annual tuition payments.
My love for teaching is why I started Firehose with my co-founder, Ken Mazaika, who previously was the tech lead at WHERE.com.
We started out by running “mini coding bootcamps” at places like Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, Brown University, Babson, and taught the entire CS department at Boston University how to implement version control into their workflow. Hundreds of people with no previous experience were building and launching their very first web application (a Pinterest clone) in a few days.
Here’s the craziest part.
These early Firehose students were so pumped about building software that they started asking us if our course was enough to get them a developer job. At that time in February 2013, it wasn’t.
That’s why we launched V1 of the Firehose online coding bootcamp.
We drew on our experience of teaching hundreds of in-class coding sessions, building out web development teams at startups and teaching beginners in classrooms. We knew that any program needed to be centered around 3 essential ideas:
- In-demand developers are rock-solid at solving complex algorithms. You can’t pass a technical interview and succeed on a real dev team without key CS fundamentals.
- The only way to gain a deep understanding of complex algorithms is through 1-on-1 mentorship and constant code reviews.
- Employers expect developers to have an impact on their team on day one. The only way to be a high-impact employee from day one is to gain the agile team project experience ahead of time by building an advanced web application as a team that’s under the wing of a senior software engineer.
We’ve spent the last 4 years building and refining an online program designed to turn any dedicated person into a professional software engineer. We’re proud to say hundreds of amazing people from all over the world have done exactly that. We believe in the coding bootcamp model.
But we also know that the best developers never stop evolving their skills. The fact is…once you graduate a bootcamp and land a job, the work has just begun. If you’re a true developer, that should get you excited. In fact, we receive emails every week from Firehose grads asking for additional curriculum to help them grow after landing a job.
And if that sounds like you, then you’re the reason why we built the Advanced Programming course. We want to support you throughout your career as a developer and help you continue to learn like the best developers do. Interested?
