Today, we’re proud to announce a big step for Firehose. We’re launching an update that was the product of months of planning, hard work, and incredibly insightful input from our students and graduates. We’re excited to see it go live, and we’re excited about what it means for all of our students moving forward. Moving forward, our students will experience Firehose in a completely different way.

So, what exactly changed? Two key things changed.

An All-New Platform

We’ve launched an all-new Firehose Student Platform, a complete redesign of the Firehose student experience. Now, when you log into Firehose, the first thing that you’ll see is this dashboard:

We’ve organized the Firehose curriculum into 8 main tracks, each of which show the different key technologies that you gain experience with within each track:

• Intro Course
• Ruby on Rails Application
• User Features and APIs
• Platform Development
• Test Driven Development
• Javascript Deep Dive
• Agile Team Project
• Job Prep & Advanced Algorithms

At the most simple level, the new dashboard helps you in three key ways:

• Easily track your progress as you move through each course track
• Understand exactly what you learn at each point of the course
• Move more easily from track to track.

Once you click into each track, you’ll also notice a brand new side navigation.

 

The feedback that we had been hearing from students was that they wanted an easier way to track their progress and move through each lesson. So we built the side navigation to optimize the experience within each lesson. You’ll now see exactly where you stand within each track as you code your way forward.

A Longer Program

In parallel to the new Student Platform, we’ve extended the length of the Firehose program from 15 weeks to 22 weeks. We did this based on the amazing feedback from our students and our own evaluation of our evolving curriculum. It takes time and practice to gain the skills needed to land a software engineering job. That’s why we’ve recently added a ton of additional content to our curriculum, including:

• An entire section focused on Javascript
• A 6th web application project
• New coding lessons

We now have over 900 hours of content, and in talking with our students, we learned that they wanted far more time to go through all of it. That’s why we decided to increase the length of the program.

Why are we so excited about the new student experience?

The overwhelming feedback that we’ve received from so many of our students, especially those who have previously tried other online software engineering programs, is that we teach in a completely different way than everyone else. And it’s true. For 3 years, as we’ve continued to refine and add to our curriculum, one thing has stayed the same:

We believe that the best way to learn anything is to experience it at increasingly complex levels over time.

Some of our students call this the Firehose way of teaching. It goes something like this:

1. You build something simple
2. You get a practical amount of knowledge on a topic
3. You build something more complex
4. You get in-depth knowledge on that topic

Then repeat.

This is what’s known as a spiral model, as opposed to a linear one. From our point of view, it’s the best way to learn programming and pretty much anything else. The updates to the Firehose student experience will help thread our unique educational philosophy into our program in the below ways:

• The new Student Platform aligns our design with the way we teach. On the new dashboard, it’s easy to see how we introduce key programming languages, technologies, and disciplines at increasingly complex levels as you progress from track to track. Throughout the process, you are always building something. That’s because it’s the best way to learn.

• The longer program allows our students to build skill and confidence at an easier pace. It gives students the opportunity to move through our 900 hours of curriculum in a way that best fits their learning style.

We’re so excited about the new Firehose student experience, and we hope you are too.

Happy coding,

Marco

CEO | co-founder

FirehoseProject

Start coding on the new platform by applying to our free Software Engineer Intro Course.