There is no substitute for real! Real-world coding experience is the only experience that matters. If you get that experience, you win. If you don’t, you’ll be left in the dust with no chance of catching up.
Unfortunately, the collective coding education world hasn’t caught up to the fact that real-world coding experience is the only thing that matters. Online video courses won’t get you there. 90% of coding bootcamps haven’t put a drop of innovation into their curriculum in the last 24 months, and the 10% that tried are still as far from real-world coding as we are from living on Mars.
It’s crazy that the major players in the industry with millions of dollars in funding still have students going through guides and listening to instructors without getting even remotely close to a real-world coding experience. It doesn’t fit their business model. Innovation stopped.
Real-World Coding Means Coding Collaboration
The best software is built by amazing teams. Experienced developers know that. GitHub – a collaborative coding platform – is a $2 billion company. Why? Because everyone outside of the classroom codes together, collaborates, splits complex tasks into smaller chunks and attacks them as a group. Teamwork is as crucial to coding as the sun is to life on planet Earth.
We live and breathe this real-world coding mentality at the Firehose Project. We bet the entire house on it and organized our entire program experience around real-world coding.
The Firehose program is way beyond coding bootcamps— it’s the evolution of traditional coding bootcamps, and it’s coding acceleration at its finest.
The first 8 weeks of the Firehose program are laser-focused preparation for real coding experience. Granted, you build 4 increasingly complex web applications, learn how to write algorithms and follow the same development standards as the professionals, but still nothing matters more than what comes next:
Building an advanced and algorithmically driven web application as part of an agile development team is the real-world coding experience that you need to succeed.
Where the Firehose Project Dominates
Our students work like in the real world: as part of an agile team.
In the last 5 weeks of our program, we group students into small agile teams to build an advanced web application together through test driven development, continuous deployment and regular team meetings. One of our experienced coding mentors leads the team, ensuring the code base is top-notch and would be accepted on a professional level.
This agile team experience is the exact real-world experience you need to succeed: you’ll build applications with complex business logic all the time on the job. At Firehose, you get that same experience while you’re still in the program. Those 5 weeks alone change the game. Your game.
For a deeper dive into why coding as a team matters so much, read The Most Critical Skill to Getting Hired as a Web Developer
The Firehose Community Runs Strong
The Firehose student community communicates daily via Slack (chatrooms), runs independent troubleshooting office hours, holds regular lightning talks about technical topics, maintains an open-source codebase to share technical talks and topics with other learners, and is always up to something fun.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with the Firehose Community.
Our Slack channel has constant chatter, sometimes about code and tech-related stuff, other times just funny animated GIFs. Alumni and mentors swing by and engage with the current students, too. Here’s what happened just last night when Ben – one of our alumni who now works as a Rails Engineer – came back from a vacation in Spain:
If you’re not one of our students just yet, you can still get a taste of the Firehose Community and daily coding inspiration here.
Our Code Mentors are World-Class
We only hire world-class mentors. Nothing else will do. Period.
Our current mentors are CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and senior web developers who come with experience from awesome places like PayPal, Shopify, eBay, Flickr, bit.ly, Product Hunt, Teespring, TechStars and Y-Combinator companies. Some sold their companies for millions of dollars before graduating high school, many contributed to the actual Rails framework itself, and others built tools that are used by thousands of developers worldwide.
Because we only have the best mentors at the Firehose Project, our students usually say the best part of their Firehose experience is their regular mentor sessions.
Here’s what Hugo said about his mentor sessions to the entire Firehose Community earlier:
We teach students how to self-correct when programming.
The Firehose Project is all about giving you the perfect guidance at the right moment and constantly taking away training wheels. We start gentle and guide you firmly, let you experiment on your own, teach you how to solve your own error messages, and get you working on complex issues with less hand-holding when you’re further through the program.
Once you’re on the group project, the training wheels are long forgotten and you work just like you will in the real world: as part of an agile team.
For a deeper understanding of why being able to self-correct is so important while you’re learning to code, read this post: The Key to Accelerating Your Coding Skills – And How to Become a Self-Reliant Web Developer
We Are Changing the Game – Be Part of It
We have hundreds of students coding with us in our free 2-week Software Engineer Intro Course. Join them and work on your coding fundamentals, have your code reviewed by experienced developers, and get help through our dedicated Q&A forum.
Apply for our free Software Engineer Intro Course.
Need more? Read In-Depth Firehose Reviews
The Firehose Project goes way beyond the traditional coding bootcamp experience, and it shows in the feedback that our students are leaving us on the web, on their personal blogs and on Quora. Read nothing but 5-star reviews on Quora here:
| Ilya’s Review | John’s Review | Colin’s Review |
| Aditya’s Review | Nan’s Review | Brad’s Review |
| Adeel’s Review | Aaron’s Review | Brian’s Review |
| Denis’ Review | Pete’s Review | Ramon’s Review |
| Stephen’s Review |
Go Deeper and Read Detailed Student Experiences
These blog posts and videos peel back the curtain and give you the depth of what your Firehose experience will be all about – learning real-world coding skills that matter:
John’s Case Study of Coding a Chess App as a Team
Aaron on Using TDD to Solve Algorithms
Ilya’s Story About Landing a Job at EnerNoc
Erin’s Video Review of the Firehose Project
Tate on Why the Firehose Project Beats Bloc.io – A Student Review of Both Online Coding Bootcamps
How Algorithms Helped Brad Land a Job as a Web Developer
Takehiro talks about his first week at Firehose
Look Completely Under the Hood
Need even more, like a complete look under the hood? Read the weekly blog updates of our students, hear their stories, feel their high and low points and learn from their Firehose experiences in epic detail.
Takehiro Uncovers and Lives His Passion… Within 12 Weeks
After starting his own business and profiting within 6 months as an undergrad student, Takehiro realized his strengths were elsewhere, found Firehose, and the rest was history. Check out these excerpts from his blog that he calls “evidence of what can and cannot be accomplished in 3 months.” Spoiler: He accomplishes a lot.
Week 1: What I Learned from Creating 2 Apps in 1 Week
Week 5: More Coding Challenges
Week 7: Landing My First Web Development Job
Week 9: My First Hackathon and Getting Job Offers
Week 10: Custom Stripe Payments, Instagram API, and the Capital One Software Engineer Summit
Colin’s experience in the core program and incredible involvement in the Firehose Community can show you what to expect and give you an idea of the kinds of opportunities you’ll have.
| Beginning | Week #1 | Week #2 |
| Week #3 | Week #4 | Week #5 |
| Week #6 | Week #7 | Week #8 |
| Week #9 | Week #10 | Week #11 |
| Week #12 | Week #13 | Week #14 |
Ramon shares the various stages of his journey with Firehose.
Getting High Alone: Weeks 4 + 5 into 6
A Deeper Look into TDD and OOP; Weeks 6 and 7
What I’ve Learned from The Team Project and My First Meetup
