First few months on with Viking Code School

I’ve been learning with Viking Code School for just over two months now. I’ve seen many stories about coding schools closing and successes and I wanted to put my options out there.

For note, I’m in the flex program for VCS (Viking Code School) which means I essentially set my own rate of completing the course. This is nice when life needs more time then learning new skills. Also, it does make it easy to defer this or that of the code school for another day, which depending on your own self discipline could be fine or a struggle. If your considering the flex program, have the drive to finish it. Essentially, you’re your own boss.

The school does offer an immersive program as well. I am not in that but could see how this is appealing. 70 hours a week for 12 weeks, and start looking for a job. This looks more like a remote classroom mode of the same program, group users rather than solo. You would have to apply in advance but if you want to knock this out “fast”, then they do offer this option.

Either way, with the school and the flex program, they do offer ‘open office hours’. Someone being in a google hangouts that will help you with a coding program or whatever issues you run into. I haven’t had nothing but good experiences with these, and great for a tip or how to resolve whatever coding puzzle you constructed.

Also, the school has a slack group together, which is great for again solving coding programs and makes the school feel more connected. This is a good thing that I hope other schools that offer remote user programs should have, if they don’t already.

With the flex program, your are assigned a mentor. A mentor for VCS is a single person you meet with regularly (once or twice a week, whatever the program currently offers). I’ve found this to help with understanding or just talking through a bigger coding question rather then just “this code isn’t working, why?” that the office hours feels more to me. No one has set that limit on the site or community, but to me the office hours are great for one offs and your mentor is better for larger view questions and keeping you on your set pace.

And to quickly touch on their lessons, it continues the “free prep work” construction. Read a bit, code a little, read a bit, code a larger project. This seems just fine.

Finally, the school seems like a good way to go about learning coding remotely, there have been students with success with finding jobs and the “final project” looks like a behemoth looking from the starting gate, but learning enough tricks, hours to days of coding, setting up servers, dealing with apis, managing data structures, etc. it doesn’t seem to far to call yourself a junior web developer. I would recommend this to someone that has a lot of time per week, or a lot of weeks to complete this start to your developer learning.