Bloc is the Millennium Falcon of Online Coding Schools
Disclaimer: As you read some of my more critical comments below please understand that I am, on the whole, very happy with my choice of Bloc and would do it all again without a second thought. These are the worse things I can say about Bloc and even at that I am really just picking nits. Literally every single Personal Mentor, Technical Mentor, Grader, Lecturer, and Student Success Team Member I have dealt with has been professional, personable, knowledgeable, and sincerely concerned with me what I need to succeed. It’s not perfect and it has some warts as you will see, but still I feel it has been more than worth my time and money. With that out of the way….
The quote above basically sums up my impressions of Bloc as I pass the halfway point in my apprenticeship. The structure is solid, it provides everything I need and more, gets me where I want to go quickly, and you get to hang with some of the coolest cats this side of the Outer Rim Territories.
But it’s certainly not a slick and shiny J-type 327 Nubian Royal Starship, and even going beyond cosmetics (everything beyond the dashboard is Orange and Grey, yuck) there are a few persistent issues and processes that, just like the famed Millennium Falcon and her pilot, occasionally give the impression of a cobbled-together roughness and lack of focus on details that one would not expect to see from a Best-in-Class operation.
Typos
The first module is heavy on reading and answering questions, and as a student the first thing you’ll notice is the typos. They even warn you about this during orientation and the explanation given is they are constantly revising and updating the curriculum so we can have the most update-to-date and relevant material available. If they slowed down and made everything perfect before releasing it they risk the material going stale during the process and not being of value to us by the time we get to it. Some of the typos I found were obvious but others were not and resulted in confusion, wasted time, and reduced confidence in subsequent readings. I buy Bloc’s explanation but only up to a certain point, and their reasoning was cold comfort to me the night I spent an hour failing an exercise because the instructions were written for Mac-only and not labeled as such despite Bloc for the most part being platform agnostic (I use both straight Windows 10 + Ubuntu 16.04 through the Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux). The good news here is Bloc is serious about feedback and and you probably won’t see any of the typos I saw as they get fixed right quick. At the bottom of each lesson is a tool to leave comments, give a smiley-face/frowny-face on the lesson, and if you frown you get a list of problem types from which to choose. Also, since I moved past Module 1 it’s been mostly coding projects and less reading and writing about abstract development topics so I didn’t notice any typos in either of the very well written Bloc Jams and Bloc Chat project guides.
Dashboard
The dashboard really isn’t much of a dashboard, more of a series of links they make you click through to get to your current spot in the coursework. I know from my research before I chose Bloc that the dashboard used to show the amount of time in the program and progress to date. That information still exists and can be seen by examining the page scripts in Dev Tools:
But it is no longer displayed for some reason. When I joined the program the Upcoming Checkpoints section used to give me one-click access to my next lesson but it stopped working a couple months ago and now it takes 3 clicks to get to where I want to go. Maybe that lack of functionality is related to the 10 errors I see on page load?
The mentor session reminders along the top are non-functional and I’m not sure why they get such prominent placement. The Group Sessions View Schedule link is problematic as well and I will get to that in a minute. Another annoyance is using the browser back button on a lesson page doesn’t take you one page back to the section lesson list, but rather all the way back to the dashboard landing page requiring 2 more clicks to get back to the list, 3 to a lesson. Not a huge deal but I guess I it comes down to me expecting a better example of how to do things from the people teaching me how to do things.
Hall of Fame Exercise
A good example of lack of focus on details I mentioned earlier can be found in a lesson on using Git. The lesson itself was excellently written and really made the whole Git thing make sense to me for the first time. I proudly completed the exercise to add my name to the list, created my Pull Request, and waited for it to get merged into the Master branch so I could see my name on the official Bloc Hall of Fame….Well, my pull request is still sitting there untouched after three months along with 181 others and counting that have come in since January 30. I messaged the repository creator and contacted Bloc support twice about it and was told they would “run it up the flagpole” but it obviously fell through the cracks. While the substance of the lesson was learned I’m sure it was originally intended that everyone’s Pull Requests be processed and their name get put on the HoF list like the first 7 students did. It sounds dumb but this lesson was a bit of a milestone for me and to see my name up there and get credit for a merged PR on my profile would have really meant something to me.
I Can’t Read (Some) Emails on Mobile
Unless the room is nice and dark and I put on my readers I am not able to read the feedback I get from Graders. From an organization that offers a Design program I would expect more than silver text on a white background. Regarding email communication in general, I once asked on a survey form for someone from Student Success to contact me and they did by email, but nine days later and by then I couldn’t remember why I had asked to be contacted lol! If it had been really serious I would have followed up or used the Bloc Slack channels to reach out. They all sincerely want to help but obviously there are limits to their time and their processes so you will need to be proactive if you have an urgent issue.
Group Sessions
Here’s an example of what gives me that “cobbled-together” feel. Group sessions are one of the best things about attending Bloc, an incredible value add over what you can get learning code on your own or through someone like Coursera, Udacity, or EDX. So it’s a super huge shame it’s so hard to find them, sign up for the ones you want, and even attending has occasional problems. The only entry point is the dashboard which I have little reason to visit regularly at this point, and why they do not send out an email every week publicizing that week’s events I do not understand. Instead of seeing a calendar showing what is offered and when, you are presented with an un-ordered list of events giving no indication of when they are being held or if there is still room in the session.
To learn if there is room available or when sessions are held you must click through and launch a new Calendy browser window for each event. Sometimes you will be taken directly to the event you wanted, sometimes you will get a 404 Not Found error, and yet some other times you are taken to a whole different event page that looks like this:
Another un-ordered list with no times given, but the real kicker here is the events listed here at the Calendy page are NOT exactly the same ones listed on the Bloc session page so you will have to click links at random on the first page to eventually be taken to the second page if you want to see all that is going on. And again you must click on each event to learn if there is room for you and it occurs at a time you are available. From there it’s as expected: Click the link and you will be enrolled, receive a confirmation email, and have a chance to add it to your Google/Outlook/Other calendar.
Once you get signed up for your group session you are not quite home yet. If for any reason the link to the Zoom video chat room you were given changes after you sign up, and it seems to change about a third of the time, you will NOT be notified of the change. You will instead spend several minutes waiting to join the room you were given before heading over to Bloc’s Slack hoping the session leader posted the new video room link, then join your session late. Doing the math it’s worked out for me 93.33% of the time (28/30 sessions attended) but it’s frustrating and it’s a pain. Bloc staff are well aware of the issue and apparently no suitable product is available off the shelf so they are “in the process” of developing an in-house solution. Meanwhile, ugh. Once you get into your room the Zoom client seems to work well though I do seem to have regular audio cut outs.
Lots of these sessions are recorded and made available on-demand, truly a great and valuable resource, but you only see that list at the very bottom and only if you are browsing the desktop version of the page. If you click on the provided “Show simplified view” for mobile that list of on-demand video resources, maybe the most valuable content on the page, simply disappears. It does, however, show a day and time for each upcoming live event, yay!
So, finally, enough Bloc bashing! As I said at the start I am nit-picking. Sure some of these things are frustrating but I have learned everything I needed or wanted to learn and then some. These are the worst most critical things I can say about Bloc and none of this made the curriculum less up-to-date or the Personal and Technical Mentors any less knowledgeable or the Student Success Team less sincere in their desire to see me succeed. And honestly, given the choice which would you choose: 1) everything neat and orderly while plodding across the galaxy with Captain Antilles’s expensive crew, OR make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs with Chewbacca and Han Freakin’ Solo? I’m all in with the Millennium Falcon, thank you very much!
