Over the last few weeks it's obvious that the Makers Academy online course I was part of the beta trial for is really growing, which is awesome to see as it was hugely beneficial to me so it's great to see others taking the challenge. As part of this I've received a few more enquiries from prospective Ronins on various platforms so I thought it would be useful to open-source my answers to their questions to share with anyone else potentially in the same situation. I'm happy to answer anything I haven't covered below, give me a shout on twitter @RobMBowers and i'll add the answers here.
Initially it is probably worth starting with the blog post I wrote not long after finishing Ronin if you haven't found it already GHOST_URL/robs-ronin-experience/ . Hopefully this will give you a good overview of my experience, i'll expand on specific questions I've had below:
Was it worth it?
Without a doubt for me yes, I went into it hoping to get an introduction into coding specifically for web development. I had previously done some self taught coding for some standalone programs for engineering problems but was daunted by the breadth of the web development field and hence when the opportunity to join the Ronin beta came about it seemed a good solution to this. It took me far beyond what I thought was possible in the time frame, it has provided me with a full range of skills as a junior developer allowing me to tackle internal and external projects and deliver solutions in an agile methodology and most importantly get these shipped. Quantifying it's value afterwards, the real value for me as a small business owner has been the ability to innovate and rapidly develop digital prototypes both in-house and for clients and being able to deploy these in confidence as I understand the entirety of my code base, largely thanks to the test-driven techniques Makers Academy focus on. I'm incredibly grateful for the moments when I was thoroughly frustrated by the coaches not answering questions I had directly, but redirecting me back to the process of how I could solve the problem. I now find there is always new things to learn. I find myself constantly learning but with a confidence that I have a template on how to use documentation, Github, StackOverflow etc. to understand new libraries and languages. I know from speaking to others who were also in my cohort and now working a junior developers that this is also one of the key aspects they found Makers does well in terms of preparing it's students for industry.
Would you do it again or go to a different boot camp?
I'm assuming from this you mean going back in time with the knowledge I have now would I do Ronin or something else. I have to admit I did not really do a huge amount of research of other options before starting, it happened to be a 'right time, right place' opportunity to join. However as you can probably note from the above I would definitely choose Ronin again knowing the skills and opportunities it has given me now. Also Makers work in an agile way internally and hence I know their materials are even better now than when I did it (you still have access to all their resources after finishing), I went through one of their new tutorials in understanding web technologies the other day and they are building ever strong materials as they go along.
Was anything sacrificed in terms of education by doing an online boot camp?
This one's tough to answer as I haven't done an 'offline' bootcamp, however having met and spoke to people who have done the Makers Academy course by attending in London I get the impression that we got a very similar experience out of it. I think I am right in thinking that Ronin is different to many other online options available in the fact that they have literally replicated their offline course online, even to the extents that it runs alongside the offline version and you are sharing the same coaches, slack channels and resources as the in-house cohort. Remembering that Makers Academy is less of a 'taught' course and more of a guided learning experience, all your learning is project based resource guided projects, where you will pair ALL the time with other Ronins on these projects. Therefore not being physically in the room with the coaches does not really put you at a disadvantage, there are still daily stand-ups and breakouts run by the coaches when you get to interact with the coaches and they are available on the slack channel all the time. Because you are constantly pair programming this also does a good job of replicating the social learning environment that you may expect only from an 'offline' course. They also do quite a good job at ensuring that if there are, for example, industry speakers at Makers in London that these are also streamed for Ronin.
I thought it may be useful to finish with what I would look for in a bootcamp given my experience a year on applying my skills back in industry:
As well as teaching you to code is there also a focus on becoming a developer in general?
To be able to prototype if you are looking at innovation or 'ship' code if looking for employment. Is there a focus on agile methodologies, MVP, User Story Mapping, distributed version control, continuous integration, environment setup, dev ops, domain design tactics, APIs, Microservices...
Is there a focus on code quality?
Good quality, maintainable, scalable, self documenting code is important in industry. Topics including Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Design Patterns / Principles (i.e. SOLID / DRY), Object Oriented Design, Code Reviews, using style guides...
What is the escalation process when you have a problem?
You are only in the bootcamp for a short time, are they preparing you for how to tackle development problems in general. A focus on referring to documentation, using StackOverflow effectively, debugging techniques, contributing to opensource(Github Issues)...
How 'immersed' are you?
Bit of a strange title, but I found the constant pair-programming with a peer on the cohort for 8+ hours a day to be a crucial way to stay focussed and moving forward, particularly when either one of us was struggling to understand a topic or we had a bug to tackle. In all reality you are probably doing this for a very focussed time period therefore getting the most out of that time is crucial.
Are you delivering physical projects?
I found it really important to have delivered projects, it helped on gaining the bigger picture and I had a confidence that I knew how to deliver a project to a client in an agile way.
Good Luck!
Best of luck as you explore learning to code further, if you have any further questions feel free to ask, also grab the opinion others to find out the new developments in Ronin now they have run with multiple cohorts, I'm sure Makers Academy can supply you with some contact details, they're a friendly bunch.