r/codingbootcamp

Hello everyone !!! Guess what... 😄

I got highest mark in my computer science and I've been selected for JavaScript coding camp tomorrow

I am really excited because as you know become a developer one day is my biggest dream, and this feels like a big step for me.

A bit nervous too since I'm still new to coding, but I'm looking forward to learning more. 💻

Does anyone have experience with this type of camp? ? 😊

I spent my first year of programming stuck in tutorial hell. I could follow along with a YouTube video and build a full stack clone of Spotify in a weekend. I felt like an absolute genius.

Then I tried to build a simple to do app completely from scratch. No video, no guide. I stared at the blank editor and panicked. I didn't know how to set up the environment, how to structure the folders, or where to begin.

Tutorials are a trap because they spoon feed you the architecture and the problem solving. They give you the answers before you have even understood the problem. Typing out someone else's code is not programming, it is transcription.

The only way to escape is to close the video, look at the blank screen, and allow yourself to struggle. The struggle is the actual learning process. Everything else is just entertainment.

Who else had a brutal awakening when they tried to build their first independent project?

Thread to discuss application process. Has anyone been contacted for the final interview yet?

Three years ago a senior engineer at my company shared a Google Doc with me. It had about 25 links. Each one had a short sentence explaining what to pay attention to and roughly when to read it relative to the others.

That document taught me more about distributed systems in a month than I'd learned in a year of random reading.

The difference wasn't the quality of the individual resources. Most of them I'd already seen. The difference was the sequence and the context. Knowing WHAT to read is easy. Knowing WHEN to read it and WHY it matters at that point in your learning is the hard part.

I've been looking for something like that in every domain since. Curated, ordered reading paths from people who actually know the field. Not courses (too slow), not textbooks (too broad), not blog posts (too scattered). Just: here's what to read, in this order, and here's what to look for.

Has anyone else found resources like this? What domain were they in?

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/launchschool/comments/1ujidfs/2025_capstone_salary_data/

Bootcamps died in 2025 and I got feedback that continuing to monitor them so closely in 2026 is like "beating a dead horse".

26 minutes ago Launch School released their numbers and I'm reporting on it here.

I believe in transparency and integrity and we've all seen what happens to institutions that do not... it eventually catches up with them.

Well here we are with Launch School's 2025 outcomes data.

As usually the original data is so detailed I have FAR LESS commentary then I do on a bootcamp like Codesmith that cares more about manipulating the story about them than delivering good results. If your outcomes are transparent, good or bad, then it's easy. If your outcomes are sketchy and manipulative, then it's comment wars and anonymoous paid attack accounts.

ANALYSIS:

• The denominator matters. Launch School lays out three numbers, which goes to show how other bootcamps that quote the best number on their website are fudging definitions to make themselves look good. Across all enrollees, there is basically a ~58% six-month placement story from a program that used to have a 100% placement rate. But, like CIRR, it's fair to remove people who didn't intend on job hunting in the first place, which is where I get the 65% rate. But you can also see how adding in "internships" turns that into 70%, which is something that CIRR might also allow, but I think is a tad too far in this context.
• 65% is quite strong. Launch School's closest competitors have been Rithm (which shut down in 2024) and Codesmith (which pivoted to become "Codesmith Enterprise" and I haven't seen a single placement in months).
• Remote was the rug pull that took the bootcamp industry with it. A few years ago, the pitch was effectively: learn from anywhere, get a remote software job, change your life. That world is mostly gone. Remote placements going from ~78% to ~27% is not a small shift. It changes who can realistically succeed, what kind of job search people need to run, and whether “online bootcamp” still maps cleanly to the actual market.
• Location is part of the curriculum now, whether bootcamps admit it or not. The uncomfortable truth is that being near a bit tech city seems to matter a lot again. Not because geography magically makes you smarter, but because startups, in-person roles, founder networks, FDE jobs, and apprenticeship-style opportunities are clustering there. A bootcamp that treats location as irrelevant is probably giving students outdated advice.
• AI didn’t make fundamentals obsolete; it made fake fundamentals easier to expose, which is why Launch School’s approach matters. They haven’t slapped “AI-first” on a bootcamp or pivoted 100% into hype; they’ve woven AI through a real engineering foundation so students learn to read code, reason about systems, debug hard problems, and use AI as leverage, not a substitute. This is smart and takes a lot of judgement and taste to do right.

hello all,

I saw an internship post on linkedin that is in my area and it sounded appealing and I thought i would benefit alot from it. I applied, paid a small fee (20$). then came the time for us to join a meeting with the mentor only to find out that he is a huge advocate for vibe coding, even sending us links and tutorials on "how to master vibe coding". Personally, I joined to become a good programmer and learn web development, I didnt join to learn how to write an AI prompt.

I'm currently trying my best no to rely to heavily on AI, and actually learn the language from youtube videos, but the problem I'm facing is that tasks have deadlines and I'm scared that I won't be making the deadline if I take the long way.

Any advice is welcome

So I am an 18 y/o student and i thought about learning coding so tell me is it worth learning coding in 2026 even now AI can write the whole programs. so i wanna know that can we earn money with coding without any professional degree or as a job i mean as a freelancer can we offer services and earn money

Freshly retired from the Army, in school for CS.

I’m using an IPad (10th Gen) for a majority of my work.

Do any of you have some strong suggestions for applications that will benefit in writing/learning code?

Thank you for any help.