Two weeks ago, I did a Coding 101 workshop by CodeFellows, a Seattle coding school with an immersive program to train new coders in a short amount of time. Students commit essentially all of their time for a couple of months, then leave school ready to get a job in some area of software development – maybe even leave school with an actual job.

CodeFellows Immersive Coding School

The CodeFellows school seems great; I really like their methodology. In contrast, I took a programming class in college and felt like I got nothing out of it at all. That college class was 1 hour a week over the course of a semester – longer than the software update cycle!

At only 1 hour a week, the same class time could have been crammed into a 2-day session that would have taught me something that would still be useful when I was done learning it. CodeFellows uses an immersive training environment just like that.

The 1-day intro workshop I attended taught me a lot more than I expected to learn in a day. The instructor was easy to follow. He obviously knew the material inside and out. Several students helped out as TAs, walking around answering questions and troubleshooting, which really helped the class run smoothly.

CodeFellows even served breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. And of course, coffee. There can be no code without coffee. The class was energetic, and I left more excited than ever to learn how to code for real.

So I'm pretty sold on CodeFellows. I started thinking about how I could cover the tuition for the program, eager to graduate and get a fun job that pays well. Then the sad realization hit me that the cost of the program wasn't my big obstacle; the bigger problem was that I don't live in Seattle.

Commuting to Seattle from Olympia can take anywhere between an hour and two and half hours. Public transportation options have been recently eliminated. Parking is not free, or cheap. Living in Seattle costs easily three times as much as Olympia, and I'm a dad so I can't just pick up and move on a whim.

Driving eliminates many advantages of the immersive environment; moving is prohibitively expensive. What to do?

Online Coding Workshops From Codecademy

As if reading my brain waves, my phone soon presented me with a new message about an online coding school that I had previously toyed with. Codecademy offers online training in web development and programming. They have quite a bit of free training, with more material available for a monthly fee. Their new offering is coding intensive workshops.

Like CodeFellows, Codecademy uses short-burst intensive programs. You don't get the immersive classroom environment of CodeFellows, but you do get your training done in a short time. Unlike the free web training Codecademy offers, in the intensives you get feedback from instructors on your projects.

At $199, the Codecademy intensives are way more affordable than the in-person CodeFellows classes. The courses could probably be shortened up even more, but Codecademy is trying to strike a balance where you can keep working your other job while you learn your new job. The intensives require you to commit 10 hours per week to classes and projects.

The main benefit to choosing an intensive workshop over the free trainings is accountability. It is too easy to quit a free training that no one but you is monitoring. The added push of a schedule, of the money you spent, and of the instructors waiting for your project to be turned in is all some people need. I'm betting it's enough for me.

But there are other benefits to the paid classes. Interaction and feedback from live instructors is a big one. Intensive students also get access to all the extra Codecademy Pro materials for the free training sessions they offer. Students in the classes also interact with each other thorough Slack -- you're part of a class, not just alone at your screen.

I'm Going With Codecademy

This is pretty much the calculation I used when I decided to sign up for Codecademy -- no commute, lower price, and fast focused training. I'm enrolled in their "Build Front-End Web Apps" course, which takes 8 or 9 weeks to complete.

I plan to also work as many of the free courses as I can during the enrollment period, so that I can get access to the extra material without paying extra for it later on. The other options for intensives include the "Build Websites" course and the "Build Web APIs" course.

If the intensive is still more than you're ready to spend, check out the free courses Codecademy offers. You really have nothing to lose with that. If you decide later you'd like the extra course material offered with a Pro membership, that's only $20 a month.

I think Codecademy is a great deal. I'm sure CodeFellows is a better school overall, and if they offered classes closer (like they do with the intro class) I'd be going there. Right now the online course from Codecademy just fits in better with the rest of my life. I'm looking forward to building new things.

Full disclosure: the links to CodeFellows in this article pay me a commission (but cost users nothing extra). Codecademy offers no such program.

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