My interview with Coding House.

Interview with Coding House with Nick James and Samer Buna

answers were paraphrased or just referenced verbatimpersonal comments are highlighted like this

Part 1: The Application 📝

Once they received my application, I was told to call Nick to go over what my goals were with the program and to get know each other (30 minute call) and then was requested to call Samer to go over my technical skills.The call with Nick took place December 19, and then I contacted Samer December 20, where he got to know more of what my technical background was.Both calls were pretty informal and did not require me to complete any technical challenge.

Part 2: The Interview (with Nick) 📞

1. How many drop out after simply experiencing the pre-work? How much time should I dedicate to the pre-work? We require a minimum level of competency. On a scale of 1–10, we need them to be 4/5, on JavaScript and jQuery, we want a 2. Depending on where you start, I would imagine about 80–100 hours total on average is needed to complete the pre-work. A few have dropped out after pre-work.
2. How many college students have you had in the past? About 95% of our students have a bachelors, 60% have a Masters, and about 1/3 have a background in computer science.
3. How would say people get along in the house? Everyone gets along. They make basically friends for life.
4. What kind of process do your instructors go through? Our lead instructor went to CMU and has been coding for 20 years. Every instructor needs the ability to transfer knowledge and be an awesome developer. Instructors will usually explains a high level concept for 15 to 20 minutes then ask you to apply that knowledge for 10 minutes. TAs are there help you in the process from 9 am to 2 am, 7 days a week. And the process repeats itself, they explain something and by the end of it you end up building applications. The curriculum itself is 100% project based - 100%. The lectures are nontraditional, you are building real life things.
5. What is your background? How were introduced into the tech/web development scene? I lived in Silicon Valley my whole life. Went to college a few years earlier. Made my company at 18 - sold my business in 2009. Took some time off. I was just trying to find myself. During that time, my goal became to reduce ignorance by a fraction of a percent. Then I thought, why not open a bootcamp? So we started with part time and then did some weekends. The problems we saw with other programs is that all these places take time out of your schedule towards learning something new through commuting and taking care of yourself. When you’re in the same place where you will be learning, that does not happen. Also, we focus on JavaScript and not Rails. Node surpassed Rails in # of commitments. And that’s why our program is 70% JS, and 30% Ruby.
6. Do you have any meetings just between the cohort and founders? Yes, weekly, we bring them into our office for an individual learning assessment.

The Decision 💡

I got in!Here’s part of the email they sent me…Congratulations your in!

Unfortunately, that’s not a typing error on my part.Logistics

• deposit should be submitted
• standard background check is needed
• bootcamp agreement needs to be signed
• there is no hard date to submit the deposit since they accept people on a rolling basis but Nick recommended sooner than later

Once all that is taken care of, they’ll let you access their internal website to get started with the pre-work at home.I also have shared my interview experience with bootcamps such as

• Bitmaker Labs
• Coding Dojo
• Designation
• Dev League
• Fullstack Academy
• Hack Reactor
• Maker Square