Part of my journey to learn web development involved a brief stint with Bloc. Since my experience was limited, and almost a year ago, I decided to connect with them again to see how things have changed. Their CEO and cofounder, Roshan Choxi, was nice enough to bring me up to speed on Bloc's recent past and give me a glimpse into their future.
Bloc is a programmer bootcamp, but they're quite a bit different from competitors like Dev Bootcamp, Starter League, or Hacker School. I'll let Roshan clarify.Roshan, what's your role at Bloc?
My title is "Cofounder & CEO". What I actually do day-to-day is build our product, platform, and team.
What differentiates Bloc from others in the bootcamp space?
We believe in the same educational philosophies as other bootcamps -- that learning is fundamentally social and you can't truly acquire a new skill set without being immersed in a community of other experts and learners. We differentiate from other bootcamps by being the only one that's entirely online. We've taken on the challenge of producing an engaging and immersive experience that's entirely virtual, so that you don't have to quit your day job or move to San Francisco to learn web development.
What does the typical week look like for a Bloc student?
Bloc students spend their 12 weeks of the bootcamp going through our curriculum, which we call "the roadmap". It consists of bite-sized chunks called "checkpoints" that cover a specific topic. Each checkpoint has a ~5 minute screencast that goes over the concept and some code, and then an assignment that you have to submit to complete the checkpoint. Over the entire roadmap, we cover everything you'd need to know to be a professional web developer.
Throughout the bootcamp, you have a lot of different channels to interact with the global community of all Bloc students, your own cohort of peers within your bootcamp, and your personal mentor who keeps office hours to help you whenever you get stuck on a checkpoint or have any question about web development in general. During office hours, you can instant message, screen share, or video chat with your mentor.
What goals do Bloc students typically have? How, specifically, does Bloc help its students reach those goals?
Our students are looking to acquire a new skill set that will help them build their own web applications for fun or career advancement. No bootcamp can turn you into an expert developer overnight, it takes years to get your "10,000 hours". But, in any learning curve those first 500 hours are the hardest to do on your own so we help you get through that part.
At the end of the day, we consider our students successful if they're able to 1) build and deploy their own web applications and 2) have the tools and basic knowledge to continue gaining experience and learning. The specific ways we do this are to include a capstone project as a part of the curriculum and to get out of the browser and teach the same tools real developers use, instead of just learning theoretical Ruby on a website. Our entire curriculum and educational philosophy is designed around building things.
What's the hardest part of being a Bloc student?
You have to stick to a schedule. We don't require anyone to leave their day job and do Bloc full-time, which leaves a lot of opportunities to get distracted by other events in your life. If you can commit to finding 20 hours a week and just put it on your schedule, we'll take care of the rest!
What is your vision for Bloc's future?
I'm not sure if everyone will get this reference, but there's a scene in The Matrix where Neo's getting some data uploaded into his brain, and then opens his eyes and says "I know kung-fu." That's our goal, more or less. We want to build the most effective, engaging learning experience possible to allow everyone to keep up with the incredible rate of change our world is going through right now.
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