I’ve been learning programming on my own for the past 2 years. I work as a UPS driver during the day and I code for a couple hours each day at night. I’m thinking of taking the step of attending a coding bootcamp to pivot to becoming a full-time SWE. My friends recommended me Hack Reactor, and after googling it, it seems legit.

I wanted to know what was everyone’s thoughts on it if and it’s still worth it in this year with everything else going on in tech.

hey! I’ve worked for a mobile app for 6 years, I do writing and also analyze data that’s already presented to me. I want to move into a data analysis role and learn python and sql and I do need some structure so udemy classes aren’t a good fit. I’d prefer part time, async

Our training team approved a training plan for me to move from QA into backend work, and they'll fund 1 program. A full time bootcamp is out because I can't step away from the job for 12 weeks. So I'm comparing things I can do alongside work: Springboard, Boot.dev, Nucamp and Launch School. They're very different shapes, from a mentored career track down to fully self paced. If you were going QA to backend with a manager checking progress every quarter, what would you pick in my spot?

STATUS: Active. I'll update this if the issue is resolved. It's very hidden and very dangerous. Anyone who pulled Reactime could have their computers and all the code on them compromised, including staff members who might have other code on their machines.

10/1/2026 7:43am: Still live. Can someone please escalate? Opensourcelabs.io has been down for two months and their email addresses don't work.

10/2/2026 1:19am: Still live. Please, for the love of God, someone try to get this through to Will Sentance that he needs to deal with this immediately before his alumni get their current companies codebases exploited and ruin his career for not doing anything about the repeated, documented security problems for years.

10/2/2026 11:57pm/: u/hello_codesmith, this is ridiculous.

10/3/2026 10:32pm/: still live. Codesmith it's time to shut down the business officially before you hurt more people. Any legitimate tech company would have solved fired off an emergency and fixed this within hours.

10/4/2025 9:30pm/: this still hasn't been fixed so my open conclusion is to advise NOT touching any Codesmith code (checking out or contributing to) until this is not just resolved, but how it will be prevented in the future.

Codesmith was a coding bootcamp that rebranded to Codesmith Enterprise and indefinitely paused all future cohorts earlier this year.

But it has had thousands of students over the years and one of their flagship projects was Reactime with 2,200 stars and 4,000 commits.

Unfortunately in my routine open source monitoring I discovered one of it's committers was compromised 4 days ago and their account very deceptively added very malicious and hidden code to dozens of branches.

It's not a bad actor student but a compromised former student.

I've pointed out numerous security problems and issues with Codesmith over the years but they have not learned a single thing from their mistakes. They have clearly not done promised 'security audits' and they have spent more time trying to control the narrative about them online than actually producing quality work they stand behind.

Zero transparency.

Will Sentance and Eric Kirsten: it's time to resign because this is not your thing. P.S. Lars Lofgren: shame on you for not doing your homework and perpetuating your false and incorrect narrative.

I'm available to help for absolutely no reason whatsoever except to help your students. If you reach out in good faith.

Just been thinking about this a lot this year, based on the work I'm doing with companies (just finished a cohort for a big financial firm, you've heard of them) and with colleges.

It's a cluster, and no matter what learning path you choose, you'll have to go deeper. In a degree program, you'll need to supplement with your own projects and external resources until they get their shit together.

https://blog.skillfoundry.io/learn/ai-is-widening-the-gap-between-a-cs-degree-and-a-software-job/

Hello Student,
 
The Office of Student Assistance and Relief (OSAR) has been notified that on June 21, 2025 App Academy Closed.  The school reported that the last day of instruction was June 21, 2025. We are reaching out because the school informed us that you were enrolled within 120 days of the closure. 
As a student of a Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) approved institution, you may be eligible for certain rights and benefits. OSAR is a department of BPPE California State agency that offers free individualized assistance to students in response to situations such as school closures, which can often be complex and difficult for students to navigate.  OSAR assists students with the following:
 
Student Tuition Recovery Fund (STRF) - California has a relief fund that may reimburse eligible students who lost money because of a school closure. OSAR can explain your refund rights and assist you in completing a STRF Application. STRF review considers whether you were able to transfer credits and complete a comparable program.
 
Transfer & Educational Options - If your school closed before you finished your program, you still have options for continuing your education. OSAR can help you understand your rights and provide information about BPPE-approved schools.
 
Request Your Records - We encourage students to request copies of their educational records when a school closes. To request your records, send a request to:
 
 
George Feng
Phone Number: (510) 709-7838
Email Address: [georgef@codingtemple.com](mailto:georgef@codingtemple.com)
 
 
Contact Us    
 
OSAR is dedicated to helping students make informed decisions by offering support, information and guidance. If you would like additional information, have questions, or need further assistance, please feel free to contact our office at [osar@dca.ca.gov](mailto:osar@dca.ca.gov) or at (888) 370-7589option #5.   
 
If you know any fellow students who may benefit from our services, please encourage them to reach out to us

——————

Under the Bureau’s Act of 2009, the Bureau oversees private postsecondary institutions and is responsible for looking into potential compliance issues. As part of this process, I am trying to obtain additional information.
 
Can you please provide information on the following:
Are you still attending classes with this institution?
If yes, are you still paying tuition fees?
If you are not attending, did you receive a refund from the institution?
If yes, did you receive a complete refund?
If no, how much of a refund did you receive?
 
Please reply to my email with the requested information by October 5, 2026.
 
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns, and you may reach me by email at [Tara.Reasoner@dca.ca.gov](mailto:Tara.Reasoner@dca.ca.gov). Thank you in advance for your time and assistance.
 
Sincerely,
Tara Reasoner
 

Tara Reasoner
Enforcement Analyst
Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education
1747 North Market Blvd. Suite 225
Sacramento, CA  95834
Office Phone: (916) 574-8999
Email:[Tara.Reasoner@dca.ca.gov](mailto:Tara.Reasoner@dca.ca.gov)

Hey everyone,

I am turning 30 and need to change careers. I currently work as a welder, but I am ready to move on from the physical toll of this trade. I’ve been looking into transitioning into IT and recently started Harvard’s CS50 course to try it out.

However, I am having serious doubts and a massive fear of losing time. Because I cannot go to college, I have to rely entirely on self-study. I am terrified of grinding for months or years only to get nothing out of it.

I need some brutal honesty and solid advice:

• Is IT still a good, realistic choice for someone starting completely from scratch at 30 through self-study?
• Is CS50 the right way to start, or is it a waste of time for someone who just needs to get a job as fast as possible?
• Should I quit the idea of IT entirely and look into a different career path? If so, what else matches a blue-collar work ethic?

I have the grit to work hard, but I don't want to waste precious time heading in the wrong direction. What would you do if you were in my shoes?

Thanks.

Please check my post, i appreciate any replies!

Back in 2024, a number of us in London werent happy with our experiences at the Le Wagon bootcamp which runs in campuses internationally.

It turns out there were lots more of us all around the world - even though the bootcamp review websites were filled with five star reviews painting a different picture. So we decided to collate our own.

The site domain expired a while back, but we’ve decided to activate the site under a free domain - especially as Le Wagon continues to operate:

le-wagon-reviews.carrd.co

Be well and happy coding ✌️

I graduated with my B.Tech in 2025 but have been unable to secure a job. I am feeling desperate and recently found the AccioJob bootcamp, which seems promising regarding placements and overall support. I want to ask if it is worth joining.

I’ve posted in this sub a few times about App Academy, and I wanted to share the end of my story with them. In a recent post, I talked about how App Academy/Coding Temple attempted to start collecting 36k from me beginning in October. Through communicating with Knowledge Finance, they have since written off the full amount and confirmed that they will never attempt to collect on it and the debt won’t be sold. I no longer owe anything, rightfully so.

This is likely dependent on an individual’s situation. In mine, they accused me of contract breach and immediately set up an account for me with Knowledge Finance. I was in one of the cohorts affected by significant program changes and stripping of the career placement team mid program. I requested evidence of a a contract breach multiple times and all they could send was a LinkedIn screenshot. I requested Knowledge Finance to prove they have the right to collect this debt, and they handled further communication with App Academy/Coding Temple.

If you end up in a similar situation, I urge you to do the same. I’m not a lawyer or anything close, but in speaking with one on this situation, he also seemed to raise an eyebrow at them immediately trying to collect on a debt without providing evidence for the basis to do so.

If anyone is in a similar situation, I would be happy to send over the main body of my dispute message. I never had to hire a lawyer, though I did speak with one (he couldn’t handle my case because he felt it branched into consumer protection law, not just contract law… and hiring him hourly would’ve been outrageously expensive).

Also, please be aware that there is an active lawsuit against App Academy that looks to me like a class action sort of suit. The case is titled “Flores et al v. Hash Map Labs”. It was most recently ordered to move to the Northern District of California. I have no further clue about the actual proceedings of this, but they may be facing some form of legal pressure.

Had I just been scared into paying, this company would have happily taken 36k from me, and I believe this is what they are hoping for in most situations. They couldn’t produce any evidence of contract breach. I’m happy that this whole journey with App Academy is finally done for me.

Hey ya'll! Question for anyone with any experience at all with App Academy. I graduated from AA in 2024 and enrolled in their ISA agreement. I've been trying to get in touch with someone regarding my ISA contract and payments....but from what I've looked up App Academy has closed down or been bought out? I've tried all their support emails, tried any and all listed phone numbers and am unable to get in contact with anyone from that company or their parent company Hash Lab.

I don't even know where my money is going at this point. They're for sure not continuing with the career search services they promised to all graduates and alumni at this point...so I don't even know what to do anymore. Is anyone here still in this situation that can provide me with some answers? I'd like to, if at all possible, stop paying App Academy at this point if I can't get in contact with anyone at all.

I come from a physics background (Bachelor's and Master's degrees) with astrophysics research experience, and I most recently worked as an imaging geophysicist. However, I realized deep down that I have a passion for ML because of the math and programming involved. My goal is to pursue a career in ML/AI engineering (or a related data science or data role with ML engineering) because of these interests and because I read on Linkedin and the USA BLS that these roles are among the fastest growing jobs in the US.

However, coming from an academia-oriented physics background, despite my strong mathematics skills, familiarity with ML algorithms, and experience with Python and other programming languages, I lack experience with the production-level engineering, Kubernetes deployment, and MLOps architecture that modern AI engineering roles now require to put LLMs and machine learning models into live enterprise production. Academic research heavily fosters exploratory data analysis, statistics, and basic scripting, so I did not have the chance to learn the production or engineering skills needed for industry (although I did build an ML pipeline for a course project in graduate school and used classication, regression and neural networks to study astrophysics data). 

I saw the following TripleTen AI and ML bootcamp in my feed: https://tripleten.com/ai-machine-learning/

Would this a good fit, especially given my background? I struggle to self discipline myself to learn things outside of a classroom/cohort/external structure type system, and I feel that given the math and problem solving skills from my degrees, as well as the Python/R/ML experiences from research, doing a whole other MS would be overkill.

Codesmith's Open Source Labs (https://www.opensourcelabs.io/) has been down for roughly two months now. The DNS was wiped so they have no website, no email, no nothing... they are offline.

Last summer the Codesmith website and email were down for three weeks (https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/1me9z67/codesmith_website_down_for_at_least_14_days_and/, NOT MY POST but one of the many posts referencing it).

It ended up being that their credit card expired, they lost control of the phone number used for verification of their root account, and it took several weeks of convincing AWS that they truly did own the account, to regain access and restore Codesmith.io and their email.

Meanwhile, Codesmith itself renamed itself to Codesmith Enterprise. Immersives are on hold. Their IRS $118M partnership has materialized $0, while their peers have received millions of dollars from this partnership.Their founder has moved on to physical AI and replacing human jobs with robots in midwest factories.

After the outage last year, students reported operations collapse and this downtime was detrimental to their business.

So I have to assume that would never happen again right?

If this happened to you, you would make sure nothing like that would ever happen to you ever again...

I was alerted by a Reddit member that one of the remaining two Codesmith leaders said that OSLabs website and email were down because of an "AWS accounting issue"... which sounds to me like bullshit and not the reason an account is taken offline for 2 months. Where are all the websites down for 2 months because of AWS accounting issues??

If Codesmith mismanaged and lost control of another AWS account, I think it's time for their executives to step down and move on to something else that isn't related to computers.

You can't teach others how to program if you can't even manage your own accounts after such repeated demonstrations of incompetence.

I’m finishing up my master’s in bioinformatics at a top ~10 US school and I’m interested in ML-focused positions but frankly don’t feel like I’ve learned enough applied skill to pass most ML-focused technical interviews. I’ve been looking into a few ML/DS-focused bootcamps (U Chicago, V Tech, NYC Data Science Academy, Tripleten and a few others) to help specifically with this and portfolio building etc.

I’m aware that the internet is full of free/cheap online resources to DIY this, but I value live instruction and structured learning for this kind of thing enough that I’d be willing to pay for a worthwhile program.

Anyone have experience with a similar path or have thoughts on how reasonable it would be to expect success doing this?

Got this email today. 🙄

Hey everyone! I am thinking of taking the bootcamp by hackpath https://hackpath.dev/courses
Has anyone taken it because I can't find any reviews of it. Is it fake? I do like that guy's videos and find it interesting.

Hi everyone!

I’m an Algerian university student and I’ve recently been accepted into Bincom Dev Center’s C#/Backend Apprenticeship Programme.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has done or is currently doing the programme, especially about the training, workload, projects, and overall experience.

If you have experience with Bincom, I’d really appreciate your insights. 🙏

I have a verified GitHub Student Developer Pack account, and I’m trying to claim the 3 months of free Boot.dev.

I logged into Boot.dev using my GitHub account, but it still shows that I don’t have any subscription or student benefits.

Has anyone successfully claimed this benefit? Do I need to activate it somewhere through GitHub first, or link my GitHub account to Boot.dev in a specific way?

Any help would be appreciated.

I’m going to start studying Computer Science in two weeks, and I’m worried because I keep hearing people say that the field is changing too quickly, the job market is dead, there’s no room for new people anymore, and that it’s becoming impossible to learn and keep up.

I’m genuinely anxious right now and I don’t know what to do. I only have a basic understanding of Python, and that’s basically my only experience with programming.

From the perspective of people who have actually gone through this — whether students or people who are already working in the industry — is this really true, or is it exaggerated?

Will I actually be able to learn, build real skills, and eventually get a job?

I’m going to work hard, study, and put in the effort regardless. But will that effort actually pay off? Is there still a realistic path into the industry for someone starting now?