Completing Launch School's Core Curriculum and Capstone program was one of the best decisions I've made in my life.

Completing Launch School's Core Curriculum and Capstone program was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. Launch School helped me build strong programming fundamentals, and Capstone taught me essential software engineering skills. Those two things allowed me to land an excellent software engineering position at Mozilla working on the Firefox browser.

The fundamentals Launch School teaches are table stakes for interviews for good engineering roles. You need to be able to break a problem down in a PEDAC-like way and clearly explain your approach. And you'll need to do this within a time limit and under pressure. In my job hunt, I encountered many interviews that were remarkablysimilar to Launch School live-coding assessments. There's no way I would have been as successful in real-life interviews if it weren't for those Launch School assessments.

In Capstone, you pivot from just programming to the larger world of software engineering. It's a big jump, but you'll definitely get the structure and support you need to pull it off. Capstone is heavily optimized to help you land the best software engineering role you possibly can - that's its only goal. So the curriculum is constantly being updated to reflect what students are seeing in their job hunts. (The two times I shared experiences from my job search, and within a day, a Capstone staff member had updated the curriculum to incorporate those experiences.) You'll also have access to a large collection of real coding challenges students have gotten in recent interviews.

And then the Capstone project! This is a large-scale, technically challenging project that you'll complete as part of a fully remote team. For me, the benefit was two-fold: 1) I grew tremendously as a software engineer by working on this project, and 2) the project played really well in interviews. It showed my interviewers I was able to understand a problem domain, have deep technical discussions and consider engineering tradeoffs. I also drew heavily from my project to answer behavioral questions and to prove I had solid experience working as part of a remote team.

I could go on for days about Launch School. But I'll just say that, if you put in the work, Launch School absolutely delivers on its promise of a career-launching software engineering job.