Methodology

Because our goal is to launch your career and not just to teach a few useful skills, our approach takes you deeper into the fundamentals than other programs which have you copy-paste code into place or use hand-holding in-browser editors. Regardless of whether you choose the Immersive Program or the Flex Program, we promise that you will be challenged!

Our methodology for structuring and delivering the course has the following key tenets:

Self Sufficiency

You start every project with a blank repo, so you can confidently create your own applications well beyond the bounds of the program.

Fundamental Depth

You will have to actually build many of your own tools (jQuery) and patterns (MVC) from the ground up, so you really understand them before we show you the "easy" way.

Career Context

We wrap our major projects in an Agile development approach that mimics a real engineering team, so you feel confident interviewing for and joining one.

Data Depth

We aren't here to help you build pretty landing pages, we're here to give you the tools you need to create deep, data-driven web applications, so prepare to dive deep into data.

If you've been disappointed by the lack of depth in other programs, you should find our approach at Viking particularly refreshing.

A Battle-Tested Way to Learn

Our approach to teaching is simple: Get you building as much as possible and give you great support along the way.

In practice, you will implement this by focusing on three steps: Learn, Build and Refactor.

Agile Tools and Processes

At Viking, we've taken the methodology of Agile Development and applied it to your learning process as well in what we call "Agile Education".

This means that you will track and organize your learning path based on the velocity at which you moving through the material, just like you would track your progress building a project as part of an agile software team.

Mockups

Every major project starts with a series of mockups and assets from the "design team" so you have a blueprint for what you will build.

Agile Stories

We use one of the most popular agile project tracking tools available to help you turn our user stories into functional features.

These are the same tools you'll use as a developer on an engineering team and they will be critical when you're building your collaborative final projects as well.

Track Your Velocity

Your velocity scores is based on how rapidly you finish lessons and projects.

View Your Progress

Track your progress using interactive tables, charts and visuals.

Forecast Success

Velocity tracking lets you forecast how long the rest of the course will take.

In a course of this depth, being able to track your progress like this helps you to manage your schedule, momentum and motivation along the way.

Collaboration with Other Students

Whether you take the Immersive Program or the Flex Program, we strongly support collaboration. During your progress through the course, our tools allow you to easily reach out to other students so you can partner up on project work.

1. Find Your Partner

2. Reach Out

3. Pair and Profit!

Remember, this isn't "school" where you were supposed to do everything yourself. This is the real world where you will need to work directly with other engineers all day long so we encourage you to get practice doing so along the way!

If you're lucky, you might even meet future friends, colleagues or even cofounders.