Apply to our course
Our programme is designed for people who are serious about a career in web development, are comfortable with uncertainty, can take initiative, and believe strongly in the value of community and helping others.
Course dates
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Cohort of Spring 2021
Prerequisites and application cycle
—Submit your application between
—Interview dates
—Precourse dates (remote, at your own pace)
—Course dates
—
How do I apply?
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Submit your expression of interest and join our online community
Please submit an expression of interest to get invited to our Slack workspace, events, workshops and meetups for prospective students.
Submit Expression of Interest.
Introduce yourself in our Slack workspace where you can find the most up-to-date information on our programme, meetups, and ask us any questions you may have.
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Start work on our course prerequisites
While we don’t like to suggest how long it will take you to complete the prerequisites, it’s different for everyone, we expect you to take at least three months if you don’t have any prior experience with web development.
We encourage applicants to work through the material with other applicants, both online and through our meetups.
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Submit an application
Plan to spend about an hour completing the application form.
If you submit your application before the deadline, keep working on the prerequisites and tidying up your website. We will evaluate your progress as of the date the window closes.
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The conversational interview
We invite a minimum of 24 people to interview (in person or remotely), and usually offer places to sixteen people per cohort. You’ll be interviewed by a panel three people, made up of Founders and Coders staff and alumni.
Eligibility
In order to apply to our full-time programme, you must:
- Be over 18 years old
- Have the right to work in the UK
- If you’re living in the UK on a visa: whatever your visa status is, you must have at least 20 months left from the last day of the cohort you’re applying for
- Speak conversational English (and no, we’re not sticklers on grammar)
What kind of people are we looking for?
We get asked this a lot, so we’re going to elaborate a little bit here. Firstly, we prioritise a cohesive cohort of people who we think will work well together over any strong individual candidates.
Learning to code is just part of what makes you a good developer. We’re looking for candidates who can help us fulfil our goal of making the tech industry a more diverse and inclusive place. This means people who are excited to be part of a collaborative, peer-led learning environment. You should be willing to sacrifice some personal gain for the group’s learning. For example, we’d rather a group presents a technically incomplete project than one person stays up late writing code that no one else understands.
The tech industry is disproportionately white and male. If this describes you please reflect on how you can help change this. Do some research on how to be a good ally to those who are under-represented in tech so you can be a positive influence on your cohort.
Finding your own solutions to problems is an indispensable skill for a developer. We’d like you to apply these same google-skills to educating yourself on the important social issues including (but not limited to) those touched on above.
Founders and Coders will always prioritise marginalised people’s safety over the comfort of the privileged. If you don’t like the sound of any of this then we’d ask you to reconsider your application.
Course prerequisites
Before we will consider your application, you must complete the following prerequisites:
Create a GitHub account
You will use this account to host the repository of your application website.
freeCodeCamp
Register for an account and complete the following eight sections:
Responsive Web Design Certification
JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification
Codewars
Reach 5 kyu in JavaScript on Codewars.
You should attempt katas that’s reflective of your rank, meaning:
- When you’re at 8 kyu, attempt 7-8 kyu katas
- When you’re at 7 kyu, attempt 6-7 kyu katas
- When you’re at 6 kyu, attempt 5-6 kyu katas
- When you reach 5 kyu, continue with 5-6 kyu katas
We suggest you focus on practical katas that help solidify your JavaScript knowledge. If you find yourself stuck on an intricate maths problem for over two hours, it might be better to move on to a new kata.
Create a personal website
Your application website needs to be written by you and it must fulfill all of the following requirements (use this as a checklist, if you will):
- Be built in HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript
- Tell us about why you are applying for the programme
- Be hosted on GitHub
- Take this opportunity to research a bit on how Git, GitHub and command line works
- Attempt to make your commit history tell a story
- Contain a link back to the GitHub repository that contains the code for your site
- Contain a link to your public freeCodeCamp profile
- Contain a link to your Codewars profile
- Include an image carousel written in vanilla JavaScript, it must:
- Be built into your application website (a link to a separate page will not be accepted)
- Be responsive (works on mobile and desktop)
- Display one image at a time
- Move between images when clicking navigation buttons
- Toggle automatically looping through all images with a play/pause button
- Allow keyboard navigation between images with the left/right arrow keys
Your website should:
- Be creative, show us with your code who you are
- Demonstrate your learnings from the prerequisites
Your website cannot:
- Use a GitHub theme
- Use any JavaScript or CSS libraries like Bootstrap or jQuery
- Use an image carousel package like Flickity — we want to see your own code