There have never been more good opportunities to learn to code, whether pursuing your personal interests or to gain a high-demand skill for the many web development jobs available in Boston. I’ve separated the options into:

  • coding bootcamps in Boston (multi-week immersive programs covering a set of skills, generally designed to prepare you for a job),
  • coding classes in Boston (one-off or short-term classes, usually focused on a single or small number of skills),
  • data science classes / bootcamps (focused on using programming to process & analyze large amounts of data, rather than to build web or mobile applications).

Boston Coding Bootcamps

Launch Academy's Boston Coding Bootcamp

Launch Academy – A 10-week web development bootcamp, with a 6-week online pre-learning course and 6 months of post-graduate support. Grounded in Ruby on Rails, students also learn JavaScript, jQuery, test-driven & agile development, Git, and how to be proficient on the command line.

General Assembly – A national program with a strong presence in Boston, GA offers immersive 10 to 13-week courses for tracks like web development, data science, and UX Design. Their web development immersive covers Ruby on Rails & Node on the back-end, front-end development, working as part of a development team, and the basics of product development.

Resilient Coders – This non-profit provides an 8-week program for 17-27 year olds from underserved communities to learn the fundamentals of front-end web development, for free. The program teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, and MongoDB, provides training in soft skills, and helps them find paid client work throughout the program.

The Firehose Project – Although this is a virtual bootcamp focused on providing weekly 1-on-1 mentorship, code reviews, and portfolio-building assistance, part of the Firehose team is Boston-based and occasionally does in-person events in Boston, one of which is their intensive weekend hackathon. “Start with nothing, learn what you need, leave with a fully functional application.”

Of course there are many more online options for learning to code, but Boston-based programming bootcamps & career accelerators all have relationships with local companies that are hiring, and most specifically offer job-placement assistance as part of the program.

Coding Classes in Boston

One of the web development classes at Bocoup

Photo by Jory Burson at Bocoup

General Assembly – GA also offers many part-time and one-off classes, including many intro courses to different kinds of programming (web development, SQL, Python, and more).

Girl Develop It – Classes on specific technologies or techniques, plus monthly Code & Coffee networking / project nights, for women.

RailsBridge Boston – Weekend workshop for anyone underrepresented in tech (“women, LGBTQ, military veterans, people of color, etc.”) to learn Ruby on Rails.

Harvard Extension School – Open enrollment semester-long classes; the extension school offers many more modern options than what you might find in degree-track classes at a college. Courses like Fundamentals of Website Development are available alongside traditional Computer Science courses.

First Step Coding – This organization offers a one-month Mondays & Wednesdays evening classes series, providing coding fundamentals skills. Aimed at both aspiring developers applying to increasingly competitive bootcamps, and employees in non-development roles (like Product Managers) that want a stronger understanding of tech.

You can also find various one-off classes & workshops on our curated Boston tech events calendar.

Boston Data Science Classes / Bootcamps

A photo from Level's first Data Science Bootcamp in Boston.

Level – This bootcamp is run by Northeastern University, teaching skills in SQL, R, and Tableau. It runs over two months, and aims to prepare participants who already have experience working with business data / regression analysis for a career in data analytics.

The Data Incubator Data Science Fellowship – New to Boston after running in NY, DC, and SF, this Cornell-funded program offers free fellowships for those with a Master’s Degree or PhD (or within a year of receiving one). Their 8-week bootcamp offers training in:

  • Software engineering and numerical computation. Numerical techniques for optimization and vectorized linear algebra. Programming tools including python, numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, matplotlib.
  • Natural language processing. Handling unstructured data, stemming, bag of words, TF/IDF, topic modeling.
  • Statistics. Hypothesis testing, regression and classification, ensemble methods, cross-validation, variance-bias decomposition, data normalization.
  • Data visualization. Including geographical and temporal data. Packages like d3, ggplot, matplotlib.
  • Databases and parallelization. SQL, Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Spark.

General Assembly – In addition to their web development offerings, General Assembly also runs a data science bootcamp. Their bootcamp covers statistic fundamentals and teaches regression & other data modeling techniques, focusing on using Python as a programming language.

QuantUniversity – Launched six years ago by a long-time data scientist at Endeca & MathWorks / analytics faculty member at Babson and Northeastern, QU provides both one-off workshops and a summer program that teaches quantitative methods, data visualization, and big data analytics. Tools used run the gamut from Excel to R to Python to Tableau to Apache Spark, and the program concludes with participants having the opportunity to complete a capstone data / analytical project for a company.

In addition to these in-person programs, Boston-based Edlitera & DataCamp also offer online classes to learn a range of data science skills & data visualization techniques, in either R or Python.

Find more one-off classes & tech meetups on our events calendar…

We curate a calendar of Boston tech & startup events, including meetups focused on in-demand tech & tools, workshops from notable local & visiting developers, and panels on getting into tech / advancing your career as a developer.

And for more resources, highlights, and opportunities for entrepreneurs & startup talent, follow us on twitter or on LinkedIn.