Relearning Javascript what helped you the most?

Do Codecademy, consider Launch School Core, and drop Codesmith and get your money back unless your goal is to go through the $22,500 version with dwindling hope of actually getting a job according to their own data. The primary goal of it is to get you to show up to more Codesmith sessions so that they can indoctrinate you and get you to join the expensive one. Their former CEO said in a podcast that these sessions were their marketing funnel and that they didn't run ads at the time (now they inundate you with ads as well). Not a bad idea to put advertising dollars into courses that offer some value! But they are ads for Codesmith that you are paying for.

They have coupon codes and they said in June if you go to a free workshop you get a code to do it for free, so at a minimum try to get it discounted :D Their overall enrollment has been struggling so they have been offering a lot of discounts on the prep programs (because again, they are marketing tools to get you to join the expensive one).

In terms of strategic advice - learning to code is great and you should keep doing it. Expecting to get a software engineer job is almost hopeless though and you should be doing it just to learn because you like programming and want it as a tool in your tool belt for whatever job you do.

I agree with this point as of June 2025. We (speaking for Formation now) use a ton of AI for helping people practice and off the shelf ChatGPT is not perfect for learning right now. We have a lot of unique product applications of AI specifically tuned for helping people have effective practice and feedback and fortunately there's enough judgement and taste and nuance in that that it justifies our existing right now haha.

Hopeless but not impossible yeah. So look at Codesmith's stats since we're talking about them and they release numbers. 2021 grads: about 90% of grads placed within 6 months 2022 grads: about 80% of grads placed within 6 months 2023 grads: about 40% of grads placed within 6 months (and very notable that there was a huge double digit percentage increase in people who ghosted Codesmith and got counted as a placement because of LinkedIn 2024 grads: no data yet, but based on Codesmith's little bits of data there have been about 250 offers in h2 2024 -> h1 2025, which covers some 2022 grads, 2023 grads, 2024 grads, and then 2024 grads. Now enrollment has declined because they cutback from 4+1 to 1+1 cohorts in Feb 2024 so it's hard to tell what the placement rates are but they definitely aren't good. Codesmith also should have plenty of information about 2024 grads now that i's 6 months post graduation for every student (nevermind a full YEAR of data on h1 2024 grads) But Codesmith claims "transparency" following the CIRR process as a bad excuse to not give any kind of indication how bad things are. The 2023 report above was published just in April 2025 and in 2024 they had early indications how much things dropped but they continued to talk about great 2022 numbers "waiting for official 2023 numbers". Oh... and because of the terrible results they switched to reporting 360 day outcomes instead of 6 months outcomes so they can show those better numbers. They are twisting and manipulating reality to create an illusion that it's very likely you'll get a job, when in fact it's not. Look at those placements too and the people have tangential experience and others lie significantly about their 4 week long Codesmith projects - branding them as 1+ years of work experience on their resumes. It's a giant facade in my opinion, an illusion and a magic trick to fool you. Please be smart and critical.