Shane F.

Overview:
For those of you in a hurry, here is a quick overview of Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in enrolling in their program, I recommend you read this in its entirety.
The curriculum is simplistic in its explanation of topics and has several errors in the literature. At one point, they send you to Codecademy.com to learn from them. You can pay up to $8,500 to be sent to a completely different company to learn what they should be teaching themselves.
The mentorship is inadequate, you will receive thirty-minutes, once a week, to talk with a mentor about any troubles you may be experiencing. Now if you are having a coding problem that you feel unable to solve yourself, and you would like to use the help of your mentor, this creates another issue. Thirty-minutes is an insufficient amount of time for the mentor to become familiar with your code and help you resolve the complication. It's not that the mentors aren't skilled or educated on the topics, it's simply a herculean task to resolve the problems in such a restrictive amount of time.
They give you the illusion that you can finish this program at your own pace, that's not true. You will have eight months to complete the program. During this time, you can proceed at your own pace, when the eight months expire, you must pay, per week you wish to extend your program (about $140 a week if I remember correctly).
My objection to this program is that when compared to so many other websites (such as Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools, Udemy) Bloc.io falls behind in content and doesn't justify the price tag.

The Whole Story:

To start, I have received my certification from Bloc.io. I successfully passed all of my assessments in my first attempt. I have not written this review out of anger due to not being able to complete the program. My complaint lies mainly behind the price and its syllabus.
I enrolled in the Bloc.io program in December 2018, paid $6500 after applying two discounts. One was a thousand dollars off for paying upfront, the other was a thousand dollar scholarship program that I had received. I started with Treehouse.com, to begin my education into web development. I learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and began my understanding of JavaScript.
After a few weeks of using other cheaper websites, I was excited to see what I would receive for my hard-earned $6500. Then my program began, within twenty-minutes, I instantly felt buyers remorse. I was met with large sections of tedious text, with an input box at the bottom of each page to write out my answers to the handful of questions. I tried to remain positive and hopeful that the curriculum would improve, I was wrong.

The Curriculum:
The first problem I noticed is how you send in your assignments. You are given a series of questions, then an empty input field where you have to format the questions and answers in MarkDown to submit it. Now, this isn't necessarily a problem, but it is time-consuming and annoying that you have to waste your time formating out your assignments.
They also have a very odd design choice to not include any videos in their courses. Instead, they do live videos, like a web conference over Zoom or Google Hangouts, to somewhat resemble a lecture you would find at a college. This defeats one of the benefits of doing an educational program online. You can view the videos at a later time, but watching a teacher stumble through a lecture suffers in comparison to an edited video with animations and excellent footage like on Treehouse or Udemy.
Most online programs I have experienced, have a comment section that you may use to ask questions on the topic at hand. This allows you to receive help from other students if something wasn't clear to you. Bloc doesn't include this, instead, they use Slack. With hundreds of different checkpoints, this becomes an issue. Simple questions and answers can't be related to a particular checkpoint. This leads to the same questions having to be answered repeatedly on Slack, or lengthy searches on Google for a simple answer.
In the program, they will go line by line and attempt to explain the reason for that particular line of code. Here is the most important thing to remember about programming. Knowing enough to understand what the code is doing, and knowing enough about coding to solve the problem yourself is a big difference. One of the most important differences if you want to land a job. Coding takes practice, copying someone else's code, doesn't improve your skills.
The facile explanations of the topics you will learn are concerning. Through this course, you will learn what is called a PERN stack. PERN, stands for Postgres, Express, React, NodeJS, and represent the frameworks and libraries of code you will use to create websites. While only four topics to learn, they are complex and can be difficult to master. That being said, after eight months of this program, I didn't have the in-depth knowledge that I wanted on these frameworks. Bloc is more concerned about giving you projects to put on your portfolio as opposed to providing a solid foundation on these subject matters.
The errors in their code are abundant and are something you will have to fight with throughout the program. It is inevitable you will create your own mistakes while following the checkpoints, and you will have to learn from them. When the mistakes are created by them, it can become frustrating and extremely hard for a student to remedy. A couple of them even confused my mentor to the point where she couldn't figure it out. Mistakes happen, but according to my mentor, they are in no hurry to fix them either.

The Personal Touch of Bloc:
Every checkpoint you submit is looked over by one of their staff. If you made a mistake in your submission you will be asked to revise your assignment. Sometimes they do give some helpful advice on your mistakes and sometimes include links to help you find the correct answer. This is nice at first, but it becomes troublesome towards the end when your submissions are extremely large. On more than one occasion, I had made a mistake on an assignment or forgot to do a certain task, and the error wasn't caught by the reviewer.
Having to do assessments after each module is a nice touch. You get the feel of what it's like to do a real coding interview. Especially in the last module, where you will take part in a couple of mock interviews. This is by far the best part of the Bloc program and is worth mentioning.

The Time Restraint:
What I found most concerning about the Bloc.io platform is the time frame in which you are to complete this program. You will endure six modules consisting of numerous checkpoints. At the end of every module, you must take a test conducted over Zoom (a web conferencing website) where you will be quizzed on your knowledge of that particular module and its contents. You must schedule an assessment with one of the staff at Bloc, and that person cannot be your current mentor.
For the first few assessments, I was able to set a date within a few days. The last couple of assessments became a problem trying to create an appointment. Only two mentors were qualified to take part in those assessments, one of which was my mentor. That left me with only one person that could assess me on my progress throughout these final modules. One of which I had to wait over a month to be able to participate in. I was patient and didn't complain about the long duration between my evaluations. Until, the end of my eight months was up, and they told me I needed to pay them, per-week, to continue. At this point, I only needed to complete two or three more assessments to receive my certification. So I reached out to the Student Success Team, they were responsive but nothing was getting resolved until I mentioned the Better Business Bureau. The next email stated I had received a week extension.
In the end, they did give me the extensions I required to finish, without charging me, but they did manage to waste an abundant amount of my time in the process.

Final thoughts:
Simply put, Bloc.io will teach you the buzz words of programing and their meanings. They will also give you the code to some projects that will make your portfolio look decent. You won't come out of this with a strong understanding of web development, but you will learn enough to get by.
If you were like me, and you have no experience in programming, this is hands down one of the worst places to start. Now if you have some familiarity with programming and web development, this is an overpriced, low-quality online program that will let you down after gouging your wallet.
The reason I have spent so much time writing such a lengthy review is to inform you and anyone else interested in Bloc.io that there are better places to receive an education on web development.
Treehouse, Codecademy, W3Schools all offer certifications that hold more weight, because people have actually heard of these companies, unlike Bloc.io. If you are truly interested in getting into web development, don't worry about getting a degree or certification. Learning how to write clean code is more important than any certification.
There is a reason why many companies do something called "whiteboarding." It's the process of giving an applicant a coding challenge and making them solve it on a whiteboard (or something similar) during the interview process. This weeds out a surprisingly large amount of programmers, who struggle with solving common coding challenges, due to them knowing how to read code and not write it.
Learn the fundamentals of web development, focus on creating unique projects that you can show off on your portfolio and go to meetups with other programmers. Those are the three steps that several of the web developers I know have followed and now have jobs without any degree or certification.

My recommendation:
I wished I had paid the thirty dollars a month for Treehouse, twenty-five dollars for Codecademy. Waited for Udemy to do one of their sales, spend fifty dollars on a couple of their courses, and received a stronger education for a fraction of the price. If you decide to take that path, you will learn everything offered at Bloc.io and more.