There is something genuinely admirable about what Leon Noel did with 100Devs, because he took what a lot of people pay many thousands of dollars for, a structured full stack bootcamp, and he ran it live for free and then left it standing for anyone who wants to follow it. That generosity is the first thing to say, and it is not a small thing, because the curriculum is real, the teaching behind it is real, and the career support baked into it is the part that genuinely sets it apart. Most coding courses teach you to code and then wave goodbye at exactly the moment things get hard, whereas Leon spends serious time on the job search itself, on outreach, on resumes, on networking, on the mindset and resilience that career changing actually requires, and that material is honestly better than what a lot of paid bootcamps provide. He is a motivating presence, he clearly cares whether people get hired rather than just whether they finish the videos, and the community that grew up around the program means you do not have to study in isolation if you engage with it.
I do want to be straight about the realities though, because pretending it is effortless would not help anyone. The volume of content is large, this is a full bootcamp worth of material, and it is now self paced, which means the single hardest part is not the difficulty of any given lesson but the discipline required to keep showing up week after week without a schedule forcing you to. The program had its magic during the live cohorts, when thousands of people were learning in real time together and the energy was electric, and that specific energy has naturally faded now that the main run is over, so a newcomer today is following a recorded course and joining a quieter community rather than riding a live wave, and it is important to set that expectation honestly. Some of the tooling and specifics have aged since the big 2022 cohort as well, which is normal for any course of this age, and it means you will occasionally need to bridge a gap between what was current then and what is standard now.
There is also no formal accountability anymore, no deadlines and no one checking on you, so the momentum has to be entirely self generated, and that suits some people and quietly defeats others. My honest assessment is that for a motivated self starter who either cannot pay for a bootcamp or does not want to take on that risk, 100Devs is an extraordinary gift and one of the strongest free options in existence, particularly for its career coaching, which alone is worth the time. The key is to go in with clear eyes, understanding that you are working through a recorded program rather than joining a live movement, that the community is a resource you have to actively reach for rather than something that will carry you, and that whether you finish comes down almost entirely to your own consistency. Approached that way, with realistic expectations and genuine discipline, it can absolutely help someone change careers without spending a penny, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say.