App Academy

Pros - App Academy goes over a good amount of material at a great pace - really providing us the tools to become full stack engineers in three months. I like the amount of practice we get with critical skills like React, which gives us an edge over certain candidates that may have more theoretical/backend focus. The staff is friendly, helpful, and knowledgable. I really enjoyed the work environment as well. We were pushed and challenged to be the best we could be, but also guided and not left without help.

Cons - I wish we had more time to work on our projects, but we only have a limited amount of time to cover so many things. It can definitely feel draining at times, but that's just the nature of a bootcamp. The price tag is a bit steep, but deserving with the >99% success rate. Overall no real cons - just a fast-paced curriculum that forced us to become better.

In summary, I had a really positive experience at App Academy. I'd recommend anyone trying to get into coding to give it a shot, as long as they're willing to put in the effort.

App academy is no joke. You will spend every single day, night and day for the next 9 weeks reading new material, watching videos, doing homework and debugging, all the while drinking endless cups of coffee. You are required to check in 3 times a day (9AM, 1:30PM, and 4:00PM) or you will get a strike. 10 strikes and you're out. Overall, you will learn Ruby, SQL, Rails, JavaScript, React, and Redux. You won't get much practice on HTML/CSS, until you get to your full stacks in week 8, where you put everything together to clone a website. For the first 7 weeks, the daily routine is basically HTML/CSS in the morning, lecture until about lunch time, then pair programming the rest of the day. The last 30 minutes are spent with your "circle" discussing your day. The evenings are spent on reading and watching videos on tomorrow's material and usually accompanied with basic exercises. The readings and videos will take a decent chunk of your time, so I suggest doing them ahead of time if you can. There are 6 assessments throughout the course. They tell you almost exactly what is going to be on the assessment, they give you a practice assessment, they give you a test generator to time yourself, they give you a video of a TA going through the practice assessment. Basically you shouldn't feel lost when studying up for the assessment. All the resources are there for you. When full stacks arrive on week 8, things change. No more lectures, no more circle time, and no more readings and videos. You work on your full stack all day, helping each other out when you hit bugs, giving tips to others who are doing the same or similar websites.

Some constructive criticism. The lectures, especially toward the end of the curriculum, were particularly long, and most of it was very similar to our homework that we already completed the previous night. I honestly only found those lectures useful for asking questions, but I did not feel the need to spend 2-3 more hours on the same topic we already spent hours learning for homework. The instructions for the daily projects are outstanding, providing step-by-step instructions on what you need to do next and why, that is up until around the end of week 6. Often times there will be a bulleted-list of directions telling you to implement so-and-so, when before these bulleted-list of directions would each have their own paragraph, supplemented with code snippets and explanations. In the React projects especially, they would tell you to implement something, and a few lines later, they'd provide the exact code you should write. I don't think that is helpful to our understanding. Some TAs are older and more experienced, others are recent graduates of App Academy themselves. Some are clearly better at explaining, while some kind of just look at the solutions and tell you to write what the solutions did. I'm thankful they are all trying and willing to help, but I'd always hope for certain TAs over others when hitting that "Ask a question" button.

All in all, it was a very rewarding experience. I've met and made many new friends. Knowing that everyone else in your cohort is going through the exact same thing is reassuring, that everyone else is sleep-deprived and feeling exhausted all the time, that if you ran into a bug that someone else will most likely have also ran into the same bug, that you have others who also committed the next 9 weeks to change their life. I've learned more at App Academy and produced more projects that I am proud of than I did in 4 years in college as a Computer Science major. If you are thinking about attending App Academy, I'd definitely recommend it. Be prepared to make some great friends, and also be prepared for some feels when your new friends drop out. There's always a few that can't handle the load.

Your life will change (super cliché/corny, I know, but it’s kind of true) after finishing this program. Especially if you don't have any technical background, like myself. 

As for the prepwork that App Academy provides, the curriculum isn’t as well developed as it could be, and you’re going to run into a lot of frustration with realizing that the things you need to learn to do some of the exercises are covered in later chapters or that in the later chapters. I recommend going out of your way to look up your own documentation of the concepts introduced in the Alpha Course Curriculum. Chris Pine’s Intro to Ruby free online course helped me a lot in that regard, you can google it but I believe App Academy should have also linked you to that resource. 

The program is intense, even for people with cs degrees. People with background will definitely catch up concepts faster and some will be a review for them.  But it doesn't mean its not hard for them. As a someone without tech background, came to aA everyday including weekends to study. They are not lying about 100 hours per week of studing time. for the first 9 weeks, I've never slept more than 6 hours. 
This is my personal case, some people can study only 70~80 hours and still do super well. 

This program is NOT for everyone. You really have to be passionate to learn how to program. Even if you are, this style of learning may not be for you. I personally loved it and enjoyed every moment of it. I strongly recommend to everyone, but please take everyone's warning very seriously. This is one of the hardest coding bootcamp.

App Academy was a very structured program that I learned a lot from. It keeps you motivated to work hard through having assessments every Monday and practice assessments prior to the main ones. This helps to constantly let you know what you need to do to stay on track. If you're looking to become proficient in ruby on rails and react App Academy is a great way to go! The program also gives you the tools that you will need to pick up new skills as well and continue learning on your own even after the program is completed. 

App Academy is an incredible coding bootcamp. I came into the bootcamp with many expectations of what it might be like but I never could have imagined what I have experienced so far.

To start, the learning environment is positive, supportive, and encouraging. App Academy constantly reinforces a culture of collaboration, pair programming, and sharing knowledge. The best example (and my favorite aspect of the program as a whole) are the TAs and instructional staff. These are mainly past graduates who have decided to help new students find their way through the intense 9 week curriculum. Because they have been through the program themselves they know what the students are going through, and do an amazing job of providing support when needed - be it technical help on a tough coding problem, or providing some much needed reassurance when the grind becomes real - they really do care and will spend hours (literally) with you until you understand a concept comfortably.

Speaking of the grind, App Academy will test you. But that’s what a bootcamp is meant to do. Sleepless nights, hours of homework reading and problems (after 9 hours of coding), and weekly assessments will push you to your mental and physical limits. You will experience moments where the last thing you want to do is write another line of code, or spend another hour trying to debug your program. The most important thing is to keep on trying, and ask for help when you need it. The support system is there for you to take advantage of, and everyone is happy to help.

But it’s not all bad. In fact, there is so much more that is good about this bootcamp. For as much stress and frustration you will go through, you will experience twice the amount of achievement, learning, and moments of triumph. You will learn to build so many cool things and come away with the confidence to continue learning on your own afterward. You will build new and deep friendships with classmates going through the same struggle and grind. The alumni community at App Academy is healthy, growing, and super friendly.

If you are thinking about App Academy, I highly recommend it. This bootcamp is has not only been an opportunity for me to step into the tech industry as a software developer, it has been a challenging experience that I can look back on with gratitude and pride.

Enrolling in AppAcademy was a chance for me to switch careers and I do not regret it. At the end of the day, it really is what you make of it. I did a lot of research on web-development and delved around in multiple free curriculums such as freeCodeCamp and TheOdinProject prior but it was hard to keep myself accountable. Due to the massive amounts of tutorials and references available through open source, I found it hard to make serious progress as I would jump from language to language, not sure of what I should learn with the limited time that I had. AppAcademy provided me structure and forced me to be disciplined and I was able to make massive progress in 3 months, much more than I ever did when I was self-studying and not fully immersing myself.

I would say that most of the knowledge is picked up through pair programming. Having to work with another partner daily during the curriculum really sharpened my understanding of not only the material but my ability to articulate it to other people. You'll also learn a lot when you help your cohort mates debug and vice versa. The curriculum is very fast-paced and it is amazing how fast you feel that you can fall behind in only a day. The React/Redux portion was probably the most challenging week in the curriculum as new material is just piled onto you.

Our cohort is currently in the job search curriculum so I cannot comment at the moment regarding the job search. Needless to say, I am looking forward to opening up this new chapter in my career.

To answer some questions that I had when I was making the decision to enroll:
- The language you learn doesn't matter. Once you are familiar with how web-development works, you realize that there are similar patterns/conventions that are fundamental to each language. Different programming languages can all achieve the same means.
- Make sure you enroll ahead of the months notice that they tell you to. You do have pre-curriculum prep that you have to do before the cohort that requires at least two weeks of time. I personally went through the prep work twice before my cohort started as well as learning as much JavaScript as I could. This goes a long way between determining how stressed you feel during the lecture part of the curriculum when you're learning new materials everyday.
-  I did a good amount of problems on CodeWars and CodeFights and LeetCode during my preparation for the application. While it helped me learn how to problem solve, web development is actually a totally different beast! Don't get discouraged if you struggle at these tricky word problems because it doesn't mean that you can't build killer apps.

BTW: Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

App Academy is awesome! The curriculum is fantastic and the Job Search portion teaches developers how to network, apply to openings, negotiate salary, and so much more.  The TA's are all very talented and very knowledgeable. Spending upwards of 9 hours a day including weekends has created a pseudo-family between classmates. Everyone is super supportive of each other in the learning experience as well. Like Dave Meltzer, I'm going to break the 5-star system and give a/A a solid 6 stars.

If you want to be ready for the job market, be skilled with ruby and javascript, meet the best and the brightest to coming into the market and have the mindset to be able to work as long and hard as it takes, this is the place for you. Use it as a learning experience on your path of becoming a software developer. 

It will not come easy but it's all about time and perseverence and eventually you will become a software developer and see the rewards of your effort. 

I can't imagine having better TAs for the curriculum. Some of the brightest people have come through these halls. I encourage everyone to take a chance and make that step towards a better career. 

The learning culture at App Academy is pretty much as far as it gets from university. They value a very collaborative culture through pair programming every day, and value understanding the material over just completing it. There were only a couple days where we managed to get through all of the days projects, but it's expected.

The curriculum as a whole is fantastic and reinforces your understanding through a variety of methods: readings, videos, homework, lectures, group discussions, and most importantly actually putting into practice your new skills throughout each day.

After completing the main coding curriculum as well as a few major projects, I've become confident in my ability to code and build full-stack and frontend apps in Rails, React/Redux, JavaScript, etc. It's also inspired me to want to pick up new stacks and tools. I've definitely learned more over these past 3 months than any other 3 month (or even 1 year) period of time.

I can't speak to those without technical backgrounds. But even though I had some previous programming experience, it didn't really matter since everything was new to me after the second week. You will definitely be spending at least 80-90 hours a week, but it won't feel like it if you love to code and learn about new technologies.

Attending App Academy has been one of the best decisions I've made in my career. You could argue that you could teach yourself or maybe even try to go back to traditional school, but I believe nothing is as cost or time-efficient as attending the best bootcamp in the industry. There is plenty of free knowledge and alternatives out there to learn the skills of a software engineer, but for most people starting out it is incredibly difficult to know what to focus on. App Academy will offer you a well thought out roadmap that has been proven to work for thousands of students. You're guaranteed to learn the most in-demand technologies and skills in the industry thanks to its rapid-iteration teaching approach, which provides frequent experimentation and rapid re-investment of findings back into the class. One of my favorite thing about the program is that is practical in nature, so be prepared to experience a non-traditional yet more efficient approach to education in which you'll learn by doing and collaborating with others. By the end of the program, you'll have an amazing portfolio of projects that will impress any hiring manager. And even after you are done as a student, you'll still benefit from the amazing career support App Academy  provides and you'll have access to the incredible network of App Academy alumni. Be aware that attending this immersive program will be challenging, but I promise it'll be a fun and rewarding experience.