App Academy

The App Academy was great. I was trying to teach myself web development on my own and was at a job that paid well but was miserable. I thought I'd come out of the App Academy with a better job that maybe paid the same or less.  Ended up getting a big raise. 

I partially credit that to the fact that a/A gets paid based on your first year's salary. It's in their best interest to get you the highest paying job possible. Because of that, they helped me with job hunting strategy, putting together a portfolio, and ended up giving me negotiation help as the negiotiations for my job were happening. Just that last bit ended up being worth about $5k a year for me. 

App Academy is intense and you need to be willing to commit fully to it. Not just quitting your other job, but also all other obligations and commitments. But when you pay that much for something, it should be easy to commit.

Money aside, it's a great school and I recommend it. I had 8 interviews in my first week out of school. I'm almost 5 months into my new job and it's awesome. 

TL;DR: App Academy is an extremely fast-paced deep dive intro for Ruby on Rails and Backbone.js. It's good for students who can drop everything to find junior developer positions.

I went through the App Academy bootcamp over a year ago.

Deeper dive:

• AA has very strong batches: Since AA is free until after you find a job, the application pool is huge and the selection pretty rigorous (I think the acceptance rate is < 5%). This means AA places you with with really strong batch mates and designs a curriculum that challenges you.
  • Pros: You work with smart people. You mostly pair with peopel you can depend on to work at a quick pace and swap learnings and coding patterns with.
  • Cons: You might have a hard time getting in. I know people who have applied and been accepted into multiple bootcamps but were turned down by AA. Make sure you really study Ruby on codeacademy.com, coderbyte.com, rubykoans.com, etc. AA will give you a similar list nof resources when you apply before you do your coding interview.

• AA is extremely fast-paced: You're forced to learn a lot and are tested weekly on your progress. They know you're smart and design a curriculum assuming that will make your head hurt.
  • Pros: You're really challenged. The course load and pace reminded me of the 'drink from the firehose' feeling I had in some of the harder courses I took while at MIT. You'll learn a ton if you apply yourself 100%. 
  • Cons: The  pace was too quick for some - we ended up having to drop a few classmates that couldn't keep up and productively pair with us. There's a weekly test that can be difficult, and students were dropped if they failed 3 assessments in a row. This makes sense - you don't want to pair with someone way behind on material, as it would hamper your own learning. Still, don't attempt AA unless you can really commit your time to pairing during the day and studying at night and over the weekend.

• AA emphasises on working through problems: We were given the entire day to work through problems, with solutions made available only after a full 8-10 hours of work put in.
  • Pros: We learned what we covered much better than if we had a quicker, more guided approach. Since we were forced to experiment and reason through problems with less structured guidance, we all learned how to read error logs, use Chrome's web inspector for inspecting DOM / inspecting network requests / using the javascript console / tail and grep server logs better than most other bootcamp students I've interviewed since graduating.
  • Cons: We covered fewer overall algorithms and patterns. Example - I only learned the Rails conventional AJAX form method using remote: true at work. However, I had a pretty good understanding of making AJAX calls from in-class experimentation, so picking up the remote: true method wasn't too difficult.
• AA emphasises on deep dives and web basics: We were taught Ruby extensively before we learned any Rails. We built a rudimentary version of ActiveRecord::Base ourselves, forcing ourselves to learn a lot of Ruby metaprogramming while we were at it, before really using ActiveRecord extensively. We did something similar with Backbone.js - we built our own simple version using basic arrays and understanding of Javascript / AJAX  before diving in with Backbone.js in projects. 
  • Pros: This approach taught away the 'magic' in lots of the libraries we were using and made debugging complicated issues easier, since we had a more intuitive feel for what was happening under the hood.
  • Cons: We learned fewer libraries and covered their actual implementation/documentation in less depth. This made us read documentation on our own time for our more extensive final projects.

Perhaps the most important point is that I'm very happily employed now with the same company I started with immediately after AA (www.therealreal.com). So is a fellow batch mate - we work on standing desks right next to each other 18 months after having first paired together. We're both valued contributors with an above-average salary and are still learning constantly from more experienced developers. Both of us think AA really helps set of promising careers in web development / software engineering.

There have been 3 rounds of layoffs for this company in the last 6 months, and the quality of support continues to decrease over time and the ever changing curriculum has been super destructive to my learning experience. The administration has made it clear that it does not care for its staff nor the student experience. I do not recommend this bootcamp. It's pretty clear that it's in a downward spiral, and I don't think they'll last much longer. Everyone I talk to in my cohort is disappointed, and they had to shut down the general cohort Discord channel becaue of the overall negative shared experience.

App academy has seemed to drastically change in their approach to learning. What was once raved as the best bootcamp, is now down there with the rest of them. I have been to 3 different cohorts. All those cohorts are STUDENTS being the lead instructors. I've dug into each of their profiles and resumes. They were ex app academy students who graduated the program but never landed an actual software engineer job. Nor do they come from a real swe role. Whereas all of us who are new to the program are signing agreements to dish out $15,000 - $30,000 (if you have an ISA). That is an insane amount of money just to be taught by students with less than an year of experience. You can sign up for code academy or scrimba and learn from real engineers with years of experience while connecting to learners like you through discord. It's literally no different. The only difference is that app academy will force you into what they call pair programming which is sitting in a zoom breakout room with other learners having to figure it out with little to no support. Please stay away from this school, it is not worth the expense, there are better and cheaper alternatives that save you $$$$$.

The resources for your success is all here. 

If you are familiar with pushing yourself and achieving something you didn't know you could, take a chance and come here. 
If you haven't, think hard. This isn't the first risk you should take in your life.

Some of the readings contain aggregated information with historical content that you would waste days or even weeks of your life to find.

Learn basic html/css/js before you start. Keep a list of websites that have interesting design.
This will help you utilize the instructors and other bootcamp resources in ways most students don't even think about because they're too busy keeping up with the basics. 

If you are here to make friends and have fun learning, best of luck to you. 
If you are here to bring change and growth to your life, be invisible to the people that fall into the above category. 

Very little of what was taught was anything that the market was seeking. That said, I was able to land a job somewhere around six months after I finished the bootcamp, so, I hope you have a nest egg. In 2023 myself, and many other software engineers were laid off - this is a known thing and some of my friends who are decade long veterans in the industry lost their jobs and are STILL unable to find work. The things I learned at App Academy do not set me apart from typical applicants and I struggle to even land an interview. Despite this, they still demand payment even though I cannot find a job in software development.

I was recommended App Academy from someone who graduated from there a year ago and received a job (8 months later), so I decided to give it a try. First and foremost, they are not the same App Academy as of even a year ago. My friend who graduated has also said how terrible the leadership has gotten, and they even at one point fired all the support for the students mid day without warning (https://www.reddit.com/r/codingbootcamp/comments/11zyz18/app_academy_fired_all_cohort_leaders_for_ai/). My friend who went through the program confirms this was true, as well as when I went through the program, they didn't have any of these support people. They are trying to have as little staff as possible to cut back on costs, which means you have little to no support when you are in a class of 40 people, with just one instructor and one or two TA's. Secondly, the mod instructors/TA's hate their lives, and only do it because they can't get a job anywhere else, with some of them being there for years making just around $40-50K(depending on if you're a TA or instructor). I had multiple TA's tell me this. Early on, while we were still learning the basics of HTML/CSS, which is not an easy concept, they just stopped lecturing, and would just put us in zoom breakout rooms with a coding pair partner, to just tell us to figure it out because thats how it is 'in the real world'. I understand the concept they were trying to demonstrate for us, as a lot of it will be having to look up outside source materials, however you can't really do that when you are just learning the basics, maybe with more advanced topics and what not. This caused a revolt with the students, where we'd join class at 8am, be immediately thrown into a seperate zoom breakout room for the majority of the day with no lecture, and then they'd move on while you would still be stuck on the previous day's material. It got so bad they had to have one of the Senior Developers, Caleb Braaten (one of the worst top 5 people I have interacted with in my life), to come in and basically tell us to suck it up and deal with it. This obviously wasn't met with a well reception among the students, and a vast majority started threatening to sue, due to them paying tens of thousands of dollars to basically be self teaching themselves. Funnily enough, this revolt did force them to change a couple of things. The instructors will tell you they care about you, but at the end of the day, they don't. For them it's just a job where none of them actually enjoy teaching, but they couldn't get a job elsewhere themselves. One of the mod instructors recently actually quit App Academy, without evening having another job lined up, due to the terrible working conditions. With all the layoffs, they gave all the extra work to the mod instructors/TA's, leaving them not happy, which leads to a negative teaching experience to the students. While App Academy may have used to be a great choice for a bootcamp, it has gone severely down hill and understaffed, leading to a terrible experience for the student. I would highly consider looking elsewhere for your knowledge needs.

I highly recommend App Academy if you are thinking of making a career change to software engineering! The instructors are second-to-none and do a great job of providing a learning experience that helps you learn to the best of your ability. The format and schedule of the bootcamp is great, allowing you to get daily experience pair programming projects with others as well as showcasing your own abilities through projects towards the end of the bootcamp. The space is nice and clean and is a great area to collaborate with your cohort mates and form a community. It is a rigorous bootcamp, so expect to spend at least 60 hours a week during the bootcamp and make sure you don't fall behind because they do not slow down. Ultimately, the job search is going to be the biggest challenge, especially in today's market, so be prepared for it to take at least 6 months. Nonetheless, the a/A community, including alumni and career team, are extremely helpful in helping you prepare to find opportunities.

DO NOT DO!!! you think you’re becoming part of a great and helpful program but they add some disgusting rules in the fine print!!!
you either pay $14000 up front or $30000 for the next three years out of paychecks…BUTTTT!!! BUTTT!!! they don’t tell you that if you get kicked (which is easy to do) they keep your money, or if you didn’t pay up front, you now owe them the tuition. AND FAILING IS EASY!!!! you can fail TWO tests and then you get kicked out! the second easy way to get kicked out is, not checking a box THREE TIMES A DAY to say you’re present and if you miss 10 (less than three days) YOURE OUT!!! so you cant be sick, you cant have family events. BE PREPARED TO LOSE YOUR MONEY!!!

I attended App Academy for 2 months, the program structure wasn't conducive to actually learning software development for me. I had no prior coding experience coming in but I was willing to commit the time and effort. The rigid policy they have on kicking you out if you fail a test had me way more focused on the specific content that was going to be on a test than on the broader content that I was supposed to be learning. Unless you come in with a background in CS or prior experience, you don't have the time to learn what you're supposed to be learning, its just a rat race every week just to get a passing score for Mondays test so that you are permitted to come back the next day and do it all over again for the next week.

The instructors are excellent coders, but only 1 out of 4 of them was actually qualified to be teaching. There was a handful of students everyone would lean on as a go-between to what the instructors were saying and what the students didn't understand. 

The first two months of curriculum are strictly ruby with a bit of CSS sprinkled in, but if you dont already have a VERY solid foundation of ruby coming in, you probably won't make it past the first two weeks. Getting through the technical interview is not enough. You need to pass the technical interview and then also get through the first 2 weeks of content on your own. And even then, a lot of people who made it through still failed out within the first couple tests.