Ada Developers Academy

A year ago I was in my mid-twenties, in possession of a BA and looking to break into CS. I figured I could do it one of two ways:

a) I could try for a second bachelor's degree either taking online classes or commuting to a campus, engaging in deep learning... Read More and possibly losing 2 to 3 years in the process.
b) I could shell out $10,000 - $15,000 for a code school lasting a few weeks/months where I would learn just enough to get a job and rely on shaky employment guarantees in order to be able to recoup the loss.

Then I discovered Ada Developers Academy and it turned out to be a perfect fit. The six month curriculum portion of the program gave us a solid base in Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, databases, deployment, agile processes and a number of other web technologies. Near the end of those six months we also covered advanced topics and completed capstone projects. Some of my classmates turned their capstones into freelance work and two presented theirs at the world's largest Ruby conference.

The next six months were spent interning at Seattle area tech companies. We had varying experience with the internships, but we all came out with six months of tangible experience that helped 100% of us land jobs as developers. I believe the average salary is around ~75k with some offers in the 90s and the lowest above 60.

In my opinion though, the most valuable part of the experience was access to the community. Ada is sponsored by some of the biggest names in Seattle tech certainly and has a wonderful core group of volunteers certainly, but spending a year with 15 tenacious, intelligent women who were facing the same challenges as me was an amazing opportunity. I graduated Ada with my dream job and a very strong core network to help me continue to grow.

All in all I'd highly recommend Ada Developers Academy.