App Academy

After college I began to become interested in learning how to code. There are a lot of free online courses out there, but it was hard for me to motivate myself to learn code on my own. I did not want to take another four years of school, so I looked into... Read More a bootcamp. I looked into a few other bootcamps, but choose App Academy because one of my friends highly recommended their program.

I pretty much started from zero knowledge about coding, and was able to finish the App Academy curriculum. Would I say I am now an expert at coding, no, but I now feel that I have a solid general understanding.

I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I would say that the two months of curriculum at App Academy was more difficult than any two months of my college career. During this program, you eat breathe a sleep code so be ready!

App Academy is a great experience with lots to learn. The program is a long 12 week program, 13 for SF, and has you coding and interacting with others everyday from 9 am - 6 pm. In addition to the days work, you have readings and homework to prepare you... Read More for the next day making App Academy a full-time experience. While it does take up your entire life for many weeks, the programming experience is great and you definitely learn a lot. Being in an environment with others trying to achieve the same goal allows you to bounce ideas off one another which helps facilitate problem solving, depending on who you're working with.
Pros:
- Working with others was by-far, one of the best experiences. Being able to talk your code out with another coding individual helped me many times.
- Rewarding coding experience
- Robust coding fundamentals. The alpha curriculum preps students with the fundamentals of basic coding
- Great Staff. The TA's provide a great experience and help when you're stuck
- Bagel Day

Cons:
- Will consume your life. Be prepared for a lifestyle change
- At points, curriculum was unclear and leads to some frustration, but having others share the experience mitigates and the staff is ready to answer
- Towards the end of the coding curriculum, there is less staff interaction or wait times will be significantly longer. However, you have students as a resource

Overall, App Academy is a tough, but very rewarding life experience. It will consume your life, but you have others with you to share the the experience.

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... Read More 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 has been an incredible experience. Just a handful of weeks ago, I had little to no knowledge of coding but now am proficient in Rails, CSS, HTML, and multiple JavaScript frameworks. However, to succeed in this program, it is imperative that... Read More you commit yourself 100% to it. That can mean giving up a lot, but as long as you are willing and able to put in the work, App Academy will give you the resources to learn more than you would think possible. A lot of that is in part due to how they structure the course. Most days, you will be pair programming with a partner, which creates a much more collaborative environment, in which people learn to help one another through problems. I feel as though this was the best way possible for my own learning, as it teaches you both how to listen and interpret other's ideas and express your own clearly.

The best advice I can give is stay on top of your work. There is no time to catch up if you fall behind because the course moves so quickly. The assessments are stressful, but as long as you keep up with the workload, they aren't impossible.

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... Read More (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.

I was a part of the NYC March cohort (Mar - Jun 2018) and purposely waited to write my review until I accepted a job after completing the program.

App Academy has changed my life; within 8 months, I quit my old non-technical job, took the course, went... Read More through interviewing and accepted a job as a software engineer (have been working for 1 month now). I think very favorably of the program overall, but want to provide some quick bullets to answer questions that I know I had when considering if App Academy was right for me:

1. How long does it take to get a job after finishing the program?
- I feel very fortunate in that I was connected with a company with an App Academy alum at my graduation night (the final week of the program) and wrapped up my interview cycle with them in 2 weeks. This is not the norm, though. Expect your search on average to take anywhere from 4-9 months.

2. What is the average starting salary?
- My offer was just shy of $100k at a company in New York City. Friends of mine from App Academy who have gotten jobs in the past few weeks have all been offered slightly more than me, but I hear the average range is closer to $85-90k for App Academy graduates in the New York area.

3. What are the payment plan options?
- There are 3 choices: (1 - upfront) $17k all up front, (2 - hybrid) $9k up front and $14k in scheduled payments after accepting a job, and (3 - deferred) $5k upfront and $23k in payments after accepting a job. For #s 2 and 3, how you pay off the larger second amount depends on your starting salary; if you sign the alumni engagement agreement (you agree to mentor future students and show up at a/A events), your tuition will be capped at either 23% (hybrid) or 28% (deferred) of your starting salary and you'll pay the lower of that amount or the written amount that you owe. For example, if you accept a starting salary of $85k and you have chosen the hybrid plan, you'd only have to pay $10.55k back instead of the full $14k. Your payment schedule depends on your starting salary as well, but expect to pay between $1500 and $2000 monthly until you've paid back what you owe. If you don't accept a job after a year from when the program ends and you've been looking with a good faith effort, you get your money back.

4. Does App Academy force me to take the first job I get?
- No. You can choose to turn down offers that don't make sense for you, but I'm pretty sure if you do that and don't accept a job by the time the year after your program ends, you're still on the hook for tuition since you technically did get a job offer.

5. Will I feel prepared to join the workforce as a software engineer when the program is up?
- Imposter syndrome will tell you no, and that's not totally wrong. There is still so much that I want to learn about software development where I feel like I'm currently just scratching the surface. But, I do feel qualified for my current job. App Academy did a great job of teaching me both the fundamentals and how to learn things quickly that I don't know (Google is your friend! All developers, bootcamp or not, use it daily!). There's been nothing I've encountered at my job so far that I've had no idea how to handle.

6. Who are the instructors?
- The instructors are former App Academy students that most times are hired while they are still students, so they know the material very well but have not yet worked as developers outside of App Academy. The curriculum is developed by lead TAs who take the job very seriously and travel to conferences/attend meetups to make sure it is up-to-date and relevant.

7. Who will my classmates be?
- Students seem to vary in their backgrounds. Expect a cohort in NYC to be around 40 people though, and maybe 5 of them will have a CS degree. Closer to 1/3 might have previous light coding experience (SQL, basic JavaScript) from another job.

8. What languages will I learn and are they useful in the job market?
- App Academy will teach you Ruby, JavaScript, SQL, HTML and CSS as languages. More specifically, you'll learn Rails as a backend framework and React/Redux as frontend libraries to help you render web pages. Ruby is not used heavily anymore but is a great semantic starter language to help teach you how to code. React, from what I've seen, is where job demand is right now. My current team uses React.

9. Is it really possible to be successful in this program with no coding background?
- Yes. I had no coding background. That being said though, it takes a lot of work and determination to get up to speed. I did the JumpStart program through a/A which taught me coding basics for free after work over 4 weeks. Then once I was accepted, I meticulously when through the pre-cohort prep course (alpha course) before beginning classes. Take alpha seriously and make sure you understand it thoroughly; there's office hours for your questions.

10. Cons?
- It's a stressful environment where you can fail out if you don't pass 2 of the weekly exams. There are only 6 exams total so they don't last for your whole time in the program, but they are very high stress and require a strong ability to focus and mitigate any anxiety that this may induce for you. The prep resources are there to help you (there are always practice exams for you to take and TAs will occasionally have test walk-throughs to attend before the assessments) but you need to put the work in to succeed. My one complaint about App Academy is there is still room for improvement for how TA's provide emotional support to students who do not handle stress well. If that is you, you can still do this program - don't be discouraged! But you will have to go out of your way to ask for emotional support and feedback from your TAs and peers.

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... Read More 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.

This is the best place to go to if you need to learn a lot about coding in a short amount of time. It is definitely challenging but also rewarding when you get to full stack projects. The more I learn, the more I figure out that there is a lot I don't... Read More know about. But App Academy will teach you the fundamentals to learn other aspects of coding much quicker.

App Academy is an incredibly rewarding experience — I've been attending the program in SF for 9 weeks, and just finished the first section of the course, and I can't even describe how much I've enjoyed it. We've learned Ruby, SQL, Javascript, React, Redux,... Read More Rails, and completed a full-stack clone of an existing application. There are people of all ages and backgrounds here. The youngest being 17 (by a pretty wide margin), and the oldest 40+. There are quite a few CS majors, but also people with engineering, accounting, sales, etc. backgrounds. However, the gender ratio for this cohort was pretty bad: about 1/12 are female. There are definitely people who are a lot better at coding from the start than others, which may change over the course of the program, so be prepared for that.

In my opinion, these are the two most incredible parts of a/A:
1. How much you learn, and how fast you learn it. The workload is intense (see below), but you'll amaze yourself with how capable you are of absorbing it!
2. The people. The TA's are very intelligent and genuinely want to help you succeed. The culture is not competitive at all. Everyone supports each other. We help one another with bugs, explain concepts to those who are struggling, get lunch together, and generally have a good time while coding. This community is actually very important, especially considering that we spend at least 45 hours together/week.

When you apply and pass the interviewing process, you must complete an Alpha Course — essentially a pretty packed curriculum on the basics of Ruby and Object Oriented Programming. a/A recommends that you spend 4 weeks on this, which is definitely a good idea. However, completely it in less than that time is doable if you can fully commit all your time to doing it. I finished in less than 2 weeks, although I had some prior programming experience in Java. I also spent nearly the entirety of every day working on it.

Each day during the first section of the actual course looked pretty much the same, save the material we learned that day: 9am start, lecture for around 2 hours, then pair program for the rest of the day to practice the material taught in lecture, with a break for lunch and a brief one in the afternoon. After the school day is over, we do 1-3 hours of homework. The homework consists of readings/videos and a small assignment that cover the material for the next day, which will be reviewed during the lecture. This is why a/A is definitely a full-time commitment — really try to keep up, and this is totally doable if you are sufficiently motivated and allocate your time wisely. At first, it was pretty difficult to adjust to this schedule: my eyes would be really sore by Thursday of each week for the first 3 weeks, and there are no windows so it's a little stifling. However, by the end of that, I was fully adapted.

There are a total of 6 assessments spread across the first 8 weeks, and if you fail twice, and then fail a retake, you are kicked out, no exceptions. This is a really strict policy, and it's definitely a lot of pressure. About 25% of the people in my cohort were kicked out, so please consider this carefully. I failed the third assessment, and was really stressed for the rest, but passed them without a problem. These assessments really are not designed to get you or anything like that. They provide practice assessments, and as long as you do those until you can finish it in about half the time you get for the real assessment, you will be totally fine. Just make sure you understand the material — don't simply memorize!

Overall, an amazing experience, and I would definitely do it again given the choice.

Attending App Academy has been one of the most rewarding experiences I've had. There were many times where I felt completely lost, but the TA staff at App Academy was always super accommodating and willing to patiently teach any of us that needed the... Read More help. I can't thank them enough for the help they gave me every time I felt ready to give up. If you are willing to drop everything and commit 9 weeks to see if coding is for you, there isn't a program out there I'd recommend more so than App Academy.