Hack Reactor

I attended Hack Reactor from August through October 2013, and it was the most useful educational experience I've ever had.  I don't say that lightly, as I've attended two highly ranked universities.

Hack Reactor's value stems from both the sheer amount... Read More of knowledge they stuff into your head and the "how to solve problems like a programmer" ethos they distill into you.  On the knowledge side, I'd  say there are five distinct phases of the course: Precourse work, structured learning, individual projects, group projects, and the hiring phase.

The precourse work is intense and ramps you up to a speed at which you could probably go ahead an get hired as a junior developer (!!!).  You learn the basics of the distributed git workflow, reimplement the wildly popular Underscore.js library, build a twitter clone, and master recursion in a way that makes you familiar with the DOM.

The structured learning phase lasts for the first five weeks of Hack Reactor.  You're implementing JavaScript inheritance patterns and data structures by the end of the first week.  The four weeks after that are a marathon run through jQuery, a couple of different frameworks, algorithmic thinking, and complexity analysis.

After that, there's an individual project phase - at this point, you're turned loose to work on a personal passion project (which they must approve). There are also paid client projects available for those who want them.  This is a great time for people to work out kinks and learn how to hack on their own.

Once you've had this experience, students form groups and unleash their combined brain power on creating apps.  Some really impressive stuff has come out of this, e.g. http://redditInsight.com.

After that is the hiring phase. Hack Reactor hosts a hiring day at the start of the 11th week of the program and then provides interview support until, well, everyone gets a job... which doesn't usually take very long! Most people in my class got multiple six-figure offers.  Interestingly, a massive amount of learning seems to take place during those two weeks, too, as people all go nuts solving ridiculous toy problems that interviewers threw in front of them together.

I'm giving Hack Reactor 5 stars.  The 3 months I spent there have launched me into a more productive, high-paying, and satisfying job than I could have ever gotten otherwise.

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I went through the Hack Reactor program, and counter to their excellent advice on how to manage a job search, I accepted an offer to work there before the founder could even complete his sentence, and without even having gone into compensation. Getting... Read More accepted is a strange type of challenge - it's now how much you know, but how you learn, that seems to make the difference. As such, the syllabus doesn't tell the whole story. Graduates have gone on to work in software engineering, web development, data science and more managerial roles.

It was such a captivating environment that I was irate at having to go home at night. I went from having next to zero software background (minus dabbling with CodeSchool etc) to writing scaled distributed computing networks that got their fair share of attention, all thanks to the people in the room, be it my peers or the instructors, very senior engineers, and solid operators who know what they are doing.