| | Bob Stauss | The Burlington Code Academy was a great experience for me. After years of working in restaurants, and living the ski-bum lifestyle I was ready to find a job that would actually engage me intellectually, and wouldn't crush my soul. Unfortunately my double major in religious studies, and fine art didn't exactly leave me with a lot of employment opportunities without first going back to school for a graduate degree. While wandering around the internet in search of an alternative I stumbled across BCA. I was a little wary of draining my savings, and giving up working for three months to learn a skill set that I had no prior knowledge of with no guarantee of a job on the other side. Despite my reservations I took a chance, applied, and got accepted. The course was great. At some points I felt like my brain was going to explode because I was learning so many new things, but that's exactly what I was looking for. This course is very intense; you're going to be in class 40 hrs/week with probably another 10-20 hrs of work and reading outside of class, but at the end you come out with all the skills you need to build a full stack web app using a variety of technologies. Josh Burke (the lead instructor) is great. He has a deep knowledge of programming, experience working in the field both as a freelancer, and in a corporate setting, and he has tons of extra resources he's more than willing to share on a variety of topics. Don't feel like you need a background in computer science, or programming to apply for this course. All you need is a desire to learn, and a critical mind. A love of logic puzzles doesn't hurt either, as I've found the closest parallel to programming is not mathematics (as I thought before starting this course) but logic puzzles. |
