App Academy

I thoroughly enjoyed being in class, working with peer students and sharing knowledge with each other. TA's are very helpful and they make all efforts to make students understand the concept well. Assessments make you feel the pressure, but they will make sure to give all practice materials to get through the assessments with ease. Pair programming is best and a/A wanted students to get best out of it focussing on understanding the material rather than project completion.

Projects at the end are really helpful to have deeper understanding of the material from the start. If you are willing to spend all your time and effort for the duration of the course, then go for it. Good Luck! Read less

For people who are looking for a career change this is a great way to jumpstart your career as a software developer! You are given the tools to make yourself a desirable employee but what you get out of App Academy will depend on what you put in. If you're willing to put in the work and 90-100 hour weeks, you will come out with a great foundation to start your new career. Coming from a technical background, the material was not terribly difficult to comprehend but the amount of new material thrown at you constantly made it difficult to keep up. This was a great experience for me and would highly recommend this to anyone currently searching for bootcamps or looking to improve their knowledge of programming. Read less

App Academy was a great way of diving into software engineering and meeting like-minded people. It’s not over the top difficult and I’ve found it to be extremely rewarding. The instructors are very knowledgeable and friendly so any confusion will always be short-lived. Read less

If you're motivated and ready to put in the hard work, app academy's course structure will help you learn a lot in a fairly short amount of time.  Don't expect to get too much help from the TAs in the later part of the course, because students to TA ratio is quite high and takes about 2-3 hrs in average to get a question answered. But it does teach you how to seek out answers the hard way. Overall, it's been a great experience, and I definitely learned a lot. Read less

My time at App Academy was filled with chaos but I enjoyed every minute of it. I learned concepts and technologies I would need to learn how to be a back-end and front-end engineer. There were weekly assessments which were kind of stressful but if you put the hours in they're not that hard to pass. Towards the end we got to pick a website and make a clone of it, it was up to us to design the back-end and we used the actual website for our front-end design docs. The TA's were exceptional and helped out in any way that they could. This program is definitely not for the faint of heart or for people who can't put 80+ hours per week towards this. Although they teach you technologies such as Ruby on Rails, React, and SQL theres no way they can teach you everything there is to these technologies, the most important skill you pick up and hone during your time at the program is the ability to pick up new languages and frameworks extremely fast. I got a job at an App Academy hiring event and my career coach was extremely helpful with navigating the whole process. All in all, it was the best decision I've ever made and I would do it all over again. Read less

I never regret getting into App Academy, it was challenging but definitely awarding. I learned a lot of skills including backend and frontend to prepare myself to become a full-stack engineer. As long as you work hard and put effort, you will gain a lot out of the program.  Read less

Very fast class with helping with a group of good people. At the end will help you build your projects for CV. Some of the job search lecture is kinda pointless, but with the personal support that they give you, it will help you find a job.  Do wish it will have more React and Redux that they will go over. Read less

The curriculum covers so many topics that are actually useful for getting a job. It is very face-paced so if you're not a quick learner, you'll struggle a lot and might even fail out of the program. Like all others said in their reviews, this is definitely not for everyone. To get most out of the program, you need to be mentally, physically, financially, and intellectually ready. Read less

I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. It took a lot of work though! Really do look at giving appacademy a go! They have the best people for sure and an ideal location in the city of San Francisco... I really liked it and felt it helped me learn a lot of new things Read less

Rigorous training that will get your skills up to industry standards in a few short months. Three large projects at the end of the course give you a good amount practical experience and knowledge so you can build your own projects, for either your own portfolio or for future employers. Deferred tuition plan ensures you do not pay salary until you find a job. Read less

I think their curriculum is great and very well planned out. Very small portions are not up to date and some of the videos aren't the best, but all the written material is a great starting point to point you in the right direction. For the price, it would be great if they could somehow get more experienced instructors and lecturers, but maybe that's not feasible. The job search support/guidelines seems very thorough/top-notch.

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Pros:

  Friendly Staff, a good conducive environment to learning. Students help each other, and staff are often willing to go the extra mile to help you. Staff have varying levels of expertise.

  Projects are mostly interesting, difficult, but ultimately, rewarding. You'll be building your own websites from scratch by the time you're done.

  You get an introduction to many topics (Ruby Rails SQL JS HTML CSS React Redux  MongoDB ...). You're introduced to many relevant programming topics, and the curriculum will get you going on building a website.

  Career coaches and staff seem helpful, friendly, and it seems like the job assistance portion will be great. I will update this review only when I interact with them more.

Cons:

  The program is fast and can be intense. You often only do get an introduction. The curriculum towards the end starts to diminish in quality as it's still new and trying to keep up with the current market. This often means that you just reuse their code and read through the documentation. Another con is that towards the end of the program, as you get more complicated in your projects and errors, the staff won't be able to help as much. It's justifiable because you do need to become independent and that you can't be expected to know absolutely everything that could have gone wrong, but it can also be frustrating when you've been debugging for 2-5 hours.

 

  There's a lot more to do after the program ends if you want a job, and I think if you're completely new to the program, you may want to factor in an extra month or two to wrap up projects and prep for interviews.

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Rigorous curriculum. Knowledgeable staff. Amazing community. App Academy provides a transformative experience that enables aspiring developers to take it to the next level. I'm confident that the skills and lessons I've learned in this program will allow me to hit the ground running and immediately provide value.

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App academy is a fast-paced no frills experience. This course expects a lot from its students, both in time and in dedication. I have a lot of respect for people in non-tech related backgrounds with the courage and drive to make it through this course. I come from a technical background and came out learning a great deal about how to think critically, write clean and modular code, and create full-stack applications. 

If you are curious about how to create applications AND the fundamentals that make up programming, App Academy would be a good fit.

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You will learn more than you thought was possible in 3 months. The environment cultivated by the curriculum, the TAs, and your fellow students is one where there's almost a compulsion to keep working to just keep up. In 16 weeks you will be able to build full stack projects, both solo and as a group and have a solid foundation in JS, Rails, React, and more. The curriculum is solid and definitely speeds up the initial learning pains of learning a new project/building applications from scratch. They have built a formula that works, and having structure and guidance in the madness that is software development and job search was certainly one of my favorite aspects of the program.

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Pair Programming allowed me to learn the intricacies of backend development in the most immersive manner.  Looking back to the first day, I barely was able to grasp the concept of implicit returns in Ruby, and now I am able to genralize json data from an into a series of position and scaling algorithms in the D3.js library. This Journey has been surreal. App Academy is an extremely difficult course, yet very gratifying.

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Definitely a full-time commitment. Coursework really pushed you to learn a ton of new things in a short amount of time. If diving head-first into programming and making a big life change is your goal, this is a good place to learn quickly, even if it sometimes feels like being thrown into the deep end. Made a lot of good friends. Heavy emphasis on paired programming. Assessment policy is very strict and there is more to learn than there is time in the day -- expect it to feel stressful and be ok with not being able to finish everything.

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I can attest that App Academy works: I went in knowing only what I dimly remembered from intro comp sci back in college, and I’m about to start my first job as a software engineer.

I’d say the greatest strengths of the program are the challenge, the support, and the accountability. The principal three-month curriculum is incredibly intense—expect 60-hour weeks at absolute minimum—but it takes you through the skills and concepts you need to know and forces you to put in the necessary work to really learn them. The instructors and TAs, though they can occasionally be overwhelmed (many are graduates of the course), are always on hand to offer helpful feedback that’s often critical to bringing together your understanding of a concept. It’s all about putting you in a structure that incentivizes you to actually put in the work, and this continues even after graduation, as you get individualized coaching and reporting tools that make sure you regularly apply to jobs and continue working on projects and coding challenges. This is especially valuable because the job search can take time—around three months in my case—and you’ll absolutely have more to learn after you graduate. Twelve weeks can’t cover every nuance of software engineering.

As far as downsides, the instruction is sometimes shaky, as I said above, though years in business have polished the curriculum to the point where you’ll usually have pre-prepared resources to help you out if worst comes to worst. Your continued participation in the course depends on you passing the regular assessments, which is a major source of stress even if you have a handle on the material and prepare well. The assessments themselves also can feel more like tests of memorization than genuine reflections of how much you’ve learned. Last but not least, despite App Academy’s stated (and admirable) goal of bringing people from more diverse backgrounds into the tech industry, most of the classes seem to be overwhelmingly male, even more so than the industry as a whole. That won’t be an issue for everybody, but it’s worth mentioning.

Still, I have no regrets. It was an extremely valuable learning experience for me and, obviously, it got me a job.

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It's very grueling, but at the end of the day, I think that it is worth it. I cannot tell about job outcomes as I am just starting my job search, nevertheless, it does seem promising. But one thing that I would investigate is whether it is a better fit for you to learn Ruby or Python for the backend, as Ruby is what is taught here. Regardless, I think that the skillset that you gain here will allow you to switch between languages and frameworks fairly easily.

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