App Academy

I am approaching the end of the main  curriculum as part of the 12 week full stack web development course in NYC and my experience thus far has been very positive. It is an extremely rigorous course, it is no exaggeration that it will require your total attention 10+ hours a day every single day for 3 months straight. That said, I feel I have learned more in that short period of time than at any other time in my life. I would highly recommend it for anyone looking to make a career change that is able to stay focused and is self motivated enough to stick with it

I have not yet started the 3 week job search curriculum, so I can't comment on that yet though I know people who have had positive experiences and outcomes with it

The App Academy curriculum is filled with a ton of good material that I wasn't always able to cover because of how fast the course went. That said, I definitely learned more than I would have at any other institution or on my own.  The fullstack, JavaScript, and flex project are the three projects we work on during the curriculum and really  shape our portfolios. The JavaScript and flex projects are  part of the job search curriculum which I feel should be structured a little better in regards to the schedule. The JavaScript and  Flex projects are crucial to our portfolios but we only get a week for each  while having to attend multiple lectures throughout the day but I suppose that's why it's called a boot camp. The TA's for the first part of the course were amazing and are the highlight of App Academy--the job search TAs are amazing as well but they seem slightly understaffed.

For three months, all you'll be doing will be is eating, coding, and sleeping. You won't have anytime to do anything else since you'll be swamped with work everyday. To become a good developer in three months, you'll definitely have to be putting in work and it'll be rewarded at the end. My time at App Academy was amazing. I met a lot of great people coming from all different kinds of backgrounds and from all over the world. In the beginning, I was struggling a bit, but with all the TA help and peers around you, you'll have all the help you need. I can't even express how much knowledge I gained over the first two months at App Academy (with one more month to go in the curriculum). So if you ever think about switching careers and  you have an interest in web development, i'll definitely recommend applying to App Academy. 

There's no faster way on the planet to pick up this skillset. The load is heavy, equivalent to taking 24 credits of upper division credits. Expect to spend 13+ hours a day focusing on new material. Expect to be confused most of the time. Expect to have a blast with your new best friends. You will not have time to achieve mastery of a topic before moving on to the next. If that's a problem for you, walk away now and pick a slower-paced course. You get the first taste of a new topic in the homework, the second taste in the lecture, and the third taste during the daily pairing project. There's a lot of stumbling, and that's ok -- the course is based on repetition, so you do pick up the skills, so long as you put the time in. That said, it's only when you look back on what you've done that you can really appreciate how far you've come. Embrace the confusion, and come out successful.

This program requires quite a bit of work and effort, but it is worth it. Coming in, I had very little notion of what it meant to write good code or build web applications, but I have learned a lot through this process. The highlight for me was the curriculum. We start off learning basic Ruby syntax and object-oriented programming, move on to (a very light sprinkling of) algorithms, then Rails, user authentication, javascript, and finally React/Redux. In retrospect, the structure of the curriculum makes it feel like you learn the building blocks of web applications from the ground up. I have a lot (a lot!) to learn, but aA has definitely brought me to a good place in terms of self sufficiency. 

Things to note: 
- If you fail two tests, they will kick you out (no exceptions). They want everybody to be at least getting 85/90% on everything. This is sad if you start to befriend someone who then leaves...
- Shortcuts are great. Learning small shortcuts on Mac has improved not just my coding flow but also my own experience browsing the web. 
- You really have to spend a lot of time on the program. I had been living in NYC for a couple years before aA, so early on I just got used to telling friends that I couldn't hang out for like another month or two. That being said, if you do a good job studying you can usually buy yourself some weekend time (e.g. I attended  few parties and weddings during the course). 
- Expect collaboration. You are pair programming everyday, which means taking turns 'driving' an 'navigating' every 15 minutes or so. I usually enjoy solving problems alone, but I actually really appreciated this aspect of the program. The few days where we worked solo ended up being pretty lonely...

Full disclosure: I'm getting a hoodie for writing this review. I don't believe that sways my opinion, but I feel it's fair that you know the context.

I'm writing this review having just completed my first 9 weeks of App Academy. In the last 9 weeks, (really 13 since there's about 4 weeks of prepwork assigned before the course starts), I've gone from 0 experience as a web developer to having created my own full stack web app using a Ruby on Rails backend with a React with Redux frontend. I can't speak yet to the quality of their job search curriculum, which I will go through over the next 3 weeks, but I will say that their full stack curriculum is absolutely effective for a few reasons. First, you should know that some of the students, roughly 15% in my cohort, were dismissed for not passing assessments before completing the curriculum, so being accepted is only the beginning of the journey. The ones who made it through are absolutely better programmers for having gone through the program. Many of my classmates started with little to no experience programming, and are full-fledged web developers now.

I think this is mostly due to the amount of reps as a programmer that you get through the course. Every day, there are 2 hours of lecture, and then you peer program for 5-6 hours. Then there are homeworks and readings to do before you get to class. Shower, sleep, and repeat for 9 weeks. Peer programming is a process through which you sit down and talk through and try to solve problems with someone else. There are many factors conducive to learning and skill development at play during this time.

First, learning to verbalize your approach to a problem is immensely helpful to refining and solidifying knowledge. Second, having the accountability to keep trying to solve the problem and having help when you need it keeps the learning process moving. Third, an understated part of programming is looking up and researching documentation, which you will get a lot of practice doing. Last but not least, you are experiencing the same thing while you drive and your partner navigates, so you have the benefit of differing perspectives every day. Before I started a/A, I thought these skills were something I could learn on my own, but would be faster with a teacher. That's partly true, but it's also true that your fellow students aid in the learning process immensely. If I were describing a/A to a prospective applicant, I would tell you to look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity to work hard and learn. That's all it is. It's intense, but if you make it out, you will have absolutely developed hard, bankable skills as a programmer.

Hi, I took the 4 week AppAcademy "bootcamp prep" course which wasn't very difficult and I was able to complete all of the exams without really studying. That being said,  I do feel that the course covered Javascript pretty well and I may have learned one or two things I didn't know beforehand. However, I didn't have the greatest experience after the course ended. There wasn't help with applying to schools and I felt totally unprepared for the non-technical interview which may have been partially my fault (even though I read all of the material for the interview and spent much time writing out what I was going to say). I think they could have covered this at least a little bit in the course I spent $3,000 on. Please make an informed decision when attending any school of the like and don't make the same mistake as me.