App Academy

Coming from someone with zero experience, I was legitimately scared to even apply to App Academy. I came from a startup and knew what it was like to work nights and weekends so the hours that I was seeing (90-100 / week) in order to excel at aA wasn't too worrisome, but with no coding experience I thought there was a chance I'd fail out.

There's no sugarcoating it, if you apply to aA say goodbye to your social life, let your family know you won't see them for a couple months, and you probably have to cancel whatever plans you have lined up in the coming months. But it's worth it. I started in April, and my end date (when the job search STARTS) is October 4th. It's September 30th today and I'm enjoying my week off because I accepted an offer last week. I worked incredibly hard to be where I am right now, I began interviewing early after being reached out to by numerous companies and received an offer before the job search actually began. I'm INCREDIBLY confident had I not applied early I would be in the same position, as the career coaches and material were SPOT ON from what I saw in my interviews. I would have actually had more success had I waited to apply -- I was under-prepared for numerous roles, which would have been taken care of if I had waited -- so I have nothing but positive things to say about Eli and the entire job search portion.

There is no way of knowing whether or not you're made for this unless you go and do it, so give it a try. The only thing you have to lose is some time and maybe some sleep -- but you have an entire new life to gain. Financial independence, work / life balance, a fulfilling job and endless connections. If you're even remotely on the fence about applying to aA, I hope you take the chance.

App Academy is a fast-paced program for getting you practical experience with many different relevant technologies in a very short amount of time. Right off the bat once the immersive portion kicked into high gear, we got exposure to Git, data structures, and we were pair programming daily through the day’s projects. The curriculum is well structured for layering in new technologies, and before you know it you’re familiar with relational databases and doing a deep dive into the inner workings of Rails. Things move at a bewildering pace, and it’s very easy to get caught off guard by this early on if you’re not careful.

The looming thought of getting kicked out over failing two assessments can be extremely unsettling, but this risk/reward setup also puts the entirety of the cohort into a hyper focused mindset. And it creates a unique environment for learning if you can sublimate the anxiety of it. Even through the online setup, it was surprising just how much there was a sense of community. You spend hours every day with your classmates, and even through a computer screen I felt like I got to know a lot of them really well. I don’t know how they’re able to isolate so many brilliant people into these cohorts, but they clearly have very efficient and calculated screening mechanisms in place to ensure they’re taking quality people into the program.

The TA’s are fantastic. The student to teacher ratio is very favorable for student teacher interactions, and they were consistently pivotal in getting me on track with the material on pace to get through the assessments. It’s a lot of information so be 100% prepared to have no life while you’re working through the curriculum. I thought 100 hours a week would be an exaggeration but I was consistently logging 95-100 hours each week studying the material straight through the weekend.

You get to build your own full stack project using the core stack of the curriculum, as well as other projects with additional technologies that you learn past the React portion of the course. They’re in a re-vamping phase with their curriculum with less of a focus on Ruby as far as I understand, so this is something to bear in mind moving forward. I’m confident that however they re-structure the curriculum will be just as effective as the current setup they have in place and I’m sure it’s necessary given the industry’s trending away from Rails, but any large scale overhaul of a curriculum carries with it at least some amount of risk.

I felt like the React portion was great. Past that things were still mostly well structured with minor hiccups. There were portions I felt were too rushed. For example, we had about a weekend to learn the MERN stack before we were working in a team to build an application in it that following week. Pieces of this curriculum might need some revision. Maybe something as simple as having at least one additional project with the MERN stack before having students code in a team environment in it. However I really enjoyed the Docker portion of the curriculum, and it was fun building an additional project with GraphQL / Apollo. I’ve heard this part of the curriculum is at the moment isolated to the online setups. You get to build a project in Vanilla JavaScript at the end of the course as well.

App Academy’s deferred payment plan was a strong draw for me personally. I felt that this established them as an institution willing to take on a lot of risk investing in the people they take into the program, and shows that they’re confident their curriculum will get people placed in well-paying positions upon finishing. I’d honestly like to see more institutions of higher education adopt a similar financing approach. There are pros and cons to deciding on doing the online setup instead of an in-person setup, and I do believe an in-person setup would have been very fulfilling. Some people would say the in person setup is vital to the whole App Academy experience. But I do like that the online setup at least had a longer space of time for absorbing the material. You get a month prior to the official immersive portion of the cohort to get solid with software engineering fundamentals. And the TA’s were always readily available to answer any questions I might have, so at least on the learning side there was nothing lost in translation going this route. An in person bootcamp really wasn’t feasible for me personally, and I would expect it’s not for many others planning on applying.

All things considered the past 24 weeks have been a grueling yet highly rewarding experience. You get out of it what you put into it, and you have to put a lot into it if you want to get through the totality of the curriculum.

App Academy was an amazing experience for me. The main factor that drew me to the program originally was the fact that it had an online option that still included the rigor and attention of a classroom atmosphere. I knew that I wanted to have a structured experience that would push me to continue learning the material at a regular pace. App Academy is definitely a challenging experience. There are a lot of concepts that are covered, but it is all presented in a way that allows you to absorb the material through application. The emphasis on pair-programming reinforces your understanding of the material by both constantly having someone else to bounce ideas off of as well as providing an opportunity to explain your thought process and code to another person. Participating in the program takes your full dedication, but is extremely rewarding in the amount of knowledge gained and the new doors that open up for a career in web development.

Aside from having material current to the day (e.g. Apollo), the staff and assistance was the best part.  Our lecturers and assistants were extremely sharp and super patient. They were personable and kind and did whatever they could to help us understand.

If you get in, work hard, harder, your hardest.  Learn to work with others. Learn to have self discipline.  This program will help you to become your best.

The content was practical, guided, and cathartic.  I cannot recommend this program enough. Thank you to Kush and Ned for creating such an awesome program.

After working 7 years as a Mechanical Engineer/Controls Engineer, I decided to take 24-weeks to study Web Development at AA. I joined the program last January (2019) and was part of the App Academy's first Online Cohort. We were a group of 8, spread across the US and even had a classmate living abroad, eating and sleeping on US Eastern time.

The program is very intense in terms of time commitment, where I spent every hour of the day and night studying (100hrs+ /week). But the more time I committed to study, the more I understood about each topic and learned. Each hour spent was worth it. 

If you really enjoy programming, you will love this program! You will have access to great TA/instructors, well-thought and detailed ressources. And learned all the skills you will need on the job.

Our initial cohort had Live Lectures from our instructor, where I was able to ask tons of questions to really understand very deeply each lecture. A minus point for future Online Cohorts, is that it may no longer be true as more recorded lectures started to get used right after our cohort. Even though, AA breaks it down so you can still ask questions every 45mins or hour. Staying engaged and awake while watching video lectures was never my strongest point. 

I have no regret though, the education was fantastic! Please give it a try and see whether it's for you!

App Academy is a 3 months (5 if you're taking the online portion) web development boot camp with a very low acceptance rate.  The program is 8 hours of new materials everyday with 6 assessments  sprinkled in to test you.  The curriculum is pretty good for the most part and the projects you do a good job of testing what you learned for the day's material.  The peers you work with from the Teacher Aids to your peers are all great people to work with.

Some of the curriculum material could use an update/ be fleshed out better.

Be prepare to work your butt offs when you do get in.

I'd been programming for several years and decided to do App Academy more as a "formalization" of my knowledge than as a way to "learn to code".  After all, I knew how to code.  Well, I was wrong.  I learned so much.   For example, a) The "why" behind many things I already knew how to do, thereby allowing for better decisions.  b) The practical value of data structures and algorithms I had previously written off as "computer science stuff", c) Effective pair programming - started out hating it, grew to love it.  d) A major raising of the bar in terms of what's possible - how about learning a new technology and using it to create something significant in 10 days?  If you have the tenacity to go after what you want, it's for you.  If you give up quickly when things get tough (long hours ahead), stay away!

Overall, this was definitely one of the most rewarding experiences I have had. I learned an incredible amount of information and feel confident in my skills as a software developer. You can tell that a lot of time and effort is put into the curriculum and that they are always striving to improve upon it. I believe that everyone on the teaching staff really cares about their students' success and are constantly going out of their way to make sure everyone is getting the help they need to succeed. I would recommend this course to anyone who is looking to transition careers into software development. 

I enrolled the last 12 weeks intensive bootcamp program at App Academy. Apparently they are changing the cohort to 16 weeks from now on.

Overall, App Academy is not the place where you just sit there and hoping someone would hold your hand to review through programming related materials. Sure, there is help provided if you request so, but it definitely takes effort and dedication to be successful at App Academy, and more importantly, to be successful at your future job after graduation. Self-motivation is the key to success here.

Even though I came from software developer background, the topics that App Academy taught us are pretty challenging, that I constantly find myself running out of time to study ahead of next day's material. Though, I did feel fulfilled and satisfied by the overwhelming topics that we have to read and understand because it is also probably one of the few way we could improve ourselves rapidly. 

My only suggestion to future students are: do not slack off during the weekend. I learned that the hard way...`

Overall, I had a great time during the 12-week in-person curriculum. While I did come in with an undergraduate CS degree, I feel that the material supplemented what I learned in college quite well (although a bit slow the first few weeks). But given my background, I did not find the pacing of the course to be all that intensive until the projects hit. There is definitely plenty to learn. They go in-depth enough on topics necessary to be considered a web developer but there are a lot of topics only briefly touched on to explore further on your own.

Pros:
 - TAs are extremely friendly and willing to help
 - Plenty of interesting projects to work on throughout the course
 - Pretty much everybody was fun and easy to work with

Cons:
 - Trying to get help during projects can lead to a lot of waiting for TAs
 - Homework could be more meaningful rather than a bunch of small segmented assignments
 - Be prepared to keep working hard over the weekends, especially for the full-scale projects toward the end of the course