App Academy

I attended App Academy in July 2017. Overall, my experience was positive and I think the course gave me the tools I need to get a job as a web developer.

Pros: 
- Great curriculum: The pace is extremely fast and it constantly feels like you're barely keeping up but the structure of the course with the weekly assessments keeps you on track and at the end, you realize you know more that you think you do. 
- Great staff: The Instructors / TAs are available to answer questions throughout the day and they're good at helping you arrive at the right solution to the problem instead of feeding you the answers. 
- Projects: You leave the program with 3 projects on your resume which you've built on your own.

Cons: 
- As the other reviews mention, expect to spend 90+ hours a week doing this. You will have very little time to do anything else. 
- With the speed of the course and the weekly assessments, it can be very easy to fall behind and there's little to no time to catch up. 
- The end of the course can seem a bit rushed as you rush to complete your resume and portfolio and start applying to jobs.

The past few months have been some of the most intense in my entire life. It really is surprising how much material they were able to pack into three months. In a way it's almost too much to tackle at once; it takes a lot of mental and emotional fortitude to get through and really pushed me to my limits. I've made it through, but I came close many times to crashing and burning. Iif I had more time to prep myself mentally I would have waited a few months, but circumstance dictated that I get started as soon as possible. It was worth it in the end, but really difficult.

The upside of being at App Academy is that you know they have your back. The students and TAs are very supportive of one another and will help see you through a multitude of challenges, technical or otherwise. The best part is that this support continues until you've accepted a job offer! Don't be afraid to open up to the TAs; they really are there for you.

•  55 reviews

Great way to learn something new while paying a deferred cost. As with what everyone said, the program gives you the tools to acquire new skills at a blistering pace. The TAs know their stuff, and while you may not realize it as you're going through the program, everything falls into place at the end of it all, when you realize you're able to make things you never thought you could make, while learning the skillset to be able to learn new things on your own.

It's very enjoyable to be able to build applications that we use in our every day lives. You understand the process in how popular websites are made, and you start to respect the amount of work and detail that went into popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Yelp. Now you can create your own if you like!

App Academy was one of the hardest yet most rewarding thing I've ever been through.  I can't say enough about the people who are apart of this bootcamp.  All of the TAs are incredible programmers, who can articulate complex algorithms, theories and concepts in a very understandable way.
The course is fast paced, but laid out in a way that keeps building on what you've learned the days before.  I can't believe it was only 3 months long and now I can build websites, games and understand complex programming and engineering concepts.
It's amazing that after going through this bootcamp, I can switch careers and grow in an industry I love.

I came in with a little bit of programming experience - enough to know a few basic data structures and the difference between HTML and Ruby, but as I soon learned, not very much at all. The amount of information I learned in the first few days combined to be more knowledge than I had about programming previously. The course has a ton of great TA's, so even if you are feeling overwhelmed, there's always someone to talk to for help. Classmates come from all backgrounds and walks of life, but pretty much everyone was the same beginner when sitting down at the computer to pair. Because everyone is there for the same reason (to learn and become developers) everyone is willing to help out each other. 
One warning: the course isn't lying when they say you will spend upwards of 90 hours a week programming. There is plenty of work to do outside of the classroom, and you'll want to do all of it to make sure you don't fall behind. The information is actually quite interesting and the lecture videos are well done, but it will be in your favor to keep on top of the work. 
There's also a great alumni network to help find jobs after the course is officially finished. Because App Academy is one of the few long-lasting coding bootcamps, companies have learned that their graduates are different than other bootcamp graduates and are more willing to give potential employees the time of day. 
Overall, I had a great experience at App Academy. It nurtures a collaborative atmosphere unlike many other places of learning. Come prepared to class each day, get plenty of rest, and there's no reason you too can't succeed at App Academy.

If you are interested in pursuing software development as a career App Academy will definitely get you there. When other reviews point out that it is really hard and intense they are not lying, but they payoff is more than enough to justify it. You get out of it as much as you put into it. There methodology and curriculum is excellent. Everything is finely crafted so students can get as much as possible from every day at App Academy. Each day you'll leave knowing some new tool or skill you did not know that same morning. The immersive nature of the program really goes a long way.

Pros: App Academy teaches you more information than you'd be able to pick up on your own. They consolidate the most important things in the industry, and package them for you to learn within a span of 8 weeks. However, even taking that into consideration, App Academy's greatest asset is the people. By that I mean, the instructors are extremely helpful and knowledgeable, and your fellow cohort members will be extremely hard working which will push you to work hard as well.

Cons: This will take over your life for 2 - 3 months. There are some outliers where some students get through just fine without spending 90+hrs a week, however for the vast majority, I'd say 90+hrs is the norm. Granted, you're learning so much in within that 2-3 month span, it shouldn't be too surprising how much time you're putting in.

I have a tech background including a good deal of time teaching myself programming and I still learned a ton at App Academy. I had no luck at all trying to apply to jobs when teaching myself. I feel that App Academy gave me the discipline to put together a portfolio I can feel proud of. It also filled in the gaps I had in my knowledge.

I suggest anyone applying to learn a bit on their own beforehand. Even with my self taught knowledge the course was very intense. Some people were able to go from a completely unrelated field and thrive but I feel like it is better to get some practice in first.

Overall App Academy was a great experience and I highly recommend them.

When I was applying to boot camps, I did so simultaneously, to about 4 different boot camps. One of them accepted me right off the bat and I knew they were the wrong choiced. Others asked me to accomplish things in coding challenges that were far beyond my skill level without offering any instruction or legitimate curriculum. 

With App Academy, the application process was very challenging, but you are given every opportunity to succeed via their resources. Also, the actual challenges they give you are algorithm challenges, very similar to whiteboarding questions you may get when you interview for a Developer position. This is in contrast to other challenges that ask you to build a Rails Twilio application or some other project that is very practical in nature. 

Yes, building an application is a great way of finding out whether someone is a good programmer, but it tells you nothing of their potential. However, if you teach someone some basic programming principles and data structures: what is a string? an array? etc. and then ask them to solve a question that uses those data structures, it is a much better way to guage someones potential by seeing if they are capable of applying what they are learning. Building a full application is much too difficult a task to ask of a newbie without spelling out every step and at that point, you may as well just write the code for them.

So aside from the deffered tuition (which is nice), the application process is what got me hooked on App Academy.

Once you get in, first the first few weeks all you want to do is survive. You will be kicked out if you fail two exams. The first people to go are people who can't type (it's painful to watch them type with only their index fingers) and people who don't speak English as their first language. That's not to say that everyone who doesn't speak English as their first language will fail, not what I am saying. However, the sheer amount of information that will be thrown at you is mind numbing and every lick of it is in English. If there is no language barrier, you still only absorb ~75-85% of what you are taught. If there is a language barrier, that percentage drops. This makes it difficult to keep up in a very fast paced environment. I noticed the people who spoke English as a second language and did well in the class either had prior coding experience or were just insanely sedulous and dedicated to the craft. It can be done, but it is certainly harder.

Once you make it past the survival phase, which is after the fourth assessment (say week 4), then you start to think, "Ok, I don't want to just survive anymore, I want to excel." This is where the course gets really exciting because you begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. You start to think about things like a programmer. You get re-programmed. That's what this program does to you, it programs you to be a programmer (you like what I did there?).

If you're smart, you may be wondering, "Well what are some flaws, some bad things about App Academy". The one thing I can point to, which I got over once I bought into the program is this: you are not attending a/A to create a startup when you graduate. I have a ton of ideas for startups, yes, but if it's one thing I learned during my time at a/A, it's that programming is very hard and it will take time (and more importantly, work experience) for you to be good. The goal of an a/A graduate is to get a job, not to start a company with a cool new application that revolutionizes an industry. Get a job, pay us back, get some experience, and then go start a company. That is the message and to be honest, I agree with it. Now some other bootcamps, like Full Stack Academy, have avenues for students to pursue their startup aspirations. This is a luxury that only a school who is already paid can afford. At a/A, they don't make money unless you do and most startups don't make money, they cost money (trust me, I know firsthand). 

Now, if they don't get paid unless you do, that means they have a vested interest in your getting paid. This system of deffered tuition is one that Milton Friedman espoused in his book Free To Choose. He devised this as a way to pay for education without the government paying for it, but admitted it would be very difficult to implement. Well, App Academy implemented and guess what, it works! The curriculum kicks ass. It is laid out in such a way that each topic builds on the next and moves very quickly so that every week your knowledge grows exponentially. I'm not going to go into specifics on the curriculum, the website does that. But I will say that I remember thinking often, "Wow, this curriculum is so good." Thank Ned Ruggeri et al!

In summary, and this has been a long review, I highly recommend App Academy.