A recent article compared coding bootcamps, and I was happy to see that App Academy still ranks at the very top.
I did not take a direct path to get into the IT industry. While I was interested in computers from a very early age (first computer when I was four!), my original major is in German law and business administration. Fast forward a few years and a move across the Atlantic, and I found myself with a profession that was not really in demand anymore. I found a job doing IT consulting and support. It paid the bills and my coworkers were great, but over time, I grew really, really bored and was looking for something else to do.
I considered going back to school for a proper CS degree, but then I heard about coding bootcamps and what they do. Now, at first, I was very, very sceptical. These schools are expensive, they only last for a few months - what could they possibly teach me in that time? And why would they care about my job chances afterwards since they’ll get paid either way?
App Academy caught my attention because of their business model - only pay upon graduation, and pay a percentage of your first year’s salary. This was interesting because now the school really needs students to succeed in the job market after graduation, otherwise they won’t get paid. So that took part of my second concern: With this model, the incentives of the school and the student align.
About my first concern, what they could possibly teach me in such a short time? Well, as it turns out, a lot. I had some decent prior coding experience, but nowhere near as much as they managed to cram into my skull in three months. Crucially, there is something else I learned, and that is how fast one can pick up new languages and frameworks. This is a skill that came in handy shorly after, when I started working as a developer for an Ivy League research university - but that is a story for another day.
The story of my education is not over, though. I’ve decided to go even further and enrolled at Georgia Tech for a Master’s degree in computer science. Judging from the sheer amount of material that program contains, this will be an even bigger challenge than App Academy was. Let’s see how it goes!