6 ms·

Show HN: App Academy Open – Free Online Coding Bootcamp

79 points by CesareBorgia 8y ago

CesareBorgia 8y ago
Hey all! We launched App Academy on HN 6 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505752), and since then a lot’s happened. We’ve graduated and placed thousands of folks as engineers and actually placed more people as software engineers at Google (30 vs 22) than UC Berkeley has since 2016! Today, we are fulfilling a dream that I’ve had for some time: to put the whole curriculum online, for free. We’ve built a learning platform around it and we’re really excited to give people a taste (or the whole thing!) of the curriculum to help you understand what we’re about.
- byproxy 8y ago
  What does the paid service offer that this free one doesn't? I'm assuming career guidance/placement. If that's the case, will completing this free offering still grant me access to a better career?
  - skinnymuch 8y ago
    Free version teaches you things. Just like many other resources of self-learning. In that way it gives you access to a better career. Not sure what else you might mean.
    - byproxy 8y ago
      Yes, of course. I wasn't trying to denigrate that aspect. Just wondering if there were any other perks the paid version provides.
  - CesareBorgia 8y ago
    We have 2 paid options. The mentorship option is a $29.99/month subscription to a Slack channel (i.e. chat room) with one or more App Academy instructional staff 60 hours a week (M-F 6AM-6PM). If it sounds like an insanely good deal, that's because it is :) The placement based plan is the same experience as our full-time, in-person course, but online. You get instructional support, live q&a, pair programming, career support, etc. On this option, we don't get paid until you find a job, so we keep fighting until you do. In that case, it's 17% of your salary for two years, up to $30k total.
    - byproxy 8y ago
      Great, thanks for the response!
- berkeleycsmajor 8y ago
  What is your source for placing more software engineers at google the UC Berkeley? Looking at the 2017 career destination surveys https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2017Majors https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2017Majors Computer Science https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2017CompSci.pdf https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2... has 21 Software engineers at google from the 40% who responded to the survey and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2017EECS.pdf https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2... has 15 Software engineers at google from the 41% who responded.
minimaxir 8y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233
- CesareBorgia 8y ago
  Dupe submission was allowed by mods through HN’s second-chance queue system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
  - minimaxir 8y ago
    Gotcha.
bruceb 8y ago
The quote from the learner: "I learned more real-world skills in 12 weeks than my Stanford degree taught me" reminds me of that both ways penguin meme. On one hand shows App Academy is "better" than Stanford. On the other hand to be successful one already has to have a degree from a top 3 school. That being said nice job having the materials available for free
- CesareBorgia 8y ago
  Lol good point. It is worth mentioning that a lot of folks with no college degree (sometimes without a high school degree) have successfully been placed in awesome dev jobs with this same curriculum through App Academy. Folks from top 3 (or even top 25) schools are definitely in the minority at App Academy.
- anonymous5133 8y ago
  That's because we live in the old way of thinking (degree = smart, no degree = you are an idiot). Overtime, I can see that way of thinking slowly degrading, especially as more people are exposed to high-quality online courses.
jraby3 8y ago
This program looks incredible. I just want to thank you for putting something like this out there for free.
lim098 8y ago
What is the curriculum? Is it web development or mobile development?
- CesareBorgia 8y ago
  Web dev. The stack is Rails/React/Redux but we do spend a significant amount of time on language/framework agnostic skills so that folks can pick up new tech fast and so that they have the tools to transition into other fields of software engineering such as mobile.
nezaj 8y ago
Congrats Kush and team! Happy graduate from 2013 here :) Keep up the great work!
skinnymuch 8y ago
Almost all the work hours (vast majority) seem to be for the projects in the sections I looked at that I’m interested in. But the projects are almost entirely done on your own with little guidance. For a project that’s supposed to take 6 hours for example, maybe the equivalent of 2 pages of content is given for it. I was hoping it would be more involved than that. Still great to release the content of course!
Kaveren 8y ago
> "I learned more real-world skills in 12 weeks than my Stanford degree taught me." I'd hope the author of that quote was paying very little attention, because I find this hard to swallow. My problem with these programming bootcamps is that they seem almost more focused on a shallow but fun dive than teaching people thoroughly. That's not problematic in it of itself if it gets people interested, but I'd hunch a guess that most of the graduates of these bootcamps are not going on to self-study more intensely after. In my opinion, these bootcamps generally teach you to be a barely average web developer. If you are sufficiently self-motivating, self-study is a great idea, but you don't need a bootcamp for this. I'm not one to judge people on whether or not they have a degree, but I think there is real value in an equivalent curriculum for self-studying. If I have the choice to hire someone fresh out of a web development bootcamp and someone who was self-studying compiler design, I'm hiring the compiler design person every time, even if it's a web development job. I don't know why this is teaching jQuery anymore. But why do you need this course for JavaScript when you have the excellent MDN guides for beginners to use? I think people are afraid of reading and prefer to be spoonfed. If you want mentorship, there's usually a good subreddit, Discord or Slack server that doesn't cost you $30 / month. I'm just extremely skeptical of the value that any of these bootcamps bring. AppAcademy appears to bring good results for hiring, but I don't believe that it's the most effective method of learning.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- soneca 8y ago
  As a self-taught web dev, I don't think I could find any "mentorship" in reddit, discord or Slack. This is like saying HN substitute for YC office hours with experienced mentors. Knowing a few people from bootcamps, it is clear to me that it is not "fun", it is work. Your impression that bootcamps are for people who do not want to read anymore is plain wrong. And self-teaching and bootcamps are not excludent. Actually, I was told that this is exactly what make a difference between bootcampers. The ones who think that all you need from bootcamp is the certificate, usually fail to have a career in software development. The ones that understand that the bootcamp is only the beginning, an accelerator and guidance for your learning, and you have to self-teach you a lot of things, those succeed.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Is there any way to get the free content without running javascript from your site in my browser, giving you my email, or signing up for anything? Ideally I'd just like some links to the PDFs or videos I can wget without any further hassle.
mike22223333 8y ago
Wages are not rising, what is the use of flooding the market?
- jeffnv 8y ago
  Incredibly selfish opinion. If you want more money for yourself, become a better asset to an employer and learn to negotiate. You don't move up by holding down the rest of the world.
  - mike22223333 8y ago
    Before a man was getting paid 40k a year. Now his wife joins. Congratulations, you both fools now get paid 20k each.
cronopios 8y ago
Is there anything similar but based on Python rather than Ruby?
__initbrian__ 8y ago
anybody want to form a long term study group?

79 points by CesareBorgia 8y ago

Hey all! We launched App Academy on HN 6 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505752), and since then a lot’s happened. We’ve graduated and placed thousands of folks as engineers and actually placed more people as software engineers at Google (30 vs 22) than UC Berkeley has since 2016! Today, we are fulfilling a dream that I’ve had for some time: to put the whole curriculum online, for free. We’ve built a learning platform around it and we’re really excited to give people a taste (or the whole thing!) of the curriculum to help you understand what we’re about.

byproxy 8y ago
What does the paid service offer that this free one doesn't? I'm assuming career guidance/placement. If that's the case, will completing this free offering still grant me access to a better career?
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  Free version teaches you things. Just like many other resources of self-learning. In that way it gives you access to a better career. Not sure what else you might mean.
  - byproxy 8y ago
    Yes, of course. I wasn't trying to denigrate that aspect. Just wondering if there were any other perks the paid version provides.
- CesareBorgia 8y ago
  We have 2 paid options. The mentorship option is a $29.99/month subscription to a Slack channel (i.e. chat room) with one or more App Academy instructional staff 60 hours a week (M-F 6AM-6PM). If it sounds like an insanely good deal, that's because it is :) The placement based plan is the same experience as our full-time, in-person course, but online. You get instructional support, live q&a, pair programming, career support, etc. On this option, we don't get paid until you find a job, so we keep fighting until you do. In that case, it's 17% of your salary for two years, up to $30k total.
  - byproxy 8y ago
    Great, thanks for the response!
berkeleycsmajor 8y ago
What is your source for placing more software engineers at google the UC Berkeley? Looking at the 2017 career destination surveys https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2017Majors https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2017Majors Computer Science https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2017CompSci.pdf https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2... has 21 Software engineers at google from the 40% who responded to the survey and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2017EECS.pdf https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2... has 15 Software engineers at google from the 41% who responded.

minimaxir 8y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233

CesareBorgia 8y ago
Dupe submission was allowed by mods through HN’s second-chance queue system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)
- minimaxir 8y ago
  Gotcha.

bruceb 8y ago

The quote from the learner: "I learned more real-world skills in 12 weeks than my Stanford degree taught me" reminds me of that both ways penguin meme. On one hand shows App Academy is "better" than Stanford. On the other hand to be successful one already has to have a degree from a top 3 school. That being said nice job having the materials available for free

CesareBorgia 8y ago
Lol good point. It is worth mentioning that a lot of folks with no college degree (sometimes without a high school degree) have successfully been placed in awesome dev jobs with this same curriculum through App Academy. Folks from top 3 (or even top 25) schools are definitely in the minority at App Academy.
anonymous5133 8y ago
That's because we live in the old way of thinking (degree = smart, no degree = you are an idiot). Overtime, I can see that way of thinking slowly degrading, especially as more people are exposed to high-quality online courses.

jraby3 8y ago

This program looks incredible. I just want to thank you for putting something like this out there for free.

lim098 8y ago

What is the curriculum? Is it web development or mobile development?

CesareBorgia 8y ago
Web dev. The stack is Rails/React/Redux but we do spend a significant amount of time on language/framework agnostic skills so that folks can pick up new tech fast and so that they have the tools to transition into other fields of software engineering such as mobile.

nezaj 8y ago

Congrats Kush and team! Happy graduate from 2013 here :) Keep up the great work!

skinnymuch 8y ago

Almost all the work hours (vast majority) seem to be for the projects in the sections I looked at that I’m interested in. But the projects are almost entirely done on your own with little guidance. For a project that’s supposed to take 6 hours for example, maybe the equivalent of 2 pages of content is given for it. I was hoping it would be more involved than that. Still great to release the content of course!

Kaveren 8y ago

> "I learned more real-world skills in 12 weeks than my Stanford degree taught me." I'd hope the author of that quote was paying very little attention, because I find this hard to swallow. My problem with these programming bootcamps is that they seem almost more focused on a shallow but fun dive than teaching people thoroughly. That's not problematic in it of itself if it gets people interested, but I'd hunch a guess that most of the graduates of these bootcamps are not going on to self-study more intensely after. In my opinion, these bootcamps generally teach you to be a barely average web developer. If you are sufficiently self-motivating, self-study is a great idea, but you don't need a bootcamp for this. I'm not one to judge people on whether or not they have a degree, but I think there is real value in an equivalent curriculum for self-studying. If I have the choice to hire someone fresh out of a web development bootcamp and someone who was self-studying compiler design, I'm hiring the compiler design person every time, even if it's a web development job. I don't know why this is teaching jQuery anymore. But why do you need this course for JavaScript when you have the excellent MDN guides for beginners to use? I think people are afraid of reading and prefer to be spoonfed. If you want mentorship, there's usually a good subreddit, Discord or Slack server that doesn't cost you $30 / month. I'm just extremely skeptical of the value that any of these bootcamps bring. AppAcademy appears to bring good results for hiring, but I don't believe that it's the most effective method of learning.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
soneca 8y ago
As a self-taught web dev, I don't think I could find any "mentorship" in reddit, discord or Slack. This is like saying HN substitute for YC office hours with experienced mentors. Knowing a few people from bootcamps, it is clear to me that it is not "fun", it is work. Your impression that bootcamps are for people who do not want to read anymore is plain wrong. And self-teaching and bootcamps are not excludent. Actually, I was told that this is exactly what make a difference between bootcampers. The ones who think that all you need from bootcamp is the certificate, usually fail to have a career in software development. The ones that understand that the bootcamp is only the beginning, an accelerator and guidance for your learning, and you have to self-teach you a lot of things, those succeed.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Is there any way to get the free content without running javascript from your site in my browser, giving you my email, or signing up for anything? Ideally I'd just like some links to the PDFs or videos I can wget without any further hassle.

mike22223333 8y ago

Wages are not rising, what is the use of flooding the market?

jeffnv 8y ago
Incredibly selfish opinion. If you want more money for yourself, become a better asset to an employer and learn to negotiate. You don't move up by holding down the rest of the world.
- mike22223333 8y ago
  Before a man was getting paid 40k a year. Now his wife joins. Congratulations, you both fools now get paid 20k each.

cronopios 8y ago

Is there anything similar but based on Python rather than Ruby?

__initbrian__ 8y ago

anybody want to form a long term study group?