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Show HN: App Academy Open – Free Online Coding Bootcamp

by CesareBorgia on 10/16/18, 3:49 PM with 30 comments

  • by CesareBorgia on 10/16/18, 3:54 PM

    Hey all! We launched App Academy on HN 6 years ago (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.

  • by Kaveren on 10/18/18, 2:44 AM

    > "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.

  • by skinnymuch on 10/18/18, 1:41 AM

    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!

  • by bruceb on 10/17/18, 8:47 PM

    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

  • by jraby3 on 10/17/18, 9:26 PM

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

  • by pmoriarty on 10/18/18, 4:13 AM

    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.

  • by nezaj on 10/17/18, 11:19 PM

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

  • by lim098 on 10/17/18, 9:42 PM

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

  • by cronopios on 10/18/18, 3:18 PM

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

  • by __initbrian__ on 10/26/18, 1:53 AM

    anybody want to form a long term study group?

  • by minimaxir on 10/17/18, 8:05 PM

  • by mike22223333 on 10/18/18, 6:00 AM

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