
Show HN: App Academy Open – Free Online Coding Bootcamp - CesareBorgia
https://open.appacademy.io/
======
CesareBorgia
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
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?

~~~
CesareBorgia
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
Great, thanks for the response!

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Kaveren
> "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.

~~~
soneca
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.

~~~
Kaveren
If you want to learn frontend web development for instance, bootcamp
curriculum is inferior to simply reading Mozilla Developer Network.

Paying for mentorship itself in programming is over-rated:

Question about career advice? Programming Discussions Discord server,
/r/cscareerquestions, Discord servers with #career-advice channels.

Stuck on a topic you're trying to learn and need help? /r/learnprogramming,
one of the numerous Discord or Slack servers available.

Code not working? StackOverflow, Reddit, Discord, Slack.

Advice on improving code, best practices for software development? Code review
StackExchange, software engineering StackExchange, Discord severs, et cetera.

Practice problems? Leetcode, HackerRank, other challenge sites.

A web development bootcamp is not going to teach you anything there is not a
better resource already available for.

When many people (I'm speaking very generally here, not talking about you)
talk about mentors in programming, they want someone to hold their hand and
spoonfeed them information. If one wants to be pointed into the right
direction, there are ample places for that.

~~~
soneca
Well, I think we just disagree in how effective are these substitutes.

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skinnymuch
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!

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bruceb
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
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.

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jraby3
This program looks incredible. I just want to thank you for putting something
like this out there for free.

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pmoriarty
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.

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

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lim098
What is the curriculum? Is it web development or mobile development?

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CesareBorgia
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.

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

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__initbrian__
anybody want to form a long term study group?

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minimaxir
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18225233)

~~~
CesareBorgia
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
Gotcha.

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mike22223333
Wages are not rising, what is the use of flooding the market?

~~~
jeffnv
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
Before a man was getting paid 40k a year. Now his wife joins. Congratulations,
you both fools now get paid 20k each.

