In 9 weeks and 2 days, I will be starting App Academy in San Francisco. For my Pythonistas out there, yes I am aware I may be made fun of for becoming a Rubyist, but I'm confident this is a good decision for me to have career options as a developer for Rails, Backbone, or Django. For those unfamiliar with App Academy, it is a 12 week hacker bootcamp for Ruby, Rails, SQL, JavaScript, and Backbone.js that includes portfolio building, interview preparation and a final project. What is the most different about App Academy is their payment model. Tuition is collected after you get a job, 18% of your yearly earnings payable over 6 months. As someone with two kids too young for public schools, I'm not going to see much of my first 12 paychecks, but it will still be worth the investment.
I learned more about the program through the application and acceptance process. I submitted my application 2.5 weeks ago, never having done any Ruby, but with Python experience. I got an email back the same day for me to do the coding challenge that included reading assignments from Ruby Monk and Chris Pine's Learn to Program. I spent about 5 days learning Ruby very slowly, because I was visiting family. App Academy does not give a deadline for the coding challenge, so you can take the time you need to prepare. I was prepared to do the coding challenge in Ruby, but the directions said I could do Ruby or Python and it would take about 40 minutes. It took me about 20 minutes to do it in Python while my 9 month old was nursing and my almost 3 year old was "going Bananas" with a cartoon on Netflix (Bruno and the Banana Bunch). The next day, I got an email to schedule an interview with a TA. The Skype interview was audio only and consisted of just one programming question. I did make an error with initializing a variable in the wrong level of my nested loops, but solved it in 9 minutes in Python. I made an effort to talk through my logic process while solving the problem. Less than an hour later, I got an email to schedule a final interview with Kush Patel. There was another live coding problem, which took me 12 minutes to solve in Ruby. I talked through some of the logic, but I realized I was humming at one point (something I do when I'm enjoying a problem). Kush did ask some questions to make sure the program could work for me and that I was aware of some of the requirements. I was accepted the next day, which was quite a surprise because it was a Saturday. So from the time I completed the coding challenge, the interview process took me only 6 days.
One of the requirements of the program is the reason I was being silly with my post title. Every weekday, students post a blog entry with the week number and day number. I have 9 weeks and 2 days until my cohort begins, hence negative numbers. Although tuition is collected afterwards, there is a $3,000 deposit. The deposit holds your spot in the program and goes towards that 18% fee (tuition) when you do get a job, plus or minus any money from fees. Fees are used to keep students focused by penalizing tardiness, absences, getting off task with phones or emails, and failing to write daily blog posts. Fines are redistributed among the graduates at the end so that you only lose money if you were worse than your classmates about following the rules. Another rule of the program is that students may be asked to leave the program. Assessments are taken each week to evaluate if someone is falling behind. It is definitely an intense program, but I'm prepared for a challenge. The gamer inside me expected some fireworks or ominous music when I transferred the first $1250 to hold my place in the program yesterday. And so our hero begins her journey... I've currently worked through 12 chapters of Chris Pine's Learn to Program, 2 chapters of Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby, and the first half of the Ruby Primer section on Ruby Monk. I am preparing to have a strong foundation for W1D1 !!
