As a co-founder of one of the first in-person programs, I can say that just by asking this question we have come a long way in just the past 3 years! But as the field grows it becomes harder for a prospective student to make the right choice for the next step in the career.
I understand that you're asking for opinions we might have on which programs to take seriously, but I feel that narrowly focusing on that can create a flamewar that won't be productive for you as you talk with friends and others about which program to apply to.
I'll at least start by pointing out some great external resources to help you verify your own opinions, learn about new programs, and help people make an informed decision.
- Quora (http://quora.com) is a great resource to get information about which programming bootcamp to choose from. Yes, you can get subjective advice from people inside these bootcamps, but just searching "programming bootcamp" will send you through a wormhole of information.
- If you don't feel Quora provides you with enough objective data, there are a rising number of bootcamp review sites popping up. From our experience with these sites, I can say that Switch (switchup.org) and CourseReport (coursereport.com) have their stuff together.
I will also add that there are other options besides just 3-month programming bootcamps. There are even more intense programming bootcamps like the Turing School of Software & Design (http://turing.io/) or gSchool (http://www.galvanize.it/school/), and 30 Weeks (https://www.30weeks.com/), a new design school created by Google.
Taking objective cap off
We have also created a 9-month program in Chicago called Starter School (http://starterschool.com), which not only teaches web development, but web design, product development, and entrepreneurship. If you want to get a graduate's perspective of this program, I encourage you to read this post (https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3771-jack-mallers-from-dropou...).
Putting objective cap back on
Final cautionary note: If prospective students have the goal of getting a "validation with a credential" the chances of being disappointed at the end of the program are extremely high. These programs were created in direct retaliation to that premise. It's all about what you learn, what you build, and what type of person you are. The more serious you are about your education, the better chances you have of being successful after you are done with your bootcamp education.
Since I am one of the crazy fools who started this thing (Mike McGee), I guess I'll chime in...
July 2011
Our main focus was just trying to build the site. Since Neal and I hadn't really built a professional site before, we didn't really know what we were doing and it was pretty damn hard. Luckily we got a lot of help from our instructor and other advisors who were developers and designers to lighten the load a bit. Still the main product was ours and it was definitely an MVP - http://bit.ly/PZpoSt
August 2011
By August I was down to about $200 in my account and we had still not received the funding we thought we would to market Code Academy to the masses. So we just decided to launch the site and see how many people we could get to apply by using Twitter, Facebook, sending emails, and going to meetups in Chicago. We launched Thursday, August 4th 2011 at 9am looking for 12 students to fill our inaugural class.
While we had the benefit of having a lot of support within the Chicago community, the applications we were getting were from complete strangers. We were getting applications from realtors, retail workers, lawyers, accountants, journalists, teachers, etc. They were also coming from across the country. California, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, New York, the list goes on. Even people from outside the country (Israel and The Philippines) applied to our inaugural class!
By the end of August we had 88 quality applications from people all over the world without spending a single dollar on marketing.
September-October 2011
From there, we decided to accept 35 students instead of 12 and we started our first class in October 2011 with two web development courses instead of one.
I think the biggest reason why we were able to generate so much interest was the fact that we were addressing the right problem at the right time. There were so many people out there looking for a program like ours, but it just wasn't there yet. When our inaugural students heard about Code Academy, they jumped at the opportunity.
"DevBootcamp teaches you the full stack for being a Rails developer too, not just Ruby."
We teach way more than just Ruby. Our Web App Development course covers the same material as the Dev Bootcamp offering. We also have a User Experience course and two HTML/CSS classes. Over the past year our students have wanted us to teach MORE Ruby which is in part why we have finally added an Advanced Ruby offering to our lineup.
Another differentiating factor is that we are not focused on just helping our students get jobs. Students who apply to The Starter League have a lot of different goals in mind. Some want jobs, some have startups that they are looking to grow or get off the ground, and some just want the ability to take what's in their head and make it real through software. Our priority at The Starter League is to create the environment where all these goals can thrive.
For students who want jobs, we have an environment that can helps network with the local community to find those opportunities. For those who want to build companies, we are located in 1871 (http://1871.com) which is the new mecca of Chicago digital entrepreneurship.
We have a lot of respect for what Shereef has been able to do with DevBootcamp, and we wish him continued success! It's great that the software education landscape has grown this much in just a year's time.
Yeah makes it even more complicated when major tech blogs call Codecademy Code Academy, and then people on Twitter get @CodeAcademy confused with @Codecademy.
The Codecademy founders don't call their startup Code Academy and apparently didn't even know about the Code Academy in Chicago (http://howilearnedeverything.com/2011/10/30/clearing-the-air...), but then just a few weeks ago they bought codeacademy.com
Thanks for the link. The timeline as described in this post seems to explain, in my opinion, the somewhat odd name that "Codecademy" is. Since the start I've found it hard to pronounce and easy to misspell. It's not a big stretch to think they had "Code Academy" in mind and adapted it towards the end… Maybe not, but I know I would never go for "Codecademy" if I could go for "Code Academy".
I understand that you're asking for opinions we might have on which programs to take seriously, but I feel that narrowly focusing on that can create a flamewar that won't be productive for you as you talk with friends and others about which program to apply to.
I'll at least start by pointing out some great external resources to help you verify your own opinions, learn about new programs, and help people make an informed decision.
- Quora (http://quora.com) is a great resource to get information about which programming bootcamp to choose from. Yes, you can get subjective advice from people inside these bootcamps, but just searching "programming bootcamp" will send you through a wormhole of information.
- If you don't feel Quora provides you with enough objective data, there are a rising number of bootcamp review sites popping up. From our experience with these sites, I can say that Switch (switchup.org) and CourseReport (coursereport.com) have their stuff together.
I will also add that there are other options besides just 3-month programming bootcamps. There are even more intense programming bootcamps like the Turing School of Software & Design (http://turing.io/) or gSchool (http://www.galvanize.it/school/), and 30 Weeks (https://www.30weeks.com/), a new design school created by Google.
Taking objective cap off
We have also created a 9-month program in Chicago called Starter School (http://starterschool.com), which not only teaches web development, but web design, product development, and entrepreneurship. If you want to get a graduate's perspective of this program, I encourage you to read this post (https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3771-jack-mallers-from-dropou...).
Putting objective cap back on
Final cautionary note: If prospective students have the goal of getting a "validation with a credential" the chances of being disappointed at the end of the program are extremely high. These programs were created in direct retaliation to that premise. It's all about what you learn, what you build, and what type of person you are. The more serious you are about your education, the better chances you have of being successful after you are done with your bootcamp education.