App Academy

The good : 
There is an established culture of cooperation, empathy, and inclusion. The curriculum includes materials on issues such as discrimination and monoculture, which was unexpected and welcome.

You will meet interesting people from a variety of backgrounds and the pair coding establishes genuine connections quickly.

Curriculum feedback is listened to and I found the instructors truly care and try to adjust their teaching styles to accommodate different students.

The bad :
Assessments require a lot of memorization, so you have to choose whether to study to understand or to burn all the time you have doing repetitions.

A lot of lectures are done via project coding demo in a lecture hall, but devices aren't allowed so you cannot code along or put notes where you don't understand something. Once you're lost it's all a blur.

When the formal instruction curriculum is finished, you're pretty much on your own. The instructors do their best, but they are vastly outnumbered. The size of the classes has exploded since we got here. There are several of them for 150+ students, it can take ~4 hours to get a question answered.

The handoff from formal instruction to career search and projects felt discombobulated- weeks in limbo without knowing when coaches would be assigned, confusion about who to talk to for scheduling medical appointments, etc. It may be they are short-staffed, as well.

Individual experience notes : 
Ask for monitor risers or ergonomic equipment when you need it. It's many many long days and your neck and shoulders and wrists are important. Monitor yourself for burnout, especially when you start coding 70+ hours a week.

The curriculum is challenging and fast-paced, but absolutely worth it for the experience you get that truly makes you competitive in the job market. After graduation you will have the skills to build full-stack applications and websites, and just as importantly, you will have the knowledge and confidence to learn any new technology that you're interested in that wasn't covered in the course. Most of the work is done via pair programming, which can be uncomfortable in the beginning, but it grows on you and is a really useful skill to have. TA support during the class portion is also really good.
In terms of job support after graduation, I don't find it nearly as successful as the scholastic curriculum. I don't I think App Academy is necessarily at fault, I think it's just really difficult to land your first professional job in general. I think the school is doing most of what they can, access to alumni boards, interview and job searching tips, weekly meetings with advisors, etc., but as a student you should understand that most the weight will be on you to find a job.

I have finished the instructional portion of App Academy and am currently transitioning into the job search portion of App Academy.

If you are comparing App Academy against other bootcamps, I think App Academy is the better option as of this writing. I have a roommate attending Hack Reactor (HR) and my understanding is that HR is equivalent to the second half of App Academy. In practice, this means you lose out on learning a second language (Some companies, such as Google, care about how many languages you learn) and do not learn databases or CSS as deeply.

If you are wondering whether you are a good fit for App Academy, I would follow the advice of those before me and go through Harvard's computer science Edx program before attending. It is not imperative that you fully understand everything from that course, but a general idea of the concepts helped me excel at App Academy. I came from a political science background, but I understood programming concepts thanks to predicate logic, the Harvard Edx course, and from video games. So, you do not need extensive knowledge of coding, but attending App Academy without some exposure is a mistake.

The program itself is rather rigorous and you will find that you live under a rock for the duration of it. Our cohort had the easiest time because our program aligned with several holidays. Nevertheless, I found myself skipping my normal gym routine in favor of late-night studying. The most telling part of the workload was when I caught the flu and missed an entire week at App Academy. During that time, I still did the work, on my own, and turned it in to avoid strikes (Yes, you get strikes while sick). I often thought I could rest and make up for lost time later that night, but when I compared my pace to my classmates, I found that not only were they working while I was resting, but even during the hours I felt I could pull ahead. Simply put, there is no escaping the time-sink involved in this type of program. When we finished the material and began personal projects, I found myself running on four hours of sleep per night.

How enjoyable the experience is will largely depend on your fellow students. I felt as if I shared a lot of experiences with my cohort and that they made the experience enjoyable. It is impossible for me to say whether other cohorts will be as exceptional. You will find yourself interacting with at least half the cohort due to paired programming and your breaks will be spent discussing the material. Personally, I enjoyed pair programming since I value the time I spend with my cohort, but some people felt it was not as enjoyable -- it really depends on your preferences.

My biggest criticisms of this program are its strike policy and location. As previously mentioned, you accrue strikes while sick and that inclined people to attend class, with the flu, during my time at App Academy. My other criticism is that it is located in rather expensive places. It might not be feasible to relocate, but New York and San Francisco are infamously expensive locations and are not necessarily the nicest places (In terms of cleanliness). Be prepared to budget if you attend. I know some people mitigate this cost by traveling from afar, but given the tedium of the program, I would highly advice against it.

Overall, I think the program pushes acquainted individuals to become great software engineers.I wouldn't recommend it to people with zero exposure to coding, but a little preparation will alleviate that concern. I was surprised to read that professional developers are paying to learn material App Academy teaches such as React and Redux. I often impressed my software engineer friends when I told them what we learned/were learning, so I believe the curriculum is rather exceptional.

App Academy is a fast-paced and rigorous program. If you are willing to learn, they will give you more than enough to learn in the span of 3 months. That being said, if you don't thrive during times of stress the style of this program might not be for you. If stress motivates you, this is a really rewarding program as most students will go the extra mile to make sure they're getting the most of the experience. App Academy won't teach you everything - that's not their goal but they provide a good foundation to take the first step towards a career in software engineering.

App Academy is not for the faint of heart. I attended their cohort in August 2019 and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Transitioning to software engineer seemed like a meteoric task but thankfully the high level overview that App Academy provided, gave me a strong grasp in the foundations of web development. Don't get me wrong, 3 months is definitely not an adequate time frame to feel ready as you venture to become a full fledged software engineer. What App Academy does teach you is how to learn and quickly pick up new technologies. Do note, the curriculum is extremely difficult. They state this program is not for everyone and it may not be for you. If you deteriorate under pressure this is not the program for you. If you aren't willing to put in at least 100 hours a week, this program isn't for you.

Overall definitely a rewarding and enjoyable experience. The instructors are amazing and really put in time and effort to facilitate your learning. However, you still need to put in your own time to keep up and master the material. 

I've seen some students spend 80+ hours a week, but I've also seen some spend around 60 hours and do fine. There is a lot of variation in how fast the content is picked up, but don't expect a walk in the park. 

Instructors are amazing, curriculum is pretty good, and some people are great.

DISCLAIMER: I'm at the last week of the course, and job search hasn't quite started yet, so I can't give proper rating/review of Job Assistance yet. 

Strong curriculum, AA tries to keep up with newer/updated technologies. Hooks haven't been added to their curriculum yet, so you'll need to learn that on your own. Another thing: the curriculum really doesn't highlight CSS. There will be a portion of the curriculum where you learn CSS for ~30 minutes a day - while they are boring, DO NOT NEGLECT CSS if you're new to it! You'll lose a lot of time on your final projects figuring out styling.
Assessments can be very stressful, you may find yourself skipping homework and/or losing sleep to be ready for them. While they're not tricky and cover only the basics, there can be a lot to take in and forgetting something might cost you the entire assessment (you either pass or you fail, basically). Ultimately, the assessments matter little to none for your job search, so just do what you can to pass them and move on.
There's a lot in the curriculum. Don't worry about not being able to complete the classwork or homework. Don't worry about not finding time to go back to them (unless you really like the project, or they're very relevant to the assessment).
Then come the projects! Working on your own projects is probably the most enjoyable part of the curriculum. However, unless you're a top student, you're not going to finish any of your projects before graduation, and will have to continue working on them afterward. Speaking of...
As of current, I am a few days away from graduating, and we've crammed in a bunch of career-related lectures and assignments in the last two weeks. At this point, you really don't get any sort of idea how you stack up as a (junior) software developer, so unfortunately, I can't provide much input in terms of the job search portion (arguably one of the most important things you'd want to know out of a review). Personally, this is actually a big pain point for me, and I feel very unprepared heading into the job search ("I barely have working projects for my portfolio," "I haven't touched algorithms in months" and "I need to network and follow up with leads" are just a few thoughts plaguing me in the "last week" of school. A part of me hopes that I'll find a job relatively quick, and look back at this review and laugh about it.

tl;dr: I want to say it's worth it, but I need to wait to graduate (this week) and figure out just how bad (or good) the job search is.

If it helps, I DID have a great time here at App Academy. You make a lot of connections/friends here (and if you're an introvert like me, feel better knowing that you won't have a choice), and the TAs here really care for your learning and well being (they're your friends, too!). 

Pros: 
- You really are able to create a fully web app by the end of the program
- You meet a lot of very supportive, awesome people in the class that come from various backgrounds

Cons:
- You have to be able to know how to learn on your own, it is impossible to pass the bootcamp expecting someone to hold your hand along the way

If you think App Academy alone will get you a job, then it might not be the right place for you. What they do do is provide an excellent foundation for people new to the software engineering field, and that foundation should prove useful in picking up new topics as you progress into the field.

Going to echo some others' comments here around getting what you put in. Personally, this has been one of the most rewarding educational experiences I've undergone (that's counting K-12 and a rigorous undergraduate experience) for a couple of reasons: 

1. If you are willing to put 80-100hrs of work into doing anything a week, you are going to learn very quickly and become good at whatever you're doing. What's difficult is setting up the correct incentive structure for yourself, having mentorship to guide you through your learning process and correct you when you're wrong, and and most importantly, having similarly incredibly motivated others to undergo the process with. App Academy provides that part for you. Your motivation is the other part of the equation. 

2. I met some incredible people through this experience from all places in life and had to pair program with all of them. I'm talking mothers with newborns, former flight attendant, master carpenter, professional poker players, never went to college, just graduated from college, biotech field alums, startup founders, people for whom english was a second language). Huge learning experience for me, and something you're just not going to get from self-study. 

3. I loved building something end-to-end, learning how to figure out how to learn what you don't know in order to get something work, learning how to talk about your thought process cogently etc. These are all skills they drill into you here. 

You get out what you put in. This is the most work I've ever put into something in my life -- 80-90 hours per week -- but if you're willing to put in the effort to study and work hard, you'll get a solid foundation out of it. The projects you build are the best part -- building multiple full-stack applications from scratch (one solo, one as a team), and a front-end only JavaScript project that start you out with a nice portfolio to showcase your skills when you don't have job experience.

Learning is slow paced in the beginning, but speeds up as the program progresses. You really start to learn when you're thrown into the project building portion. At this point it could take up to 5 hours to get a Teacher to show up to help you out, so you have to figure stuff out yourself. Some of the Teachers are amazing, others are lackluster, so you never know what you're gonna get when you ask a question. Overall I've learned a lot in App Academy, I just wish I could say it was mostly their doing.

I'm currently in my fifth of sixth months at App Academy and I can honestly say that I've never learned so much so quickly. At this point in the curriculum I have a lot of confidence in my skills and I am actually looking forward to the job search. I will say it has been a rough ride. This has been my life for the last 5 months and I've spent somewhere between 60-90 hours a week on average studying/reading to stay afloat but it has all been worth it as I can now build websites using different technologies all by myself. I'd recommend a/A to anyone who is serious about becoming a software developer, just know that while you're in this program it's going to take up MOST of your time.

TLDR: Loved it, and definitely worth it!

Longer version:

You really do get a job over 100K, typically within the first month or so if you're on top of your cohort. So if you're confident in your logical ability, definitely worth it. The flip side is, if programming seems hard for you, no matter how good the bootcamp, the job search is going to kick you in the butt. That said, 90% of graduates get hired in the first year, so if you get in, the odds are in your favor! 

Aa is pretty selective in who they admit, and it ensures that people are capable of succeeding in this very competitive field. Computer engineering is a lot of work, but damn it is more interesting than almost any other job out there, and pays well too. Anyways, I say, take the dive!