334 Hours of Ruby on Rails

you might say the same thing about college. the majority of the stuff is just being taught straight out of books in large lecture format and a lot of its available for free by universities and online resources.

personal trainers at the gym mostly tell you things that you can figure out online too.

its a mistake to think of devbootcamp or code academy or any of those programs as strictly "cash in exchange for knowledge in your head".

you do it because you get other benefits. some people learn faster in that environment, for example. or having an experience resource available on call the entire time. or access to mentors that would be harder to get in touch with otherwise.

anyways, i didn't do devbootcamp, and this is NOT an endorsement of it, but i think you're missing the point, and why would you come rain on someone's parade by telling them that what they did (and saw value in) is pointless?

also, people talk a really big talk about how its great to invest money and let it grow, but in my experience those people really don't 1. do that, 2. know how to do that well.

I watched my roommate study development independently and in Dev Bootcamp, and Dev Bootcamp was way more productive. His earning potential has gone up ~$40k/year during the program, so I'd counsel any interested parties to keep the cost contextualized. (And, of course, it's free if you get recruited, which he has.)

The keys to success as a startup and as individual coder in the present world is not technical prowess, but culture and cultural fit.

There is a running joke in San Francisco that companies looking for "Code Ninjas" and "Rockstar Programmers" are not worth working for, because they haven't gotten the basic truth that the team matters more than the individual. They're falling prey to the "Talent Myth" (a reference to a Malcolm Gladwell article where he describes among others the reasons for the spectacular failure of Enron.)

What devbootcamp has cultivated in a classroom format is the actual vibe of a startup doing well: Excitement, vibrant, infectious energy. I visited at week 3 and at week 8. In any typical multi-week courses (e.g. college), the enthusiasm wanes pretty quickly after a few weeks. Not so with devbootcamp, it kept growing.

It's not the individual's technical skills that matter so much (there is always some else to ask or Google anyway), than it is to build a culture of resourcefulness and team spirit.

In full disclosure I should say I was a guest instructor, and I felt aweful that we let students run head-first into database joins--a concept we hadn't explained at all, but which was necessary to complete the exercise at hand (which was, coincidentally implementing a ranking for a Hacker News-like site). If you hit this in self-study, 99% of the students would give up and shelve their dreams of becoming a developer. Not so in devbootcamp. To my big surprise, not knowing joins didn't present much of a hurdle. Through pairing, people's resourcefulness quickly led to a variety of usable solutions. Perhaps not the textbook solution, but that's not what matters in real life.

It's this type of can-do, resourcefulness and team spirit which creates solutions and being exposed and immersed into that is what people paid the money for. This cannot be replicated in self-study, in my opinion, and it's well worth it.

I think it best not to make decisions solely based on monetary risk/reward. There are many free resources out there...agreed. However, I have developed my own tight community of junior developers, many who will go on to be intermediate and eventually senior level developers. I have an entire network of mentors who are already senior developers. I'm taking interviews for junior dev jobs. I just learned how to code 2 months ago. Good luck spending 300+ hours in front of a computer in 2 months AND building up a network this large. I don't know what monetary value to put on that...it will vary from person to person.

Devbootcamp doesn't make sense for everybody. It made sense for me. I would rather learn how to program with a pair or several pairs than sitting in my room learning from a book and the internet. I've tried that already. It's not for me.

Haha...thanks buddy. Appreciate the vote of confidence.

At the risk of answering incorrectly on the OP's behalf, I would say they primarily covered the latter (Ruby + RoR). The timeframe involved is insufficient for a meaningful overview of software engineering.

However, I would also posit that what they covered is enough to get them in the door. The rest can (and, for those passionate and determined) will follow.

I think this is a pretty significant point. Thanks for bringing it up. I was part of Dev Bootcamp and this is where I thought the whole experience lacked as well. But here's the interesting bit: I left the experience feeling like there was a gap in my knowledge and wanting to go fill it. Even in the last week I was heckling the mentors for a deeper understanding.

By contrast, I left college last May with a large theoretical base in Finance and with no desire to pursue it practically.

In some sense, programs like Dev Bootcamp and traditional education start on the path of knowledge from opposite ends. In the middle lies experience (that mystical thing people say I will have one day).

Having started on each end of this path exactly once (on a large scale anyway), I don't know if they hold any gravity, but, in my experience, learning practically by "hacking out some web apps in Ruby on Rails" left me hungry to understand software engineering while learning theoretically about investment strategies and real estate markets left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I think that's a really good question.

My goal in designing the curriculum was to graduate world-class beginners, not to quickly hack together one or two rails apps.

The first half of devbootcamp was just Ruby. We covered basics of OO design and TDD.

One of my students blogged every day, if you're interested in the details of what we covered: http://douglascalhoun.tumblr.com/

Overall, I feel strongly that folks graduated with a strong sense of what's involved in building software, some basic knowledge and more importantly feeling resourced to learn what they don't yet know.

30 companies interviewed 20 students this last Friday for 5 minutes each.

On average each student was invited to 6 companies for further interviews. This experiment only works if we're totally transparent so I'll be updating this community and our blog with numbers as soon as we have them.

The spring's tuition was 6k, and 100% refunded on hire. The summer is 11k with 5k refunded on hire. Summer will be 2 weeks longer and will have at least twice as many mentors per student.

The question is, are these people actually learning what they are doing, or are they just creating muscle memory on certain tasks... kind of like a 2 year old seeing patterns in a word and being able to identify it despite have no idea how to read.

The only way I can learn something well is by doing it many times. That's how I learned ruby, js, vi, regex, etc. But if this program is able to present a good scope of topics and get the people to really hammer on writing code from scratch (not copy and paste coding), then I can really see this being successful.

Humans have amazing potential to learn and be productive when we get into a distraction free, focused 'zone'. If this program can push people to reach this point and take full advantage over the course of several weeks (without burning out), I can see them doing extremely well on an interview and realistically getting junior positions.

Just a friendly warning: The overall tone of your comments seems to be rather negative and kinda hostile, especially to people who make money from teaching, and as a result your karma is currently negative. If you keep on this way, the system is going to hellban you. I'd recommend sticking to productive rather than destructive comments, at least until you get a good feel for the community's standards.

We were encouraged to take a daily reflection on what we did that day. I kept a general journal of what I was learning. By week 3, I started logging hours specifically on a notepad and in excel. Really awesome how much ground we covered as a class in that short time.