Miona Necic

Review of HackerYou

I took the part-time Web Dev course. The days wer...

I took the part-time Web Dev course. The days were crammed full of information and we followed along with our online comprehensive class/lecture notes. They're online, but you lifetime access which is great. I took full day Saturdays option, but I realize I would've preferred to space out my lessons and exposure to new material to smaller, twice a week chunks (couldn't due to work). That said, the advantage of being there for several hours at a time gives you a different type of continuity and ability to synthesize new info during practice times. You also get to hang out more with your classmates during brakes and lunches. A full day class was more representative of how the immersive bootcamp would feel like, except it was totally chill. I did find breaks on the short side though, whether it was 5mins for coffee or the half hour lunch, but we were allowed to have drinks and food at our desks so that worked in order to cover enough material during the day. There were a couple of TAs to help out whenever someone is stuck during lectures or during exercises. Jenny was great and she conveyed the material in a really approachable way. You don't get much theory behind the concepts, but you get a really good working knowledge; and you're always encouraged to seek out more on your own and work on problem-solving skills, esp. through online resources. If you need additional help you also get optional extended hours to meet outside of classroom time. It covers HTML and CSS well, but for JS you'll have to take a separate course or continue on your own (you learn just enough to get you going and to start understanding the structure). I found the classroom layout a bit challenging, as the room was deep, so I always felt tired from trying to see properly on the projector screen; they'll zoom in as needed (or requested), but I kept coming in late for the 9am start so I was always sitting a bit back... my work doesn't ever even start before 10:30am, so it may sound ridiculous but 9am start time was rough for me. I once attended a workshop where the room was wide rather than deep, and they had two projector screens - that setup was really effective, and I hope HackerYou has similar rooms for bootcamp (I'm still considering that option!).