Matthew Buck

Review of Hack Reactor

The team over at MakerSquare is incredibly dedicat...

The team over at MakerSquare is incredibly dedicated and they continue to substantially improve their program. I was with MakerSquare for two classes as an instructor and curriculum developer. I currently work as a senior engineer at Rapid7 (working on Metasploit), and I worked at many other software companies in Austin (including OtherInbox and Mass Relevance/Spredfast) prior to MakerSquare.

I would say without reservation that the founding team is an amazing group of folks. I got to know them all very well, and they re incredibly dedicated. It s difficult to draw comparisons between the various coding schools without attending them all yourself, obviously, but from purely anecdotal evidence, it sounds like the team at MakerSquare cares more about the success of their students than some of the other schools.

The cohorts themselves tend to skew towards mid-twenties, but they ve had students in their late fifties, as well. They are incredibly selective in the selection process (I believe the acceptance rate is ~15%), so it s always a great group of really motivated people. Rarely did I encounter someone who had trouble getting along with the other folks in the class.

I can now say with some authority that it s very difficult to teach the software engineering in 10 weeks (they extended the classes to 12 weeks for that reason), but MakerSquare is relentless in their drive to improve. The instruction team meets regularly to review lessons and student progress. The Learn app which houses the curriculum is a great resource for learning new concepts, and their focus on teaching the fundamentals of software engineering, rather than simply throwing you into here s how you build stuff with Rails, is also a big advantage.

There are now both full-time and part-time classes. Part-time classes will take you through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript basics and the full-time classes focus on software engineering, Ruby, and JavaScript. The JavaScript curriculum is particularly good - I haven t seen anything like it anywhere else, especially for folks coming at JavaScript from the perspective of a total beginner.