Launch Academy

Launch Academy is a very intense and hardcore immersive learning experience. The pace that myself and everyone was learning was incredible. Coming from a mostly frontend background, I had some experience in the background but not enough where I knew how... Read More everything tied in together in an application. Launch Academy has helped me fill those holes in my knowledge and thus increased my own confidence as a developer. Most of the students had absolutely no web development or programming background. The fact that the students have a working deployed app after 10 weeks as well as a plethora of completed coding challenges and projects says alot about the efficiency of Launch Academy

Launch Academy has grown to be a solid program in ruby on rails! I was part of the first cohort and many of the students got jobs afterwards, which is the key metric I use to evaluate bootcamps.

Also, I wrote a more extensive review on PINH also and would... Read More like to link to it here, since it contains supplemental information - Launch Academy Review.

In the first cohort, many of the students got jobs.

I landed a decent job at an advertising startup downtown which I was very pleased with. Without Launch, I may not have been able to do that just learning on my own. While the curriculum was a little shaky at the start, understandable being the first class ever - I believe that they have since then improved their curriculum to address some of the issues!

The biggest issue in the first cohort was the lack of teachers and too many students, but they have since hired more staff to address this issue. They also ironed out kinks in some of the projects and homework assignments.
From my experience that staff at Launch are all there to help you succeed

In summary, I think Launch is a decent program, so it's definitely worth checking them out! Good luck with your search!

Cop-out answer: it depends on your definition of worth-it.
Less cop-out answer: I was in the "fall cohort". Launch Academy did a great job of preparing me for an entry-level Ruby-on-Rails engineering position. The staff is attentive and care about the... Read More students and their success post-graduation.
As Launch Academy grows, they'll have to make sure they have enough experience engineers to adequately cover student needs. There were times when there were meetings for the entire staff but at those times I think many students felt like they couldn't get the assistance in a timely manner.
Job placement for the first 2 cohorts has been excellent. The fall cohort ended almost 2 months ago and the majority of my cohort are employed and working as devs. I would say that the salaries that I saw were at or just under market average for an entry-level dev.
Was it hard work with long, exhausting hours? Yes.
Are there things Launch Academy needs to work on? Yes.
Would I do it again? Yes.

As part of the first cohort, my experience was mixed. Some parts of the program were excellent, while other aspects fell short. Overall, there is room for improvement and I believe that the team at Launch Academy is dedicated to improving its curriculum... Read More and offerings. My recommendation is that you compare their curriculum with other bootcamps and ask lots of questions when you interview with them! Here are some pros and cons:

Pros:
1) Rails: The instructor Dan Pickett is a Rails guru. This part of the curriculum is the most well taught. You will leave this course very comfortable with the Rails MVC framework and building simple apps.
2) Experience Engineers: Very helpful mentors will help you move up the learning curve quickly.
3) People: The people I met were very kind and helpful. I enjoyed the group dynamics and overall it is a fun (and stressful) learning environment.
4) Talks: Awesome lecture series from guest speakers provide a great insight into the industry.
5) Hiring Companies: They did a good job bringing in over 25 companies to the career fair. However, not all companies were looking to hire.

Cons:
1) Javascript: They did not cover Javascript very well. Most students left the course knowing very little Javascript. The curriculum for Javascript was not well designed. You’re better off reading Professional Javascript for Web Developers by Nicholoas Zakas.
2) Lack of support: There were only 2-3 experience engineers available to help the 30 students. There were not enough mentors around for us and we had to scramble for help. Also, one of the mentors had to leave halfway through the course and it became a bit disorganized. However, I do trust that the team at Launch Academy will improve on this aspect and I know they just hired a new experience engineer to add help.
3) Curriculum: Some of the online curriculum that they provided was not very well written and the assignments had flaws in it which wasted a bit of our time. Given that this was their first cohort, I expect that they will improve upon this next time.
4) Lack of assessment: They did not assess students at all and provided very little code review feedback, partly because they were so understaffed. Some students were falling way behind in the curriculum but they did not notice soon enough.

Conclusion: It’s worth considering this program if you’re on the East Coast and want a Rails focused course. If you have a good technical mindset, willingness to work extremely hard, and good interview/networking skills, you should be able to land a job in Boston as a rails developer. There is definitely a shortage for good rails devs at this moment (Nov 2013). I also think that the second, third, and later cohort experiences will be much better than the first.

Overall my experience was mixed but at the end of the day, the experience is what you make of it! If you work hard, Launch Academy will provide a good enough foundation for you to explore other areas of programming. I ended up with a great job after an intense search, so I can’t complain.

Prior to attending Launch Academy, I was somewhat skeptical about the bootcamp education model. Bootcamps require a large upfront tuition payment, offer no certification and make no promises other than to provide you with the skills to develop web applications.... Read More Launch Academy was particularly appealing because they offered full-stack training which includes database, back-end and front-end development. After thoughtful consideration I decided to attend. I knew I wanted to be a web developer and attending a bootcamp seemed like the most efficient way to successfully transition into the industry.

The program is 10 weeks long. Our cohort, the first cohort at Launch Academy, got off to a slow start in the first week but quickly picked up momentum in the second week and continued at a fast pace right through the remainder of the course. The curriculum offered a good balance of depth and breadth. However, I do feel that future groups would benefit from an additional instructor (which they have recently added). Throughout the course Launch Academy invites local developers, CTOs, CEOs and active members of the tech community to speak to the class. This was a great addition to the course; I gleaned a ton of valuable information from them.

There were some points where Launch Academy fell short on staffing resources and students were not being helped in a timely manner. However, I give them credit for listening to student feedback and making adjustments on the fly to address shortcomings. I believe these issues were due to the fact that we were the first cohort and the entire process was new to everyone.

Overall, I had a good experience. I learned more than expected, worked with an incredible group of people in the cohort and had a blast developing cool things for 10 weeks.