App Academy Open is identical to App Academy's in-person full-time software engineering curriculum. It covers ~1500 hours of material including fundamentals such as data structures and algorithms, design patterns, scalability, OOP, TDD, computational complexity, and software engineering best practices. Programming languages and technologies include Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React-Redux, SQL, Git, HTML and CSS.
The repo will be FREQUENTLY updated with my solutions to all the exercises and challenges from the curriculum.
Curriculum start date: January 14, 2019
Curriculum completion date: August 29, 2020
- Is the free course different from the paid course? No. The course content is identical to the in-person. There are no differences.
- What does this repo contain? Solutions to all of App Academy's coding challenges. Yes I went through every section without skipping any modules.
- Why did it take you so long? I have a full time job, 40+ hours a week. I spent, on average, 3 hours after work (normally 10 hours of work including commute) studying. I did sacrifice my saturdays/sundays to put in more hours though.
- What was the toughest/easiest section? Ruby. Huge jump from the alpha course (which covered progrmaming basics). Lots of side learning you have to do (i.e. you can't rely on a/A to cover everything). Projects kept getting harder and harder. SQL was by far the easiest.
- What is your background? I have a BS and MS in environmental/earth sciences from the University of Waterloo.
- Did you get help? I tried to solve all the problems on my own. If I couldn't come up with a solution to a problem, I went to Google and tried to reason about what I could find on there. If it still didn't make sense, I asked my colleagues employed in the industry. I found that was the best approach of learning for me. App Aacademy does offer a mentorship program for a cost though.
- Where are your personal projects? They will be in separate repos.
- Did you buy any resources? No. All resources I used were free.
- Would you recommend App Academy Open? If you can afford the in-person/online courses, I highly advise going through that route. It will save you a lot of time. I did not want to quit my job and spend my savings, so I decided to teach my self. It takes a lot of dedication and commitment to go through the entire course on your own. For most people going through the self taught route, it can be tempting to quit early on, but if you are goal oriented and have a passion for learning, you can and will complete the entire course.
- Are you employed as a software developer? Yes. I am currently working at a startup as a full stack developer.
- I have questions, how can I contact you? fares.osman@outlook.com