A Community Passionate About Student Success 360: Fill & Download for Free

(I'm a cofounder at Hack Reactor.)Our programs are very similar in most ways, and we share a common mission. You can't really go wrong here. Still, I'll answer in some depth, since I get asked this question often, and I'm looking forward to responding with this link.An edit, much laterThis post is now quite old, but I see a steady stream of upvotes that tell me that people are still reading. The news since then:Our big bet on JavaScript has paid off, and it is now a generally-accepted fact in the industry that JavaScript developers have a brighter future than Rails developers. The Rails bootcamps, including Dev Bootcamp, are gradually shifting focus to JavaScript, but they are now trailing the industry in SF. (Demand for Rails devs is still growing outside of tech hubs, where trends take a while to catch up.)Our curriculum was selected by Udacity to power their Web Development microdegree.Our student outcomes have consistently led our industry, even as 100 other schools got started in the same market that used to just include Dev Bootcamp, Hack Reactor, and a few friends.We continue to invest more staff resources in job search support and alumni programs than any other bootcamp.Dev Bootcamp is a great school, and their students rave about it. In one sense, this is like arguing whether Paris is better than Madrid, but in another sense, this is a settled question: Hack Reactor leads the sector in many concrete respects.The original postIn the interest of brevity I'll do my best to only state things about HR that aren't true of DBC (afaik -- corrections welcome).Hiring stats100% of our graduates are now working as software engineers, at an average salary of $85,000. Edit, several months later: those numbers are now 98% and, for the most recent class, $110,000. They work at companies that turn away college students every day, like Groupon and Salesforce, and at small, revolutionary startups like Lovely. They are among the first full-time Meteor engineers. No other coding academy claims to exceed these outcomes.Way more hoursHere's the naive calculation:12 weeks * 6 days/week * 11 hours/day = 792 hours9 weeks * 5 days/week * 8 hours/day = 360 hoursNow, it's definitely true that you can stay as late as you want at Hack Reactor or at DevBootcamp, so your experience won't play out like the above math. However, these hours have many material effects on your world. During these hours:Staff are there to help.Prepared curriculum keeps you on an optimal learning path.Every student is present, collaborating with their project partners and contributing to the motivation of their peers.My biggest reason for advocating for these hours is the least intuitive, and the one I have the hardest time explaining to applicants. I'll give it a shot here anyway:Classes move at the pace of the slowest student, and when someone punches out at 5, it affects everyone.Our long hours are an unusual choice, and one that turns off many potential students. We're pleased about that!Quality of InstructorsOur founders are software engineers from Google, Twitter, OkCupid, and we hired our instructors away from Adobe, Mozilla, and elsewhere. They're all phenomenal teachers, and very passionate about it. There's no comparable teaching force that I'm aware of.Technical abilities of incoming studentsWe do rigorous technical interviews, including assigning applicants an actual web application as a take-home project. (We welcome applications from students with no programming experience, but in these cases the admissions process involves supporting them through the first ~30 hours of learning to code.)When we accept a student, they're already quite familiar with the basics of programming. Our pre-course curriculum covers pretty much all the material that you can profitably cover on your own: the command line, git, and many JS tools (jQuery, Backbone, Node).About a third of our most recent class had previously worked professionally as a developer.JS vs Ruby/Rails: conceptual sizeRuby (and its community) has emphasized productivity and attractiveness over conceptually small, well-understood code. This is a very smart decision for experienced developers, but does not make for a great educational environment. Javascript (again, as a language and a community) is focused on composing smaller pieces into larger, well-understood programs.Rails is an outcome of (and a contributor to) this aspect of Ruby. It's a great piece of software, but it's not a conducive place to learn about how code works. Rails devs don't, in general, have any clue who instantiates their classes, or what a bare HTTP request looks like, and they are not expected to learn. This isn't true of Node or Backbone developers. It's an important fact when you're trying to teach software engineering and how the web works.The Ruby/Rails focus on making very slick, usable tools has led to another undesirable outcome for students: there are a vast number of toolbox niceties that aid the experienced practitioner, but are a dangerous distraction for the beginner. I don't want my students to muck up their head with the many potential invocations of url_for[1], but a) that's what the reference material recommends and b) inconsequential details like that are part of how Rails engineers are evaluated by hiring companies (for better or for worse).JS vs Ruby/Rails: a brighter futureWhile Ruby and Rails are growing, Javascript is the center of an exciting revolution in the way that applications are developed. Bear with me through some background:Until the advent of Gmail and Google Maps, the web was built around the client-server model, in which servers generated pages of HTML and browsers (called "clients") showed them to users. When the user wanted to interact with the site, they'd click on something, their browser would throw away the page they were looking at, and the server would send them a new one.Gmail and Google Maps were the first "rich client apps" -- applications where the HTML was generated in the browser, by Javascript (the only language that runs in the browser), using data gathered in the background from servers. This architectural style offers interactivity features that aren't possible in the old model, and as such, most of the applications you interact with daily are now built in this manner (or transitioning to it). We're in a very exciting era, and we have an opportunity to educate the first native speakers of this new paradigm. Meanwhile, Rails is increasingly being relegated to the API layer, and it offers very little support and structure for those hoping to build rich client apps.More individual attentionWe, the staff, are phenomenally dedicated to our students. Our hours are our public-facing evidence of this, but our students are more affected by the following:We conduct individual code reviews (via github pull requests) for every student for all assessements and practice problems.We hold hiring day before the program ends, so that we have time to work one-on-one with students and provide intensive, deep coaching for success in their job search.During the beginning weeks of the program, about a quarter of your in-class hours are instructional. This means we are actually giving lecture material and guidance, rather than just giving you space to learn the material on your own.Higher tuitionEarly on, when we were making tough decisions, we used one fact as a compass by which to navigate: this program forms the basis of our students' new careers and lives, and its impact goes far beyond its apparent limited scope. This led to every one of the above facets of our program. It also led us to decide not to economize. We've set a very high price point in order to provide the resources that will set our students up for years and years of reverberating successes.(We have a deferral program for exceptional students that are unable to otherwise attend for financial reasons.)---------------I haven't even touched on stuff like amenities (24/7 hot coffee), visiting luminaries (the authors of Meteor, and Uber's dispatch system), the deep focus on best practices (git + pull requests from day one, TDD from day two, etc), and so on, but -- yknow -- time to go help the students :)[1] It turns out that there are five different methods named url_for in rails 3.2.8. url_for (ActionController::Base) - APIdock

Ohohohoho, where do I begin … this’ll be a long one. So have a seat, stay a while, and read on!Games aren’t art, and aren’t stories.They have art, they have stories, and it’s certainly better if both those things are well-developed, but they’re fundamentally products designed to fill an activity niche of some kind.User experience — that is, the means by which the user experiences and interacts with the activity — is the undisputed first priority. If you have an unclear user interface design, fail to convey information the player needs, or implement mechanics that go absolutely, horribly against the grain of what constitutes good interactive design (especially if walking is overly slow), it won’t matter how “artistic” any of it is, because the user will shut it off with a resounding “fuck this.”You have all these requirements to satisfy in terms of the way the user experiences your art before you can have the art at all, and that requires a sobering sense of perspective and a lot of compromises. Thus, games aren’t primarily an artistic medium.Games need better storytelling and more available formal knowledge base about storytelling techniques within games.Wait, Mike! Didn’t you just say games aren’t art and aren’t stories? Why yes, yes I did!So games aren’t stories and aren’t art, but there’s certain activity niches that have stories and have art, and even ones that actually center around consumption of those things. There isn’t anything wrong with being passionate about this layer of the product, and there isn’t an excuse for it or the player’s relationship with it to suck.RPGs, adventure games, and to some extent action-adventure titles are essentially imitating the act of reading a novel or enjoying a film. Some of them are trying a little harder to lean towards “choose your own adventure” and some of them are leaning a little harder towards being theme parks in fantastic settings. Some ideologues even believe that’s the preferred model. Then again if that were the case, Final Fantasy wouldn’t exist as a franchise and Telltale’s product line would have fizzled out rather than continually growing. Truthfully there’s all sorts of players out there, and quite a lot of us are sitting down specifically to satisfy the curiosity and perhaps the sense of introspection that draws us all into stories — just with a bit more pep and a bit more personalization.So… what’s the excuse for being derisive towards storytelling? What’s the excuse for marginalizing the writing team? What’s the excuse for deliberately wasting the numerous opportunities for fun that they present you? If it’s expense that’s one thing, but did you ever stop to consider that maybe the game doesn’t need a horrible crafting system the user’s going to hate? Or that maybe fewer quests with stronger stories might be better bang for the buck than dozens of generic fetch-quests?What’s the excuse for avoiding or discouraging R&D into the relationship between players and this specific sense of enjoyment?On the flip-side there shouldn’t be an excuse for storytellers to ignore good game design, as it forms the fundamentals of how the user experiences their stories. Good game design can not only put the player into a scene, it can reinforce the user’s relationship with a narrative or with characters by using risk-and-reward as a means to structure the player’s behavior sympathetically. In short, it can put you inside someone’s head and make you think like they think, almost more effectively than just reading words written from their perspective.I think we have a lot of R&D to do in this area. I don’t feel as if anyone I’ve worked with in a professional sense has had a formal, deliberate understanding of how to work with stories, and I’ve yet to see any satisfactory literature that goes beyond “game writing 101” topics.Sadly it’s so expensive to practice that it seems like I’m going to have very few opportunities in my lifetime to work on this area. And, as you might figure, this is a very, very unpopular opinion within the game development community.Video games aren’t one type of product. Also, chill out and quit shaming people about their tastes.As I stated earlier, I think video games are an umbrella encompassing a multitude of different kinds of products defined by different activity niches. Some are like reading a novel, some are like building model trains, some are like going bowling with friends, some are like doing a daily crossword puzzle. It’s plain-as-day logic that none of these activities are in any way substitutes for each other, and so it is the same with different genres of video games.You do not play Call of Duty for the same reason you play Final Fantasy, and you play neither of these for the same reason as Civilization, Minecraft, Bejeweled, or Farmville. Your expectations for each of them are different, the skills to play each of them effectively are different, the mindset with which you purchase and enjoy them is different, the skills to design and construct them are chasms apart, and their core technology is often wildly different.In short these games aren’t substitutes for one another and are not in competition with one another. At all. But, because they’re all delivered on similar electronic devices, somehow we associate them all as if they were intended to be, as if there were some zero sum game going on where any budget and development time devoted towards one of them takes away from the others.Simply put, no. That is not how this works.The new Call of Duty game doesn’t represent resources that would have gone to a new Grim Fandango if you hadn’t purchased it. You don’t need to shame Call of Duty players over their being interested in products that you don’t like. Similarly each new item purchased in Farmville wasn’t a dollar that person could have spent on a new Final Fantasy game.Let me put a couple of hard numbers on this for you: Call of Duty represents a very far outlier in terms of success, hitting between 10–15,million units sold on each console at its height. That’s each console, not total. The number of PS3s and Xbox 360’s in circulation was around 80,million.That means less than 20% of the user base of both consoles bought Call of Duty. This so-called definitive game series doesn’t approach close to half of all gamers playing it.What were the other 80% playing? Everything else.At the height of Final Fantasy you’d see similar numbers. At around 10,million copies of Final fantasy X, that only represented around 8% of the install base for the Playstation 2.8–10 million plus is a freakin’ huge number of sales that any game developer would be envious of — but again, that is definitely nowhere close to a majority of gamers. But for a few really weird exceptions, mainly games that came bundled with every copy of a console ever sold, it doesn’t matter what franchise you do this with. Roughly 10,million units worth of sales is where the best-selling games tend to top out, with a few recent hits breaking that number — but the overwhelming majority falling underneath it, meaning even so-called platinum hits are just scratching the surface of the gaming install base.Basically, the notion that there is a generic, monolithic market for video games is completely contradicted by reality, and it turns out that we don’t have remotely as much overlap in interests as gaming enthusiasts, whether they be developers, marketers, journalists, or simply other gamers, like to think we do. These are all actually separate products; there’s people loving single-player story games in one bubble, people loving multiplayer shooters in another bubble, and people loving strategy games and farming sims in another bubble, and so on.Many enthusiasts will definitely enjoy multiple different types of games, but I think that most of them exaggerate their own love of variety, really only favor a handful, and otherwise just have a certain habit of indulging curiosity when something unusual crosses their path.Any way about it, though, there’s plenty of room for all of us, and plenty of room for each of these niches to establish their own ground rules for making things work. I think, in fact, that a lot of designers exaggerate the level of commonality there is in what defines “good” design principles between different products.“Just working on any kind of game” isn’t a good goal for aspiring game developersThis is a piece of advice that was repeated to me ad nauseam during my time in college — that working on a game, any game, was a good idea and would help me work towards my goals in getting hired.As we’ve established the skills for building one kind of game, though, aren’t the same as those you’d use for building a different kind of game. Consequently, no, the mobile puzzle game won’t get you hired at a console game developer, unless the position in question happens to be on building a mobile puzzle game.There really, really isn’t some ladder of skills starting at creating a “Breakout” clone and ending at architecting an RPG. More simplistic games often serve as a useful way of teaching the barebones basics of a game engine, like moving transforms around, but that won’t get you far.Multiplayer shooters use network proxy systems that you won’t touch unless you’re specifically working on a multiplayer title.RPGs sit on top of complex data management and gameplay flow that you simply won’t touch unless you’re specifically working on an RPG.Social games have a relationship with live web services that is their core as a product, and if you don’t specifically work on web services, you aren’t going to magically become capable of implementing them.Open-world games rely on a level streaming model that you won’t learn how to build environments around unless you specifically work with that technology.Fighting games work based off animation-driven game mechanics that you won’t learn the best practices for unless you specifically work on a fighting game, beat-em-up, or some similar product utilizing that exact technology.It goes on, and on, and on. Each type of game has one or more core technologies and skill sets that it depends on, and these take tangible practice to work with. No amount of reading textbooks, watching Extra Credits, or listening to Game Grumps will help you if you don’t actually build something with these things.Yet, every educator I know, every mentor figure I’ve ever seen advising either myself or a student has always told people to wait “until they’re ready” to approach things beyond a certain scope. In being overly cautionary and telling students and aspiring game developers to consistently undershoot and avoid projects that are along the lines of the kinds of things that they’re aspiring to create, educators in the game development world do their students a miserable disservice.Video game development is not a single skill set, it is an application of other skill sets.Above you can see examples of specific technologies that act as the core of potential types of projects. Web services, data management, remote proxies, realtime animation and rendering, and many more.Each of these is a specialty unto itself, and learning that specialty is what equips you to build software with it. Video games are essentially entertainment products or toys built using that skill set or technology. Or, more specifically, playing with that technology.What is a multiplayer game if not the product of playing with network protocols and local area network connections? What is a social game if not a product of playing with web services? What is a stylish-looking hack-and-slash or a cinematic action game if not playing with animation technology? Many of the first games of these types were simply that: playful experiments. Play is learning, people make games to learn about technology, and as it turns out games in and of themselves end up being pretty good side-products.But, let’s be clear here. Those are the skill sets. A video game is an application of them — one potential application of many. If you pursue training specifically in video games you’re approaching the prospect of learning to work with technology or a given knowledge base very shortsightedly. You could do so, so much more than just video games, and you could find yourself able to build much more exciting products than the ones you’re hoping to imitate.Aspiring game developers do not have passion.They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.So let’s talk about “passion.” You’re “passionate” about making video games, huh? What games have you made?… None?How can you be passionate about making video games if you haven’t actually done it?The phrase you want here isn’t “passion,” it’s “youthful optimism” or “wishful thinking.” Passion is what’s left when that shit gets snuffed out by reality but you keep working anyway. Passion’s when something you wanted is hard as shit to accomplish, but you did it anyway, and do it damn well. It’s something you show and demonstrate, not something you hold within.To paraphrase the film Gattaca, when you’re already halfway across the lake, and didn’t save anything for the swim back, and make it all the way. Until you hit that point, you do not know whether or not you ever had passion to begin with.One thing I can tell you for sure is that it’s a lot easier to be passionate when you’re successful than it is when the waters are rough.So how about you, Mike? Do you have passion? …I’ll tell ya… I’m in a state right now where I’m teetering.On one hand, this has been an awful, un-rewarding career. I’ve become separated and isolated from friends and loved ones, I’ve compromised my own health, I’ve compromised my finances, and I’ve compromised so many opportunities to do something else. I genuinely think that I’m going to spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have been in other environments where I was more appreciated and more welcome, and where I might have achieved more.I certainly know I’m going to regret never having had the chance to work with some friends that I’d hoped to make games with, in that many of those friends have already been forced out of the industry. Not for a lack of passion on their part, but because they came so close to drowning and took so much abuse with so little reward.At the same time, I am at a point where I am surprising myself with what I am now capable of and what I could build if I could only secure an opportunity to do it.If I can just reach a little farther, Dad……then again, even Henry knew that there was a time and place to let go.

MISTAKES STUDENTS DO and GET “REJECTED”1. SAT First – Considering SAT alone as a first step. Appearing for SAT and considering it as a first step towards admission and wait for SAT attempt and results for further preparation for college application can be fatal. As admission is not only solely based on SAT scores so simultaneous preparation for AP and SAT 2 along with profiling guidance should be taken into consideration.Remember – Mediocre SAT score with good looking CV and well-written Essays/SOPS and LORS will make admission happen. Not to forget AP and SAT 2. So once you are sure of going abroad for, preparation should be holistically approached.2. 1500+ OR stop dreaming about IVY - Does this mean that anyone who doesn’t score highly on the SAT with perfect grades should abandon her Ivy League dreams?No. On the contrary, top universities have begun to place less emphasis on metrics like test scores and are growing more interested in students who live well-rounded lives.So advice is, don’t chase perfect scores at the expense of other activities.Students should focus on developing significant depth in one area, not just strong test scores and grades, if they want to attend their top-choice college3. More AP will make my profile strong: No please, it’s a truth those students who have challenged themselves academically as high chances of getting noticed by admission committee. Now there is a flip, students should not over burden themselves and should choose subjects where they are stronger at, The goal is not to think too much about the number of them, but to make sure that you leave time to pursue other things.4. More extracurricular - signing up for every extracurricular activity available, a laundry list of extracurricular may be a bit…imprecise. In other words, a lot of what we think will get students into highly selective colleges might actually have the opposite effect. What’s worse, a lot of those activities can be incredibly time consuming, energy draining, and expensive.Students should avoid boasting about small contributions and focus on showcasing a few activities where they truly shine.5. I know all and will do all - Parents and students don’t really know where to go for high-quality information. They look around and follow, try to enroll everywhere they can. A. Enrolling in most difficult classes. B. Chasing highest standardized scores. C. Joining every club and activities.6. Chasing SAT/ACT perfect scores- focusing or over-focusing on standardized tests takes away time from what truly matters, which is building that unique extracurricular profile to stand out. Instead, students should take a more reasonable approach that values a good test score, but not at the expense of other activities.We need to understand – What colleges are looking for and that’s a point that we always misunderstand and waste our child’s time and energy.To identify the students with the greatest potential, colleges have begun to prioritize a variety of factors in the admissions process. This new positioning means that students from all backgrounds have a better shot of getting into their dream school — if they know how to prepare.Demonstrated Interest: Colleges are looking for student bodies that are collectively well-rounded, comprising a group of specialists who together are an incredibly well-rounded and diverse. They’re not looking for students who do a little bit of a lot of things.Instead of being Jacks of all trades, students should figure out what they’re really passionate about, and then become a specialistNow problem arises when - student doesn’t know what to specialize in? What if she doesn’t feel she has natural talent in any one area?Now do a brainstorming or simply observe (hit and try) where the focus could be. It may be in ARTWORK, and then start small, if that student continues to work within that field, growing her skills, taking on leadership roles, and finding ways to serve the community in that same field, rather than pursuing ten other things, she becomes a specialist.The goal is to stand out from the crowd. Selective colleges tend to look for “T-shaped” applicants: students who are accomplished at and interested in a wide array of things but also have a "spike," a special depth in one area of genuine passion.When you take these incremental steps and start making connections in the community, you start getting attention. That’s why START EARLY.Essays and Personal StatementsSAT scores don’t tell colleges how interesting, driven, or passionate their applicants are. That’s why they ask for essays.Students should use their essay to demonstrate what makes them unique. Everyone tries to be special, which means students have to be careful about how they present themselves.SUPER ADVICE – Do your school, plan for SAT/ACT, don’t get over packed with classes and activities (why so many tuition, does your school teaches ROCKET SCIENCE!!!!!). Focus on one hobby, Yes- you heard it right HOBBY, NOT ANOTHER TEST, which will be a stress buster, it will eventually helps you connect with community, as you will make incremental success in the same.Young people who explore the world outside school inevitably learn things they never would have otherwise. Those discoveries feed an intellectual curiosity that’s good for both admissions odds and personal growthWhat EduQuest offers: We here well understand that only SAT won’t work so we offer a 360 degree approach SAT course which covers all value added points, sans those it’s difficult to get noticed abroad.Online live and Classroom SAT coaching