*Note: It's been a long time since I wrote this and it's been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I've founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program that takes exceptional aspiring developers and makes them job-ready. Our mission is meant to bring this level of education to people who cannot uproot their lives to attend an in-person program and I encourage you to check it out if this path interests you.*

I recently attended the inaugural Ruby on Rails bootcamp offered by App Academy and it was a hell of an experience. It's an undertaking that I highly recommend but one which takes a serious level of maturity and commitment to do right. Given that hundreds of other students will soon walk a similar path, I've put together the following recommendations to help you get the most out of your bootcamp experience. You may not be headed to the same program but I bet you'll find some of this useful to you anyway.

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*Note: It's been a long time since I wrote this and it's been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I've founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program that takes exceptional aspiring developers and makes them job-ready. Our mission is meant to bring this level of education to people who cannot uproot their lives to attend an in-person program and I encourage you to check it out if this path interests you.*

I got into App Academy in late December and it's pretty much consumed my life ever since. The San Francisco-based program is a 9-week intensive dive into Ruby and Ruby on Rails designed to take people with little or no experience in computer programming and turn them into junior web developers. They are an offshoot of the original Dev Bootcamp, which began offering a similar style of classes about a year ago and has enjoyed great success.

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