The moment I caught my first glimpse of the prep work for a/A, I was like, “Whoa. Holy sh*t.” One part being that at the time, I had less than three weeks to complete it, and it was “four weeks” worth of work, and the other part being that, after looking through some of the problems, we’d be building some next level stuff (relative to my current mastery of Ruby). It was structured to span four weeks, with a certain set of readings and problems for each day of the week. a/A had estimated that it would take approximately 3-4 hours a day, 4-5 days a week depending on which week, but it definitely took much, much longer. This was especially true since some of the concepts were a bit to hard to grasp at first. After moving my cohort, I often found that some problems took more than a day to fully understand, keep in mind that I was still working full time and was only able to put in 2-3 hours of solid, focused work each day.

Each day built on the last and so the difficulty was progressive, which made for a great learning experience. I often found myself referring back to old problems for concepts that would need to be incorporated into the later problems, especially the problems for week 3 problems. By far, I found week 3 the most enjoyable, minus the XML document problem. Week 3 encompassed making games, and while it was great to pass all the spec while writing the programs, it was much more fun to work on making the game playable after the initial test-driven development (TDD) workflow.

Without an ounce of a doubt the problems were hard, as with many things when you’re first learning how to do it. But rather than increasing in exponential difficulty, I found that there was only a steep learning curve in the first week to week and a half. Once I got the hang of the fundamentals, it was a lot easier to take the fundamentals and apply them towards the later problems, as opposed to learning the fundamentals from scratch.

If you’re reading this and you’re thinking of applying, are applying, applied or got accepted to App Academy, I have a couple nuggets of advice for when you hit the a/A prep work stage. If you’re able to quit your job and focus on the prep work, I would do it, but only if you have enough resources and support to last you up to 6-7 months without working, since a/A’s program is 3 months, followed by an average of 7 weeks to find a job post graduation. The increase in focused time spent on working on the problems will definitely set you up for increased success as opposed to tackling the prep work in 2-3 hour blocks. You can still be successful with 2-3 hours each day, don’t get me wrong, I just feel like I would be much better prepared if I had a full 8-12 hours a day to spend on it.

Another nugget of advice I would like to provide is to really dig deep into the why of how everything works. I’ll be writing blog articles soon on the fundamentals of Ruby that I learned as a way of reaffirming the things I learned, as well as helping you understand the concepts at a deeper level. I hope to be able to convey the fundamentals in a way that a beginner, such as myself a couple weeks ago, would have understood it completely.

Until then, thanks for reading! And I’ll talk to you guys next time.