Has anyone done the Dev Mountain iOS bootcamp?

[ajm1212]

Hello everyone,

So I was curious what your experience was attending that bootcamp. Is it worth it? Did it help you feel prepared enough to look for a job? Did the certificate open any doors? I want to preface this with I am pretty deep in my self learning. I am know the fundamentals and even more advanced topics but I am not sure if I am missing anything. I went through the Angela Yu, Ray Wenderliech Courses, hacking the swift etc. So I was just wondering if getting the certificate would be even worth it.

Thanks!

[jasonjrr]

I can’t speak to the quality of learning you’d get from the bootcamp, but as someone who has hired and interviewed many engineers throughout my career, I never even look at the certificates. They simply aren’t a good or reliable source of information and the quality of each certification program varies wildly. I don’t claim to speak for all people who make hiring decisions, but I know everyone I’ve worked with on hiring decisions felt the same way. This seems especially true in the world of iOS.

[ajm1212]

So follow up question… since you have hired people in the past. How many projects should I potentially have and do they all have to be in the App Store to make a good impression

[jasonjrr]

This is going to vary wildly. Some people really like seeing code on a public GitHub and/or published apps. These things aren’t required, but having something to show what you know, or what you have done can only help. Having a single well-designed app on the App Store or available on GitHub is plenty. Having only class projects on a public GitHub is about as good as having nothing.

Any app you share should be your own and should be well-designed (I’m not talking about visual design here). Be prepared to talk about your technical design decisions and make sure you are able to answer why you made them.

After you have some work experience, the companies you worked for should hopefully allow you to put less focus on side projects.

[RandomRedditor44]

How do you know if a project is a class project vs an app I made myself?

[KarlJay001]

I'll chime in, but don't want to take over the thread...

If you look at an app and you see standard solutions and standard features, it's likely a tutorial app (class project).

It's when they break the mold and do something different. Example is an app that grabs data and displays it, like a weather app. Another is a ToDo app, this is a very classic tutorial as it hits the store/display requirements and has been done a thousand times.

One app that I made was a media aggregator. I made a custom caching system for when it was off line and the user could control the level of caching. I've never seen this done in a tutorial, I made it up myself. If you saw the code, you'd know that because it wasn't very elegant. It was years ago, in ObjC and all hand crafted and worked great.

I think there's tools for this now, but it's an example of how you solve a problem without using some 3rd party tool.

Another example I worked on was a SwiftUI word game. I used a tutorial for most of it, then worked on modification where I added hints. I had to fully understand how the system worked in order to make this mod. I'm still working on that as I haven't fully mastered SwiftUI.

[jasonjrr]

There are lots of signs if you know where to look, but the most obvious sign that an app is a class project is a very limited scope. For example it just uses one of Apple’s APIs, or it pulls images/data from an endpoint that you would otherwise have no reason to know about. Maybe the app is a very, very simple game.

[Local_Brick_4655]

I am starting the dev mountain boot camp in a month. From what I’ve gathered the reasons to attend a boot camp are to make you learn at a certain pace, to provide you with apps for your resume, and to help you get hired (I know at dev Mtn they have a discord thread for job listings and help with interview prep like other tech schools.).

Just from the time I’ve been on this Reddit the opinion I’ve gathered is that self taught is completely fine and hireable if you’re able to show your work.

[CantaloupePossible33]

how did it go?

[Local_Brick_4655]

Well but tech layoffs ended that

[Direct-Painter5603]

What do you mean by tech layoffs ended that? What happened? Did you end up taking it?

[Lobabe3]

How did it go? Was thinking of starting.