A coding bootcamp is only as good as its instructors. We’re lucky to boast some of the best.

One such instructor includes Barry Mattern. A recent App Academy graduate himself, he took an offer to join our Online Instructional Team to help future generations of App Academy students change their lives — and careers — in a matter of months.

Members of our online, 24-Week bootcamp cohorts get to experience Barry’s unique teaching style as he moves them through complicated computer science principles. Learn more about his job, his background, and how his steadfast philosophy around communication and documentation.

Barry, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your role as a Junior Instructoinal Assistant.

I’m an online Junior Instructional Assistant, so basically I’m here to help the students in whatever issues that they have. Whether that’s with technical [stuff], or understanding the problems, or just giving more explanation in general. Having gone through the course myself, I think having something like that is incredibly helpful. To be able to go back and do that and help students even more is pretty awesome.

So you were a student yourself. How did you wind up coming to work at App Academy?

I graduated on Friday and started the next Monday. I went right from a cohort into helping assist with the teaching. And I mean, I love it to be honest. I was actually a mentor in college to some people in our design programs. I’m a designer by trade before I came to App Academy.

So I got started there. As I worked my way up, I became more of a mentor/manager to a lot of the teams that I was working with. A lot of that was all technical based, as well. How do you work with the programs, how do you get them to be most efficient, and things like that.

I’ve always really enjoyed teaching and talking with people and showing them things regarding whatever it is we’re working with, whether it’s with the design programs or now with code. I find it incredibly rewarding. You learn so much more by having to teach it to someone else. You just get that next level of understanding. So it’s like… beneficial both ways.

I’m sure your students are super lucky. Speaking of, how do you interact with students on a day-to-day basis? What does your day look like?

There are a couple of mediums that we use for interaction.

One is through video on Zoom. We’ll have an online classroom, and we’ll all just be hanging out in the same room — that’s usually when there are lectures and questions that can be answered by the lead or something like that.

While they’re doing that, there might be Slack questions. Slack is another thing that we contact students with. So while I’m busy listening to the lecture, listening to the questions there, I’m also keeping an eye on Slack and seeing if I can help out, maybe provide a little insight. That could be just quickly providing a few words or sentences on something that the lead just mentioned, or it could be a specific question that a student will ask in Slack. That way, I can send them some helpful resources.

Towards the end of the day, students have a project they work on, so really it gets to be more of a one-on-one situation. While they’re pair programming, I’ll hop into their room with both students and just listen to any questions that they have, try to provide some extra support, or help understand the problem itself.

You mentioned a module structure, so there are different kinds of modules as you’re going through the program. At what point are you working with students during their journey through the program?

I’m actually in Module Two. That’s the Computer Science Module. It’s very fun stuff ’cause you really take a deep dive in algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming. It’s a brain teaser for sure, but it’s something that I really love doing.

I write everything down, because sometimes visually seeing what’s going on and understanding what your code is doing, is so much more helpful seeing it written out and figuring out what’s happening. That’s something that I really enjoy doing while teaching this stuff and giving those people the resource of, like, Hey