Many years ago, Kelly Chung was a mathematics major at USC. He was a smart guy who could have easily continued in the academic direction but decided he didn’t want that particular career. After a few months thinking about his next step, and knowing he enjoyed his brief interactions with coding in college, he decided to apply to coding bootcamps. After getting into a couple, including App Academy, he decided he’d go for it and move to San Francisco from Las Vegas.

In less than a year, he would graduate as a top student at App Academy and was offered a job as an instructor. What happened next was a great success story: He became a leader, often leading discussions of growth. Many of those discussions led to new curriculum additions that would benefit successive coding cohorts, like a weekend program for potential students.

In order to understand key aspects of the program, we wanted to talk to Kelly about his perspective. We discussed the reasons behind App Academy’s curriculum updates, day-to-day instruction, and the reasons why a bootcamp degree may be better than a college Computer Science one.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity where needed.

Tell us about what students can learn at App Academy that they can’t learn anywhere else.

One of the things we tell people we specialize in is creating web applications, or websites in layman’s terms. [But] where we shine as an organization is our ability to adapt to what is popular within the market. Unlike traditional college CS programs, or Coursera, who have to go through a long update process, we can update our curriculum on the fly with updates that have happened on a day-to-day basis. For example, we’ve updated a couple of the programming libraries six to seven times in the past year. What we teach is the latest technologies and the latest practices on how to implement those technologies.

Can you explain the curriculum updates to programming languages in more detail?

Anytime a programming library or a framework for a programming language is released and updated, it sometimes means they’ve found security flaws. That is the worst case scenario. Less seriously, [it is] bugs they didn’t catch before or features they wanted to implement but couldn’t because it didn’t fit with the underlying philosophy for that particular tech. Creators of these technologies are thinking about how to improve themselves and by extension, their libraries.

For that reason, technology has been an always-evolving thing. So it makes sense libraries need to update according to the times. Some of the things we’ve updated in the last couple of years included going from Rails 4 to Rails 5, which came with a lot of changes like WebSockets — that’s how you get streaming to work. Our students implement things like Slack that need streaming services.

We’ve also updated to webpack 4 and [we have] JavaScript updates on a yearly basis. React is one of the hottest techs and we’ve moved from version 14 to 16. React Router, a library we use in connection with React, is so popular that Facebook bought it.

How is the updating connected to students’ educational needs?

As a person that comes out of a bootcamp, it’s almost expected you’re learning the up-to-date tech because you don’t come from a CS background. So there’s gotta be another selling point. That’s what App Academy excels in — the current modern-day applications of those theories. The libraries we work with that are popular in the market all stem from some of the fundamental principles of programming that eventually evolved into this new thing. You only need to know how to use it and work with it and know it extensively [and] that means being up-to-date with any updates.

Sometimes companies will use older versions of these technologies because they don’t want to update and potentially break something when it comes to their production level code but when it comes to them sitting down in an interview, [you need to know whether] you know this or not. It helps to be cutting edge when it comes to those technologies and that’s how you prove yourself in the interview room.

A lot of the day-to-day learning happens at App Academy through pair programming. Tell us about that.  

Pair programming is the concept of working with another person on the same computer, sharing a keyboard and a mouse, working on the same exact text editor when it comes to editing a piece of code. Some people say what’s the point of that? You’re essentially halving the amount of coding potentially