Hungry Academy

Boot camp from Categories Washington DC
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Washington DC-based The Hungry Academy is a unique and game changing 20 weeks learning experience. It’s your opportunity to push yourself to the limits. At Hungry Academy you’ll:

  • Work with and be mentored by the industry’s best programmers.
  • Learn how to build successful products using software development tools, like Ruby on Rails.
  • Prepare yourself to join LivingSocial’s elite engineering team.
  • Have a huge impact on the world of local commerce.

The Hungry Academy is an intensive program that will put you in a position to join LivingSocial’s engineering team for at least 18 months. It’s an exclusive program for two dozen dedicated people who want to build amazing products.

Story of Hungry Academy:

Hungry Academy started with the question “If you had good people who had the right attitude but were missing development skills, could we turn them into proficient developers in six months?”

The answer isn’t easy. Collegiate Computer Science programs are an intense four years. But the reality is that academic form of CS only maps to some areas of real world development. If you’re building 3D-game engines, you’ve got to understand complex geometry and eek out every instruction cycle from your CPU.

But the world of web development is a different story. Our real challenge is figuring out how the application should work. If we build out ideas, smooth the rough edges, and follow strong guidelines along the way, we can later turn the slow code into fast code. The real challenge is figuring out what the software needs to do and how to do it.

We take people who have the right spirit, a knack for solving complex problems, and teach them to build those solutions in software. A six month program can’t turn them into true masters of programming — but that’s not the point. To be a great programmer is like being a great artist or musician: you combine a solid foundation with a lifetime of practice. This is the foundation.

The application was released in December of 2011 and due just a few weeks later. The notable requirement was an eight minute video answering five questions. “Video?!?” people asked. We weren’t looking for skills they already had, so how good was a resume? We were looking for character, attitude, and drive. And video was the perfect way to communicate it. A huge pool of applicants led to a selection rate lower than the world’s top colleges.

That’s the story so far as we get ready to kick off with our first class of twenty-four on March 5th, 2012.


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