So I have finally finished the Telerik Software Academy and it was a transforming experience. Before I started the Academy I asked some friends of mine who were developers, if it is possible to become a junior level developer in 1 year starting from zero. I didn’t exactly start from zero, I learned BASIC and Assembly when I was a kid, and later enough C++ to write a Bulls & Cows game, but I knew nothing about modern web or game development. No idea what JavaScript, CSS or SQL was. And so were most of the other students.

Now I know for certain that it is possible to become a junior developer in about 12 months. The numbers prove it - every one I know from the Academy found a job within a couple of months after graduation. But statistics are not all. What they don’t show is the enormous amount of work and stress and dedication required to complete all the exams at the Academy with excellence. I have probably put about 16 hours a day for 12 straight months to study and write code. Here is the punch card of my Telerik Academy repo where I put all my homework assignments and team projects:

And check this guy’s repo, who I think is one of the best students ever completed the Academy and who writes the most elegant code I’ve ever seen (he is now working on the NativeScript runtime). It looks like he didn’t sleep :)

I’ve estimated that we have put a total of over 100 hours just in sitting for exams (16 exams of 6-8 hours each). And the competition was really intense - about 1500 students enrolled in the class of ²⁰¹³⁄₂₀₁₄ and 150 graduated with a certificate (that means they took all exams with excellence). We were using an automated scoring system (BGCoder) which showed live results during the exams (similar to TopCoder) and there were always some people who solved the problems super fast and even left early. So our teachers made the problems so hard, that only 1 or 2 people could solve all problems and sometimes no one had the maximum possible result. So when you got in the top 10, you were pretty darn happy about it :) I knew that the toughest exam was Data Structures and Algorithms, and if I wanted to become a software engineer I had to ace that exam. So I studied really hard and I solved all problems at the exam and got to the 3rd place. That was pretty awesome :)

I think what makes the Academy so successful is the way the program is structured. Instead of going straight to studying a technology (like databases, a web framework, or mobile applications), you first build a good foundation covering algorithms, data structures, object oriented programming and high quality code principles. You go from building basic console applications, through simple static html pages, more dynamic javascript applications and finally full scale database driven business applications. You go from the more simple and concrete to the more complex and abstract, with practically no gaps. We also have some super smart trainers (national coding competition winners) who really care about their students.

So thank you Telerik Academy for the excellent training and the challenges along the way! Now its my turn to use technology to solve some real world problems.