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A Year in Review: A Look Back, and Forward, at the HackerYou Journey

2018 HackerYou Review

Blog A Year in Review: A Look Back, and Forward, at the HackerYou Journey

6 min read

Melissa Carter's headshot

By Melissa Carter

Senior Designer

Juno College

2018 has been another exciting year at HackerYou.

We’ve got a lot of things to be proud of this year, and a lot of people to thank for making the HackerYou community even more amazing with each passing day. In case you’re new to HackerYou, or you just want a reminder of all the great things that have happened in 2018, here’s a recap (and slight humble brag) of some things we’ve accomplished this year. Plus some of the things we’re excited for in 2019.

We won all the awards

In 2018 Switchup named HackerYou the Top Coding Bootcamp in Toronto, and 8th in the world. HackerYou was also rated as the Best Coding Bootcamp in Toronto by Course Report, and the Best Coding Bootcamp by Course Compare. It’s not only our hands-on, project-based learning, our great student to instructor ratio, or our downtown learning campus that sets us apart. According to these ratings our summer camp vibe and almost cult-like community following is what puts us over the top, and we agree. Our community is what we’re known for, so we just wanted to say thank you for being a part of it!

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Continuing Education is booming

In 2018, we ran a total of 63 continuing education courses. These courses were previously known as part-time, but we’ve recently switched the name to continuing education to better represent our increasingly diverse group of students. These learners come in on evenings and weekends to take courses on Web Development, JavaScript, and User Experience Design, and walk away with beautiful new portfolio pieces and a variety of new skills. 63 courses is the most we have ever run in a year, and our goal is to increase that number even more in 2019. We have three Web Development courses starting in January alone, and you can choose to start on a Monday, Tuesday, or Sunday depending on your schedule.

Learn More About Web Development

Our Bootcamp is better than ever

In 2018 we welcomed in another four cohorts of Bootcamp students, with our largest ever cohort of 39 students wrapping up their program in just a few days. That means that in 2018 our bootcamp grads launched 149 beautiful portfolios and more than 700 incredible projects using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Git, and more. You can check out a few of our favourite projects from these new developers tonight at Fall 2018 Demo Night!

In 2019 we’re also excited to launch our first-ever post-bootcamp course to help our graduates level up and make the most of their job seeking time. This course will start two weeks after the end of each bootcamp, and run two evenings a week, for six weeks. This course will review and expand on some of the more advanced topics of our bootcamp curriculum, and teach grads what they should be learning next. Think this course sounds great? Stay tuned in 2019 to hear about how you could get involved too.

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New and FREE workshops

In 2018 we also launched a series of free workshops, and the response has been so great that we’ve decided to make them a permanent part of our offerings. Our free Web Development Basics Workshops are focused on giving absolute beginners a taste of what coding is like. We ran the first edition of this workshop in November, and will be continuing to run it regularly into 2019. These workshops sell out fast, so be sure to visit our events page to find an upcoming date and reserve your spot.

Find Out More About Our Free Coding Workshops

In 2019 we’ll also be putting a big focus on workshops, and providing content that can help our community learn and level up in just a few hours of learning. In January alone we have three new workshops running, and will continue to launch new dates throughout the year. Stay tuned for the launch of more new events, or check out our workshops page to secure your spot in an upcoming session!

Our team is huge!

It’s not only our students who are growing, the HackerYou team has also changed drastically in 2018. At the beginning of the year we had a small team of just 14 people. After welcoming a number of new faces and adding a bunch of brand new positions to our team over the last twelve months, we’ll be up to 27 people at the beginning of next year. That’s almost double the size in only a year, and that’s not even counting all the dogs we’ve welcomed in!

New courses

This year, we also introduced two new continuing-education courses to give our students more learning options. Accelerated Web Development and Accelerated JavaScript are versions of our normal continuing-education courses that have been accelerated to suit those who want to learn faster in the same hands-on classroom environment. Instead of running over six weeks on evenings and weekends like our standard continuing-education courses do, our Accelerated courses run full-time for one week, with the same great curriculum. We ran two accelerated courses in 2018 with such success that we’ll be running eight accelerated courses in 2019. If you’re looking to take a vacation to quickly learn a new skill, level up in time to apply for our next bootcamp, or get a taste of what our full-time learning environment is like, our accelerated courses might be perfect for you. Our first accelerated JavaScript course of 2019 kicks off January 7th! Find out more about Accelerated Web Development here.

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Exciting events

This year we ran a number of exciting new events for our community. Visibility hidden is an annual event we hold for our alumni where developers compete to code a website in a short amount of time, without being able to check their work in the browser. This has been a favourite event of the HackerYou community for years, so in 2018 we decided to take this event into the broader tech community, and held a special edition of Visibility Hidden for the opening party of FITC Web Unleashed. Not only did we have a number of HackerYou community members speaking at FITC this year, but we had a huge turnout for this event and had a great time opening our space to the broader Toronto tech community.

Impressive new stats

Last, but not least, this year at HackerYou we launched our first ever Student Outcomes Report. This report details the success of our bootcamp students for the entire 2017 year, and breaks down the numbers on their salaries, the gender gap, and much more. Though we’ve always known that HackerYou bootcamp graduates do extremely well in their careers, now we have the proof. With 97% of 2017 students being employed and an average permanent salary of $53,872, we’ve never been more sure that our process works - and we’ve never been more excited to perfect it even more in 2019.

Download Student Outcomes Report


Overall, 2018 has been one of the most exciting years at HackerYou yet. Though I may be biased because I only started on January 2nd, 2018 - I can tell that the HackerYou community is stronger and better than ever. With a growing team of passionate experts dedicated to building the best curriculum, taught in the best possible atmosphere, by the best possible people, 2019 is set to be even better than this year. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what happens.

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