I attended a portion of a bootcamp last year and the AD team is great
and worth visiting just for the company and pleasure to sit in their
chairs. I was hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the ACS toolkit during the bootcamp by talks / demos of different parts of the
toolkit. However the bootcamp consists more of: Here are the problem sets, if you need any help doing them ask (more than willing to help).
This is fine if the goal of the bootcamp is to determine who can/will
off a set of requirement specs can adopt a new tool set, code the solutions. Upon evaluating the *cadets* results, offer positions to
those that are capable and produce acceptable solutions. However I
was not really looking for an offer from AD but was hoping to gain more of *seminar* experience opposed to a *lab* experience. I feel
it is probably just as easy to accomplish the psets at home, maybe easier considering no time constrains. If your goal is to work with
AD then I would do the pset at home anyway considering the bonus you
get upon acceptance. I think the boot camps are also a chance for
perspective employees to *check out* AD as well. Since you can probably just go and visit them you could accomplish this without doing bootcamp. AD seems like a great place to work and good luck if
that is your direction. AD has done great things lately including the
role that they have given to Adam Farkas. In case your reading this Adam, I think part of the goal AD envisions for ACS and OpenACS is to gain an acceptance and usage in market share. This would be helped
along if there were more of a seminar or lectures / demos of the ACS
features / usage either at beginning of boot camps or separate sort
of event. If I wanted to spend my hours figuring out how to do something, I prefer to do it in the luxury of my own home. ACS is a great toolkit but can have a hefty learning curve. Anything that can shorten that cycle is good thing.
