Forge Academy
16-week full-stack engineering bootcamp · next cohort capped at 24

Forge is the bootcamp that refuses to coddle you. No passive playlists, no copy-the-instructor busywork. You ship eleven real projects, get your code read line-by-line every single day, and graduate able to hold the room in a working engineering team.

  • 16 weeks, full-time
  • Pay nothing until you're hired
  • 24 builders per cohort, hard cap
week-16 — capstone demo day
$ git log --oneline --since='16 weeks ago' | wc -l
1,438

$ npm run deploy -- --prod
  building capstone… ████████████ 100%
  ✓ 214 tests passed
  ✓ lighthouse  perf 98  a11y 100  best 100
  ✓ shipped → https://demo.forge.dev/maya

$ cat ~/offers.txt
  [accepted] Junior SWE — Northwind Labs
  base 84k · start in 3 weeks

you@forge:~$ _

The numbers we audit and publish, every single cohort.

91%
Hired within 180 days of graduating
$82K
Median first-year base salary
1,400+
Commits written per graduate
24
Builders per cohort — a hard cap

Where the last four cohorts went to work

Northwind LabsHalcyonVergeTidewayBrightfieldOnsembleDriftwoodKestrelNorthwind LabsHalcyonVergeTidewayBrightfieldOnsembleDriftwoodKestrel
How the forge works

Heat, pressure,and a hammer.

Skill doesn't come from finishing a playlist. It comes from building something hard, breaking it, and being made to explain why out loud. Every hour at Forge is engineered around that loop.

Build from hour one

Hour one of week one you're in an editor shipping a real feature — not configuring a sandbox or watching someone else type. By Friday you've opened your first pull request against a live repo and defended it in review.

Code read every day

Every line you write gets read by a working senior engineer. Blunt, specific, on the record — the exact bar you'll meet on the job, starting day two instead of month three.

Pair under a clock

You rotate pairs each sprint, ship to a deadline, and learn to think out loud while someone watches your cursor move.

Real stack, real ops

TypeScript, React, Node, Postgres, Docker, and a deploy pipeline that goes red the instant your tests do.

The pager goes off

Final weeks run a simulated on-call. A service falls over at 9am; you read the trace, find the bug, and ship the fix before standup.

The 16 weeks

A curriculum thatbuilds, not buffers.

Four phases, each one ending in a shipped project that goes straight into the portfolio you interview with. No phase moves on until yours runs green.

Phase 1 — Foundations

JavaScript and TypeScript to fluency: the language, the type system, the runtime, and the habits. You ship a CLI tool and a fully tested utility library.

Phase 2 — Full-stack

React on the front, Node and Postgres behind it. You ship a multi-user app with real auth, real data, and an API you designed yourself.

Phase 3 — Production

Docker, CI, observability, and load. You take an app from 'works on my machine' to deployed, monitored, and surviving real traffic.

Phase 4 — Capstone

Three weeks, one ambitious build of your own, defended on demo day in front of hiring engineers who are taking notes.

Shipped by builders, not instructors

Capstones that turned into careers.

Every graduate leaves with deployed, real-traffic projects on their name. A sample from recent demo days — each one live, each one defended line-by-line in review.

Realtime · WebSockets

Tideline

A collaborative whiteboard syncing 40 cursors at sub-100ms latency. Its author had an offer the week she demoed it.

Postgres · geospatial

Switchback

A trail-routing API that ranks hikes by elevation and weather, serving 12k requests a day on a single free-tier box.

Payments · webhooks

Cadence

A subscription billing dashboard with idempotent Stripe handling and a full audit log — built solo in three weeks.

Queues · workers

Relay

A job-processing pipeline that retries, backs off, and replays failures, load-tested clean to 5,000 jobs a minute.

Search · ranking

Northlight

A docs search engine with typo tolerance and ranked results, indexing 80k pages in under a second.

Offline-first PWA

Bramble

A field-notes app that works with zero signal and syncs cleanly when it returns — no data lost across 1,000 test runs.

Graduates

They came in unsure. They left engineers.

I'd quit two online courses before Forge. The difference was the pressure — someone read my code every single day and refused to let it slide. I had three offers before graduation.

M
Maya Fernandes
Junior SWE, Northwind Labs

The on-call weeks felt cruel until my second month on the job, when a real service went down and I already knew exactly what to do. Forge trained the reflex, not just the syntax.

D
Daniel Osei
Backend Engineer, Halcyon

I was a line cook with a library card. Sixteen weeks later I was deploying to production. No fluff, no false comfort, just the work — and the work changed my life.

P
Priya Raman
Full-stack Developer, Verge
Tuition

Skin in the game — on both sides of the desk.

We only win when you get hired, so we priced it that way. Pick the path that fits your life. Every one of them lands in the same cohort, the same bar, the same daily review.

Upfront

Pay in full, save the most.

$14,500 once
  • Full 16-week cohort
  • Daily senior code review
  • Career coaching + mock interviews
  • Lifetime alumni network
  • $1,500 off the deferred price
Most popular

Deferred

Pay nothing until you're earning.

$0 upfront
  • Everything in Upfront
  • Pay only once hired above $55k
  • Fixed 12% of salary for 24 months
  • Capped — never more than $18k total
  • Never placed? You owe nothing

Employer-sponsored

For teams reskilling their people.

Custom
  • Cohort seats for your staff
  • Curriculum mapped to your stack
  • Progress reporting for managers
  • Volume tuition rates
  • A dedicated cohort lead

Hard questions, straight answers.

Do I need to know how to code already?

No. We require a short logic and persistence assessment, not prior experience. Roughly half of each cohort writes their first real line of code at Forge. We screen for grit, not a résumé.

Is this really full-time?

Yes — nine to six, Monday to Friday, in person or live-remote, for sixteen straight weeks. It is the hardest thing most graduates have ever done. If you can't commit the hours, this isn't the program for you, and we'll tell you so before you pay a cent.

How does the deferred tuition actually work?

You pay nothing until you land a job earning at least $55,000. From then it's a fixed 12% of your salary for 24 months, capped so you never pay more than $18,000 total. If you're never placed in a qualifying role, you owe nothing — the terms are in plain language, signed before you start.

What happens if I don't get hired?

Career support doesn't expire at graduation; it runs until you're placed. On the deferred plan, no job means no tuition. We publish our placement rate every cohort and have it independently audited, because the model only works when yours does.

Why cap every cohort at 24?

Daily, line-by-line review from senior engineers does not scale to a lecture hall. Twenty-four is the largest group we can hold to a real engineering bar before it becomes a video course with a Slack channel.

The next cohort starts soon. The forge is already hot.

Applications are read in the order they land, and seats are capped at 24. Take the assessment today — it's free, and it'll tell you honestly whether you're ready for sixteen weeks of this.