Holberton School

I've been lucky to be a part of the first experimental batch of Holberton school. I had some previous programming experience, but not enough to pursue a career in coding, and certainly not enough to fall in love with programming.

As someone who has been... Read More passionate about coding and how computers actually work, I've found that the problem with learning on your own is not that there is no information out there -- the problem is that there is too much information. There are so many resources that it becomes difficult to assess what you need to know. Holberton School has surprised me in cutting through the noise.

From the start, the founders of this program have gotten the fundamentals right: enforcing good learning practices and coding habits. I think it's these fundamentals that make this program unlike anything else out there.

While I personally can speak more to the low-level programming track, my personal experience has allowed me to form a few theories as to why this program is so successful. In my opinion, here are the few key features that I think differentiate the Holberton program:

First, it has a structured learning approach: it tests you and ensures that you are actually learning, as opposed to coding things you don’t thoroughly understand. As soon as your code is being reviewed, the faculty goes to very great lengths to push your code to the limits and find a way to break it. Evidence of your code not being perfect could be evidence of you not learning. Double pointers? INT_MIN / INT_MAX edge cases? If there is a hole in your understanding, it is the goal of the faculty to find it -- and they will create checks and test cases that will fail when running checks against your code. I think this is a big reason why I personally never felt bored and why I never felt unchallenged through this program, even when I pushed to learn more.

Second, I was never challenged so much that I felt that I couldn't overcome each challenge. Even someone without experience can learn from what happens in memory as your code gets compiled by the GCC compiler on a Linux kernel. The teaching assumes no background in CS whatsoever, and yet, supports you with challenges at the more advanced levels of depth that you can get (there are optional “more advanced” tasks, that have the full support of the faculty). How the school has managed to strike this delicate balance -- I don't know. But I think it has something to do with their strong culture of learning, which I think is their third strong point.

The school has a very strong culture of learning, and the way I see it, I think it is due to its spirit of effective communication and cooperation with your peers, coupled with very strong learning fundamentals. These fundamentals include: "don't write any code you don't understand”; “don’t write any code your peers won’t understand”; “write code in a way that your future self will understand”; “understand what you are doing first, and then code later”; “comment your code”; “keep your functions short”; “your code should follow a certain style” (they've even automated a surprisingly robust style code checker -- codenamed "Betty", named after Betty Holberton -- that enforces good program structure and checks to make sure your C code doesn't become a whole mess!)

Fourth, depending on how you look at it, this one can be seen as a con, or as a pro, of the program: the program is young. This means that there can sometimes be minor errors / typos, and other inconsistencies in the tasks and projects. If you decide to look at whether the program and its curriculum is in its "final" form, you will not find that here. At least as of this writing, the curriculum is the aggregate of all the project assignments, and the solutions that its students post on GitHub. While the curriculum is not formally defined, in my opinion, the faculty more than makes up for this; the tasks, the projects, and the learning materials iterate and get more advanced based on feedback from the students. This means that there is a very rapid feedback loop; it is common for projects to get clarified or updated in real time as you work on them (the faculty always notifies you of these changes on Slack though). In fact, you could argue that the culture at Holberton is that there is no "final" form -- learning evolves. I guess it is up to each individual to decide if this is a con or a pro. In my personal practical learning experience, this has been very much a pro.

And fifth, for the last thing, and perhaps also one of the most important, this program teaches you how to learn. How to ask for help. What kinds of questions are “Google-able”. How to look something up without knowing the answer. It gives you that intuition somehow. There is so much to write that I think that it will not be possible for me to cover everything in this review, but I can definitely tell you that this program successfully and effectively tailors education to each student’s background and learning style. In short, this culture of learning has made me fall in love with programming.

To sum it all up in a nutshell, this program aims to give you the learning experience you need to start a career in Computer Science. It my experience so far, it has exceeded my expectations.

I am so thankful that I have had the opportunity so far to be a student at Holberton. It's changed my life, and I'm only a month in to the program. Talking with all the past students and seeing how many of them have gone off to be successful is amazing... Read More and inspiring. The staff and mentors are incredible people who really care about the students and the school. It's not easy work, but its an incredible experience and I am looking forward to the next 2 years.

I do know a couple students who ultimately decided that Holberton wasn't for them--either the pace of the curriculum was too fast, they wanted more instruction, or they realized that they wanted to focus on one aspect of web dev (e.g. Ruby on Rails) instead... Read More of the full stack.

For me, Holberton was perfect. On an intellectual level, I love being able to "touch" a lot of different things, understand how things work together, and have a comprehensive picture of the industry. Operationally, because projects feel more like tackling puzzles than "studying," it was always easy to find motivation to work (something I chronically had issues with in college). Finally, because I had a lot of freedom for how to approach and guide my own learning, I felt like I had ownership over every day (a rare thing to feel in modern society!).

So whether Holberton School is right for you depends! because Holberton is very true to its model. It's a demanding project-based and peer learning-oriented school that aims at teaching you the full stack. Please ask yourself the following: are you able to tackle projects with minimal direction? Do you enjoy that type of learning? Are you interested in understanding lower-level details of how code is executed? Or do you just want your code to "work" for you?

Background-wise: some of the basic conventions of programming (i.e. logic flow) can be hard to grasp at first, so it helps if you are already familiar with if-else if-else conditions, while loops and for loops when you enter Holberton. This isn't absolutely necessary, however. More important is a basic sense of how to problem-solve (i.e., you have an instinct to break a problem down into a series of tasks, you can identify what knowledge gaps to resolve, and you are able to parse information from the Internet to solve those knowledge gaps). If you don't have this ability yet, motivation, grit, and an extreme readiness to seek help from others will help, but it can be hard. Ju and Syl are trying to make it easier for students all the time, but you still need to nail down basic problem-solving skills in the first part of the curriculum, or you will find yourself with a lot of projects you don't know how to tackle.

IF Holberton is right for you, and you are able to to take advantage of what Holberton has to offer, Holberton is a really strong value proposition. You'll be trained up in all the skills you need to be a successful software engineer (and I'm not talking about knowledge skills so much as an ability to learn and adopt new technology). You'll have a super strong community of peers that is also your support network for years to come (the social aspect of Holberton is unparalleled, probably). You'll have a solid foundation coding-wise, as well as a deeper understanding of the industry than any bootcamp/college grad. Finally, Holberton offers you a lot of opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise via the mentor network, e.g. interviews at high profile companies via recommendation. Plus it's just an exciting place to be, because Julien, Sylvain, & the team really are serious about disrupting the educational model.

So, after a lot of caveats, would I recommend Holberton School? The answer is a resoundingly a yes. :P

Holberton School is not like any other school out there right now. We are a project based, peer learning school. It's not a full 4 year university, and it's so much more than a bootcamp. The best part of Holberton it is geared towards getting its students... Read More industry ready. Here we focus on the foundations of software engineering, the goal is to get a full picture of the industry before we move into specialization. That means that we get experience in low level and high level programing, front end and back end, system administration, deep learning, and so much more. A lot of bootcamps are focusing on specific frameworks or languages these days - the only issue with that approach is that it does not take into account how quickly this industry moves forward and changes. I you only know one language, it can be much harder a few years down the road to adapt to something new. Holberton wants to break free from that singular focus. The theory is that if we can master the concepts of algorithms and if we exercise flexibility between languages, we will be more valuable in the long term in the tech industry.
The other thing that really sets Holberton apart from other schools are our mentors. We currently have over 100 mentors who work in the industry. They are direct resources for us to tap into. If we are working on a project and get stuck, we can reach out to someone who works with that technology or has experience in a certain area to help us out. Not only does this emulate how the industry works (utilizing peer learning), but it allows us to create strong networks while at school. That is something that no other school is currently offering. The mentors here are one of the schools greatest resources.
The school started January 2016, so it's not super well known yet, but I expect it to make quite a few waves in the near future. It's a bit of a disrupter in the industry right now, that's for sure.
Another huge benefit of the school is that it has 0 upfront tuition. You pay the school based on your salary once you have a job. This is awesome for two reasons - 1) who has the money upfront to pay for a bootcamp? and 2)- the pay is on a sliding scale (it's based on what your salary is). That's huge. When I was looking into going to a bootcamp, one of my biggest concerns was how I was going to come up with the money. Holberton solved that problem. This deferred tuition also puts the pressure on the school to get you a job, and a good one at that. If you don't get a job, they don't make money. Win win.