By now, there are plenty of coding schools that will happily train you to become a junior programmer within a couple of months. Most of them will teach you the basics, but to become a full-stack engineers, a 12-week boot camp usually just isn’t enough. Neither are most online courses. The team behind the “ Holberton School of Engineering ” wants to take a different approach to teaching new software engineers. Holberton is a physical school – currently based in San Francisco — founded by a group of three engineers who previously worked at Apple, LinkedIn and Docker. At Holberton, students sign up for a two-year program (plus a six-month internship). The organization is currently recruiting its first class of students . As Holberton co-founder Julien Barbier — who was previously the head of growth and community at Docker — told me, the school is taking a project-based approach and wants to be an alternative to college. The focus at Holberton is on hands-on learning. There won’t be any formal teachers. Instead, students will learn from peers and a large number of mentors the founders have recruited. While students will learn with and from their peers, most of the projects will be solo. “The idea behind that is to replicate what you find in the workplace,” Barbier told me. He noted that many students who are great in school have to be trained again when they come into the workforce. By using mentors who are still actively working as engineers, the team also hopes to be able to teach its students more real-world skills as developers. “Once you become a teacher at a school, you’re out of the workplace,” Barbier noted. “The world is moving so fast, if you don’t keep up with the industry, you become a dinosaur.” […]
