Welcoming the legendary songwriter Savan Kotecha to our Board of Trustees

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

We are thrilled to welcome Savan Kotecha to Holberton Board of Trustees! Savan has written musical hits for many of the world’s best artists. His songs, performed by Jennifer Lopez, Ariana Grande, Madonna, Justin Bieber,  The Weeknd, and numerous other headliner artists, have earned 17 Grammy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination.

Savan and his wife founded The MyLeo Foundation in 2017 with the mission to provide college study and vocational training scholarships to students from impoverished backgrounds.

The Holberton Board of Trustees is helping us to achieve our core mission of providing high-quality education for the many. Trustees meet multiple times a year to discuss successes and to provide advice on how to address the challenges facing the organization. Trustees also leverage their large public platforms to make the tech industry more accessible and diverse by encouraging a broader swath of the population to continue their educations beyond high school.

“Pop culture has shown me the importance of representation. It’s important that the people shaping the world via music, art, visual media, and technology come from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds so that everyone feels represented. Holberton’s focus on that is very inspiring and is why I wanted to be involved. During this ‘new normal’ we’re experiencing during the pandemic, we’re seeing just how important software engineering is with regards to shaping our new world. Software engineers’ creativity and vision will be key in helping us all move forward,” said Kotecha.

Savan joins the board which currently includes Grammy award-winning artist NE-YO, actor and social activist Priyanka Chopra, CEO of CloudNOW Jocelyn DeGance Graham, Avasant Foundation Executive Director Chitra Rajeshwari, Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel, legendary Educator Esther Wojcicki and Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes.

Songwriter Savan Kotecha with Holberton co-founder Sylvain Kalache.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Savan Kotecha to our esteemed Board of Trustees,” said Kalache, Holberton’s co-founder. “He is such a creative force and has accomplished so much for so many groundbreaking artists. We can’t wait to put his innovative ideas and communications skills to use on our mission to increase access to tech education – a goal that has always been important but is especially so now as we help people acquire new, hirable skills during this economic downturn.”

Join us in welcoming Savan to the Holberton community!

A breakdancer’s journey to becoming a software engineer

Posted on by Yazmin Giraldo

Sergio Rueda is a breakdancer turned software engineer for the machine learning division of Mercado Libre, Latin America’s $50B e-commerce and auction site. Getting there was not easy, he had to balance a heavy workload in Holberton while trying to make extra cash doing translations and whatever he could get together from his dance shows.

Photo: Karen Daza (@dazita_sbc)

Originally from Barranquilla, Colombia, he moved to Bucaramanga to study mechanical engineering but his prospects and initial work experience after graduating had left him disillusioned. Sergio’s passion for breakdancing brought him to Medellín to join a dance crew with his friends. In Medellín, he discovered Holberton School and with it, his second passion: software engineering. 

Sergio decided to go through the admissions process as a challenge to himself and considered it sort of a game, but as he delved deeper into Holberton he decided becoming a software engineer is what he really wanted to do. 

After being admitted and just three months into the program, Sergio had to relocate from Holberton Medellín to Holberton Bogotá so he could live with his family, as he could no longer make ends meet. 

At first, Sergio would get frustrated because he could not finish the projects as fast as some of his peers, but he quickly learned to put his ego aside and developed the most important skill: learning how to learn. Even in the most trying times, he never thought about quitting and realized that no matter what personal challenges he was facing, starting a new programming project for Holberton always brought him happiness. 

“I found a lot of support from the staff and my peers, they are now my family”, said Sergio.

Finding a job

Sergio says that being a programmer and a dancer make him very happy, each discipline compliments the other and brings about a balance, dancing helps his programming and programming helps his dancing. 

When Sergio began his job search after finishing foundations, he discovered that it was his soft skills, not just his technical skills, that made him stand out as a candidate. Rejections were common, so he narrowed his search to companies that valued soft skills as much as technical skills, and that is where he found the match with Mercado Libre. 

“They were looking for a senior developer, so I told them: Let me solve the technical test, then you could know if we can work together now or in the future”, said. 

After a battery of soft skills and technical skills interviews, Mercado Libre made the offer and despite the fact that the job opening was for a senior candidate, the hiring manager in Mercado Libre told Sergio that they wanted to work with him because they saw his potential. 

Join me in congratulating Sergio on his accomplishments, all the hard work he put into going through the Holberton program and getting the job of his dream. Well done!

Holberton opening in Mexico City!

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

We’re excited to welcome a new campus in the Holberton network by opening in Mexico City! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Holberton School Mexico City will initially open as a remote program providing its education fully online. The school will begin enrolling its first cohort of students in September 2020. Also known as CDMX, the city is the capital of Mexico and the most populous city in North America.

Holberton School comes in alliance with Inteligencia México, a business community that seeks to promote digital transformation in Mexico founded by Philippe and Alexandre Surman.

The program is open to anyone above 18, living in the State of Mexico. No degree or diploma is required to apply and following its mission of accessibility, the campus will offer students multiple ways to finance their education: upfront, monthly payment, loan, or income share agreement.

“Mexico has an untapped talent potential that needs to be realized. I am thrilled that Holberton will be bringing their high quality and accessible educational program to our country,” says Mastercard Mexico CEO Laura Cruz. “Holberton will train the next generation of Mexicans – including under-represented groups like women – with the skills they need to secure lucrative, interesting careers in software engineering while boosting our country’s talent pool and fueling our economy.”

The local digital economy is growing and the tech talent gap is widening. Even COVID-19 hasn’t slowed the appetite of venture investing for technology-based startups, it has grown by 132% compared to last year.

“E-commerce has been steadily increasing in recent years in Mexico but the recent pandemic has drastically accelerated the trend,” says Pierre-Claude BLAISE, Director General at AMVO, “This acceleration is not limited to retail; all industries are impacted, whether you are in finance, healthcare, education or entertainment, companies will need to hire software developers to build your online presence. Holberton is arriving at the perfect time!”

Mexico has the largest Spanish speaking population in the world. Our ambition is to open 10 additional campuses and to train a total of 10,000 students in the country over the next five years. 

Check out the Holberton School Mexico City campus page to learn more about it!

Celebrating Pride

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

June is Pride Month for Holberton. For many, it’s a synonym with amazing parades, love, and colors, but also a reminder of the progress and challenges we still have to solve. Pride is about celebrating equality, and we can thank the LBGTQ+ community for being a force behind it. This same community has faced so many challenges, and are still facing so many. Pride month is when we come together, and we celebrate that we are at the end, one big community.

This year is also special as it is the 50th anniversary of the first-ever pride parade and the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall riots where black transgender women continuously harassed by the police fought back for their rights.

BeSafe, built by aura Pasmin, Felipe Satizabal, Paula Sotelo, Joshua Daniel Martínez

For the opportunity, Holberton Colombia students decided to build an application, BeSafe, that allows reporting cases of violence against the LGBTQ+ community, informing and receiving legal advice and counseling. The idea came up as one of their classmates who is gender transitioning shared how hard their experience was.

The goal of the team was to create an application that could collect data in real-time and that had a friendly and intuitive user interface since in many cases reporting a case of violence is a very difficult experience. You can learn more about their projects here, and access the code on Github.

Our Checker to the color of pride

The Holberton Product team customized our Checker to the color of Pride. As a school, one of our main missions is to educate. The Checker, is the tool students use to review their Holberton-related code – sort of unit test-like but also checking proper code documentation, code styling, code efficiency – is displaying one of the 12 LGBTQ+ flags at every run. For every flag, we provide a description of the flag’s meaning and its history.

Finally, because sometimes, you don’t know, what you just don’t know, the Holberton staff and Professional Advisors have put together a list of resources to learn more about Pride and the LGBTQ+ community. The list contains books, podcasts, movies, and people to follow so that you can learn with the media that works best for you! It’s on Github, so feel free to make pull requests to make the list even better!

With love ❤️

Students building apps for Colombia’s top tech companies

Posted on by Yazmin Giraldo

As part of their first-year curriculum, Holberton Colombia Cohort 10 students will work on their final projects with Colombia’s top tech companies under the mentorship of their leading CTOs and engineering managers. Participating companies include Colombia’s unicorn Rappi, robot delivery company Kiwi, learning platform Skillshare, IoT platform Ubidots, and remote talent marketplace Torre. Each company is coming to the program with a real-world product request to serve their business needs. Students will build the product or feature on top of each company’s tech stack.

“There are two objectives for the company capstone projects. One is to let leading employers access the best technical talent for their recruiting needs. The second objective is that these multi-week, hands-on projects will give Cohort 10 programmers real-world projects completed for top-tier companies to include in their portfolios,” said Jessica Mercedes, Country Manager of Holberton Colombia.

The projects include developing the following: 

  • Crowdlending for Rappi delivery couriers so that they can finance the purchase of a motorcycle
  • An algorithm to detect the distance of moving objects for Kiwi’s autonomous vehicles while using only one camera 
  • A picture-based class recommendation engine for Skillshare
  • A computer vision solution to maintain COVID-safe distances among factory workers using the Ubidots platform
  • A web service that centralizes job opportunities and applicants across many job boards for Torre.

Students will work for six weeks under the leadership of each company’s technical management and will be expected to deliver on the same level of technical excellency as their full-time employees. Each project will be presented during the demo day taking place on June 19th. The event will be live-streamed on Facebook, so be sure to follow our page to watch!

Holberton students use their tech skills to solve COVID19-challenges

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all of us on so many levels – professional and personal, physical and emotional. It’s often the most trying circumstances that ignite the greatest discoveries. Like many in the tech sector, a number of Holberton students and alumni have been inspired to develop technology to help pave a path forward. We’re excited to highlight five of these projects that embody Holberton’s innovative spirit while reflecting the needs of this moment in history:

Knowing that many people are struggling to maintain a healthy routine while sheltering in place, Holberton Tunisia 🇹🇳students Yasmine Hamdi and Ahmed Omar Miladi built Yawmi. The app schedules activities based on the user’s calendar and preferences. By partnering with 3rd party platforms, Yawmi suggests online courses, fitness sessions, cooking classes, gaming, movie watching, and more. The day planner aims to develop the users’ skills and knowledge in a flexible way, mitigate mental health issues, and create a healthy lifestyle. The duo started building the app during the OMAC (One Million Arab Coders) COVID-19 hackathon. They made it to the semi-finale out of 1,260 teams – congratulations!

Darcie is a virtual assistant that helps people find the nearest social services in their neighborhood or city. Co-creators from Holberton San Francisco 🇺🇸 Akeem Seymens, and Max Stuart built this tool that works with phone and text using IBM Watson, Google Cloud, and Algolia (who provided a free Pro version of their powerful Search indexing service to support their effort). Their goal is to address COVID-19-related humanitarian issues, beginning with the mounting issue of food insecurity. While many Americans were already food insecure before the pandemic, the number has increased dramatically in recent weeks. Resources that were already strained are even more so now, and food banks are stretched beyond capacity. Partnering with feedingamerica.org, nokidhungry.org, hungerfreeamerica.org, and America’s Food Fund, the team has been collaborating to establish data gathering standards and systems to help food distributors get additional support and get resources to more people in need.

Holberton Colombia 🇨🇴students Camilo Morales, Jose Luis Diaz, Oscar Riaño Tapias, Daniel Chinome, and Giovanny Perez built EnTuBarrio. Small businesses we are suffering as shelter in place guidelines required people to stay in and prevented people from shopping. This clever team found a way to help both parties – the store and the shoppers. EnTuBarrio connects customers to their local stores so that they can buy the groceries they need. The delivery is handled by locals riding bikes or walking, making it cost-effective, fast, and environmentally friendly. All the communication currently happens over WhatsApp, but the team is working to port the app to Facebook Messenger chatbot as well.

As the COVID19 situation was unfolding, Holberton New Haven 🇺🇸students Jose Alvarez de Lugo, Stephen Ranciato and Gareth Brickman noticed that there wasn’t a place to get COVID-related data for Connecticut in a consistent and clear way. They thought we could help their state by building something quickly, so they began writing code right away and were able to deploy a website that very same day. That’s how CTCovid19.com came to be!

Spaced is a mobile app that tells users when and how to go places for necessary errands while optimizing for social distancing. It’s like Waze but for walking. Built by Holberton alumni Bobby Yang, he came up with the idea while he was attempting to walk his dog and go to the grocery store. He found there were way too many people in the park next to his house, and there was a long line at the Safeway half a mile from his house. The app leverages different open source projects like MIT’s COVID-19 Tracker and Open Routing Service, along with Foursquare’s Places API. Spaced is able to recommend specific times to go to popular locations, as well as routes to reach locations while minimizing the number of people with whom users come into contact. The data is completely anonymous, and Spaced’s code is open source and can be found here. It will soon be available for download on iPhone and Android.

Stay safe!

Holberton Students Awarded CloudNOW Scholarship

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

CloudNOW, the executive consortium for the leading women in cloud and converging technologies, provided scholarships to help Holberton students with their cost of living while attending the school. The scholarships are sponsored by Facebook, Google, and Intel.

Holberton San Francisco students, staff and Facebook Director Production Engineering Syamla Bandla

“As a former CloudNOW recipient, I was able to attend Holberton full time without the added stress of trying to cover my basic needs,” said Kristen Loyd, former Holberton student. “I was able to fully commit myself to becoming the best software engineer I could be and the payoff was worth it! I am now working as a software engineer and I definitely don’t think this would have been possible without the help of the CloudNOW scholarship. Congrats to this year’s recipients!”

CloudNOW’s focus is to provide STEM scholarship funds to top talent, targeting women, minorities, and underrepresented individuals, 18 years and older, who are looking for accelerated STEM training allowing for immediate tech career opportunities. CloudNOW also provides support across the career lifecycle with networking, events, speaking opportunities, mentoring, and friendship. CloudNow has been partnering with Holberton for years and past recipients are working for Change.org, Pinterest, Twitch, IBM and more.

Holberton New Haven students, staff celebrating the CloudNow scholarship

“From supporting themselves and their families to the cost of commuting or relocating closer to campus, many of our students face financial challenges related to the cost of living. Often times, this leads to students having to maintain some form of employment while enrolled, which can be an additional stressor and distraction from their studies,” said Nadine Krause, Director of Holberton School New Haven. “We are truly grateful that CloudNOW has recognized our students and their potential, providing them with the same opportunity to succeed as other scholarship recipients. Congratulations to all of our well-deserving students!”

Congratulations to the 12 students who were awarded this prestigious scholarship and we can’t wait to see what the future holds for each and every one of you!

Welcome Holberton Uruguay!

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

Today we’re excited to announce that we are opening a campus in Montevideo, Uruguay! This new school will be located on Uruguay Zonamerica campus, a community of  350 companies, counting 10,000 professionals which are producing 1.8% of Uruguay’s GDP. The campus features 300,000 sqm of parks & green areas and is designed for an enjoyable work experience that improves the performance of people and businesses. 

Montevideo is the capital and largest city in Uruguay. It has been declared the city with the best quality of life in Latin America. Montevideo is one of the leading cities in the region, with a vision of using technology to improve its citizen’s quality of life.

“In Uruguay we need more than 2,000 qualified software developers to help us meet the demand of the industry,” said Martín Dovat, general manager of Zonamerica and member of the board of the Zonamerica Foundation. “Holberton’s innovative, Silicon Valley-grade education has already proven to be highly successful in Zonamerica Cali, Colombia. Partnering with Holberton is helping us supply the talent to meet the demand for highly trained engineers.”

Holberton Montevideo campus

The school will begin welcoming students in September and depending on how the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, Holberton School Uruguay may temporarily open as a remote program providing its education fully online. We are so excited to help with the continuing growth of Uruguay’s tech market and are looking forward to welcoming students this spring. The new Uruguay campus, led by Ines Jakubovski, is planning on opening its doors to its first cohort of students in September. Applications are open, learn more about the campus here!

Holberton Students Win Globant Escape Game Challenge

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

With a meteorite close to reaching planet Earth, Jimmer Hernandez and Johan David Muñoz of the Bogotá campus had to solve four online challenges in order to save the world!

These two students were the first out of 1,000 teams around the world to “abandon the Room” in the The Great Mission, Globant Escape Game Challenge! Because they were named the winners, Jimmer and Johan will be sent to Globant’s Converge 2020 in New York City, where they will network with some of the world top tech employers and influencers!

“The Great Mission’ is this year’s version of Globant’s Escape Game initiative, designed to engage the brightest minds in a fun, challenging and creative scenario to test and refine their mathematical and problem-solving skills,” said Andrés Giolito, Country Manager of Globant Colombia. “The first team that abandoned the Room was team ELECTROS, from Holberton School Bogotá. They were selected among 1,000 couples that participated in this initiative.”

And this isn’t the first time that Holberton students have fought to combat meteorites! In 2016, Sravanthi Sinha was accepted into one of the most prestigious engineering internships in the world, NASA’s Frontier Development Lab with the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. The interns gathered from around the world from top universities such as U.C. Berkeley and Cambridge, teamed up to help NASA plan for a potential cosmic Armageddon, an asteroid strike on earth.

We are so excited for these two brilliant students for the work they put into this challenge. This win is further proof that the Holberton curriculum is paying off and that our students are able to think critically. They are able to think outside the box because they have been taught to learn.

Jimmer Hernandez and Johan David Muñoz

“We were students of electronic engineering in our seventh semester at the national university of Colombia when we decided to join Holberton,” said Hernandez and Muñoz. “We found Holberton an excellent complement to our career because it allowed us to practice our engineering skills on a daily basis with high-level challenges and allowed us to learn soft skills interacting with professionals from all areas of knowledge. These helped us keep our minds sharp and fit for the challenges that we have been presented with throughout 2020, especially the Globant challenge, which we managed to win and now we can begin to know the world. Thanks to the prize.”

Congratulations to you two! We expect to see many more great things from both of you and can’t wait to see where the future leads you.

Education Shouldn’t Miss a Beat, Holberton Goes Online

Posted on by Sylvain Kalache

The novel coronavirus pandemic has turned our world upside down. Wanting our students to keep their momentum and continue their journey to become software engineers, yet not wanting to risk their health, we adapted the Holberton curriculum to be done remotely for all our campuses around the world: Colombia, US, Lebanon, and Tunisia.

We were in a unique position to do this quickly because the Holberton education methodology is based on two main pillars: our software and a global community. 

Our software provides students the projects and guidance they need to get started, it also provides students instant feedback of their work; using a proprietary system that provides a highly detailed analysis and correction of their work. As of today, it is analyzing more than 10M lines of code per week. And all of this is delivered online.

Our community has multiple layers – students, alumni, staff, and professional advisors – which are in cohorts, schools, cities, and countries around the world. While a large part of the interactions typically happens in person, the students are also connected globally via internal chat via Slack.

But a central part of the Holberton mission is to get students trained on soft-skills like public speaking, teamwork, and interview practice. As much as we like in-person interaction, the current situation led us to put in place video meetings and increase the frequency of webinars and live-coding sessions accessible on our intranet to accommodate those needs. In the grand scheme of things, this also has the advantage of training students for the future of work, which will increasingly move online – our world is becoming distributed, and borderless.

Live streaming coding for students available internationally

We are in this together. While we can’t be together in person because of COVID-19, we are together virtually. Nothing can come in the way of our education and our community.

While the transition from offline to online was smooth on our side, we understand that a lot of fellow post-secondary organizations might be struggling to do it. We are happy to share our learnings and assist in any way we can, contact us here. Stay safe!