Holberton Is Now An International Phenomenon

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Holberton School is going international! As TechCrunch reported – we are thrilled to announce that our first campus outside of the US will open on January 28th in Bogotá, Colombia!

We welcomed our first Holberton School cohort in January 2016. Our mission: to offer affordable, high-quality technical education for the countless talented individuals who would never have access to it otherwise. Since the beginning, Julien and I have aspired to positively impact our society at scale. It was always our hope that Holberton would not be bound only to Silicon Valley, but instead would grow nationally (and it has: to New Haven) to internationally. We are incredibly excited to begin our international expansion in Colombia.

Why Colombia? The country has been experiencing strong economic growth for the past few decades and is determined to be a leader in the digital era. The country is already known to be among the fastest growing sources for IT and digital services. And as large companies experience digital transformations and as founders create vibrant new startups, the need for software engineers is absolutely exploding.

Rappi, Colombia’s first “unicorn” startup valued at over $1 billion, is joining us on this quest. The YCombinator alumni recently raised $200 million, with participation from storied venture firms Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Rappi is partnering with Holberton and will contribute to the Bogotá school opening costs, provide mentors and hire Holberton graduates.

The initiative is led by Coderise, an organization that empowers underprivileged youth in Latin America through software programming education as a means to provide skills and access to opportunity for upward social mobility.

Sounds amazing, right? We think so too! That is why we will open a second school in Colombia in June 2019 in the city of Medellín! All of this is only possible thanks to the hard work of Coderise’s Andres Barreto and Hernando Barreto, as well as the amazing Holberton School team. To you all we say THANK YOU!

As NE-YO said, “Let’s make Holberton one of the biggest schools on the face of the planet.”

NFL Player Kelvin Beachum Helping to Offset Living Expenses for Holberton Students

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Aligning with our mission to provide high-quality education for the many, we are proud to announce that New York Jets’ Kelvin Beachum has joined our cause. Kelvin, who was recently recognized NFLPA Community MVP for his philanthropic efforts, donated a $10,000 grant to help students offset living expenses.

While San Francisco is the hotbed for developing a world-class software engineering career, it is also one of the most expensive places to live in. Beachum, NFL player by profession, fiercely advocates to increase STEM education for young people, particularly in underrepresented, underserved communities.

“I’m committed to supporting STEM education, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or who just need an alternative approach to help them get started,” said Beachum. “Holberton is filling the gap by offering an alternative to college, making cutting-edge software engineering training available to everyone with the desire to succeed. I’m proud to be part of it.”

(L to R) Holberton School co-founder Sylvain Kalache, Kelvin Beachum, Holberton School co-founder Julien Barbier

This initiative follows our recent announcement for a new Holberton School campus in New Haven, where the cost of living is only a third of the one in Silicon Valley. We are proud to partner with Kelvin who, as ESPN coined it, is a big man with a big heart.

Kelvin’s donation is among a series that has helped so many students achieve their goal. Previous ones include CloudNow, Scality, Google and Accenture.

Candidates can apply to the scholarship once they are admitted at Holberton School, start your application now!

Priyanka Chopra Joining Holberton School Board of Trustees

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

In case you haven’t already seen, check out the NY Times! Actor, producer and social activist, Priyanka Chopra, has joined our Board of Trustees and invested in the school – to take an active role in attracting women to software engineering.

“No path to success is linear, but it’s staggering that women make up half the workforce and have held fewer than 25 percent of jobs in tech for the past two decades,” says Chopra. “At the Holberton School inclusion and diversity are more than just buzzwords, it is prioritized and infused in their DNA, and I’m looking forward to joining the Board of Trustees to help further their mission and close the gap.”

Priyanka joins our amazing collective of Trustees which includes Grammy winner, NE-YO, Jocelyn DeGance Graham, CEO at CloudNOW, Stephane Kasriel, CEO at Upwork, and Solomon Hykes, co-founder at Docker.

Priyanka will work with us on making sure that our mission of providing high-quality education for the many is fulfilled. She will focus on accessibility, and more specifically inspiring more women into a tech career. In the US, only 20% of software engineering positions are filled by women.

As software and artificial intelligence are becoming, by the second, a bigger part of how our world works, it is essential to have gender parity in the teams that are building the product and systems that are impacting our society and life at large.

We at Holberton have been training the next generation of software engineers, and many are women already working in the field: from hunting asteroids at NASA, contributing to the future of self-driving cars at Tesla and building technology that will power artificial intelligence at Nvidia.

Priyanka has been an outspoken advocate, and role model, for women for many years and we are thrilled to align our values and actions to solve the diversity gap in the Tech industry.

Welcome Priyanka!

Welcoming Nadine Krause as Holberton School New Haven Director

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

As many of you know, at the beginning of this month we announced our new campus in New Haven, Connecticut. But what you didn’t know is that we have hired our campus Director, Nadine Krause.

Nadine held human resources roles gaining extensive experience in talent and leadership development, team and diversity and inclusion. She embraces the mission of Holberton School, providing high-quality education for the many, where the often-times forgotten soft-skills, are in the center of our education.

Nadine will assume responsibility for all of the operations and the success of the New Haven campus. She will also focus on building a strong community and corporate partnerships to ensure that our students have access to meaningful internship opportunities, mentors and industry experts. In return, the local employers will have access to the diverse, motivated and well-rounded skill-set of our graduates.

So, join me in welcoming Nadine to the Holberton family!

Holberton School is opening in New Haven, CT!

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

Our world is entering the fourth industrial revolution, led by software, automation and artificial intelligence. Companies, to survive, have to run at the pace of technology and leverage these tools, or risk becoming the next Blockbuster or Kodak. They need a workforce that is skilled and able to constantly retrain and retool.

Our post-secondary education, that was really developed during the last industrial revolution, is falling behind on equipping today’s students with the skills they need to thrive. Some institutions have managed to adapt – but only for the elite. Only a fraction of Americans can access this Ivy League club.

Tech companies, and really any company that is going through a digital transformation, is suffering from the lack of a trained and diverse workforce needed to take over 500,000 open positions. That’s what Julien and I decided to tackle by founding Holberton in 2015 – provide high-quality education to the many.

We took inspiration from progressive education, a movement that emphasizes learning by doing, problem-solving, critical thinking. A movement that leads students to develop their social skills and become lifelong learners. We wanted to make sure that the Holberton opportunity was accessible to anyone motivated to become a software engineer. We designed a free and blind admissions process selecting on grit, and made the school free until students find a job.

We welcomed our first cohort of 30 students in January 2016 and since moved to a new building that can accommodate up to 1,000 students every year. We have alumni working in Silicon Valley’s top companies including Tesla, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook. Today, we are making the Holberton School opportunity accessible to even more Americans by opening our second campus in New Haven, Connecticut.

Connecticut has always been known for innovation. Leading in insurance, and a major actor for aircraft & parts manufacturing and ship & boat building. Technology-related jobs grew by an estimated 1,060 jobs in 2017 and contributed $16.2 billion to the state’s economy. In this context, Holberton will both help local companies to successfully navigate the digital transformation they are going through by providing the talent they need and also attract businesses to join the area, as the war for highly-skilled talent rages nationally.

New Haven’s low cost of living is also a big advantage. While the Silicon Valley is providing countless advantages, the cost of living can sometimes prohibit potential students from attending the program.

We have been working hard for months along with David Salinas and his team at District to make this happen, and we expecting to welcome our first cohort of students in January of 2019. Thanks to Comcast, CT Next, District Innovation & Venture Center, Indra and Raj Nooyi, Seedlings Foundation, State of Connecticut, and The Community Foundation for their support. Enrollment have started, apply here!

Docker + Holberton Hackathon = A Whale Of A Time

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Holberton School students recently participated in a 24-hour Docker Hackathon! While there were various cool hacks, there were a few that stood out; placing these teams as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners. Let’s take a look at the hacks that won these budding software engineers tickets to the most coveted container community event in tech – DockerCon!

Third Place

Isaiah Becker-Mayer, Spencer Taylor, and Nick Teixeira: We wanted to make a container image that would act as a data science lab that you could work out of. It’s really hard for people who work with data to recreate the same circumstances that produce a given result. Different operating systems and computer specs make this really difficult. Using the container you’re able to save a snapshot (Docker Image) of your current lab with the same operating system and specs, and send it to your colleagues so they can reproduce the results.

Second Place

David Yoon, Sue Kalia, Yunju Chen: Docklio! (the name comes from Docker + Twilio) If you already have your Docker environment set up, how about deploying your app with a single push of the button? That’s what we want to achieve with Docklio — to make system admin’s lives easier. Docklio allows users to control their Docker containers by sending text messages and Docklio will send back a message to confirm the container status.

First Place

Katya Kalache, Kim Wong, Spencer Cheng, Stuart Kuredjian: Our goal was to learn more about how Docker can enable a scalable distributed system on both virtual and physical machines. We decided to run a image recognition model using three Raspberry Pis and set up a three node swarm cluster using Docker. One node was set up as a swarm manager which executes and distributes commands to the two worker nodes. We also explored the OpenFaaS framework, developed by Docker Captain Alex Ellis, a scalable framework for building server-less functions with Docker swarm.

Thank You’s

These hackers have skills and will soon be in search of their first software engineering gigs! Thanks to folks like our mentors and volunteer hackathon judges, these students are able to fine tune their skills with the advice of industry professionals! Shoutout to Mason Fish and Andrew Hsu for volunteering their Saturday afternoons to help judge the hackathon presentations! The support these two gave to the hacking efforts will not soon be forgotten!

Student Spotlight: Max Johnson

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Camden, New Jersey, if you’re not familiar, has at times been branded as ‘America’s most dangerous city.’ Max Johnson, if you’re not familiar, has at times been labeled Holberton School’s hardest working student. What does one have to do with another? Max grew up in Camden, NJ and in true poetic fashion, as his city experiences some positive changes, so does Max’s career trajectory.

In spite of the fact that Max had earned a degree in Criminal Justice and Psychology he struggled to find a related job in the field. He decided he was not going to let his tough surroundings dictate his future path and began looking into the prospect of breaking into the tech industry. Max was rejected by every program he applied to up until being admitted to Holberton School.

(L to R) Holberton School co-founder Sylvain Kalache, Max, Holberton School co-founder Julien Barbier

We are not our past. With this notion, Max set off to the west coast with a few thousand bucks, and the determination that he would come out the other side a full stack software engineer. However, the path to success was not paved with ease for Max. During his tenure at Holberton he experienced a few personal hurdles. These struggles coupled with the challenging curriculum eventually taught Max, arguably, his greatest lesson- it’s ok to ask for help. “My classmates had my back. They helped me, they supported me, they stayed with me after hours,” The peer learning structure and collaborative nature of Holberton School’s curriculum allowed for the network of helping hands that Max needed.

The confidence Max has gained due to his hard work at Holberton is evident. With his first high- paying job in tech secured, he felt compelled to share his journey with our most recent cohort of students. The overwhelming take away from Max’s talk was one of perseverance and that above all, hard work wins out. He shared with us the below Les Brown quote:

“If you want a thing bad enough to go out and fight for it,

to work day and night for it,

to give up your time, your peace and your sleep for it…

if all that you dream and scheme is about it,

and life seems useless and worthless without it…

if you gladly sweat for it and fret for it and plan for it

and lose all your terror of the opposition for it…

if you simply go after that thing you want

with all of your capacity, strength and sagacity,

faith, hope and confidence and stern pertinacity…

if neither cold, poverty, famine, nor gout,

sickness nor pain, of body and brain,

can keep you away from the thing that you want…

if dogged and grim you beseech and beset it,

with the belief in yourself, you will get it!”

Announcing Holberton School’s Summer Coding Camp: Take Deux

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Due to the success of last year’s summer coding camp Holberton School will be sponsoring our second annual summer camp for students aged 15-18. Last year we facilitated introductory programs for high schoolers with no programming experience. Each of the campers were able to successfully construct their own website from scratch.

Salesforce Senior UX Engineer and Holberton School Mentor, Ayesha Mazumda, offers a summer camper some tips

This year, in addition to providing a track suited for someone with no programming experience, we’ve added an iOS/Swift curriculum to the mix. We’re excited to accommodate the novice as well as the tinkerer this year with our two separate curricula. The summer coding camp will closely resemble the structure of Holberton’s software engineering program by sticking with the peer based and project based pedagogy that’s made our students successful. You can catch campers working in teams sprawled across beanbags or huddled together around some computers. We’re excited to provide these high schoolers with a glimpse into what it’s like to work and innovate in the tech industry!

Campers will have an opportunity to meet with various industry professionals throughout the 3 week summer camp. Additionally, as eliminating barriers to a quality education is part of Holberton’s overall mission, we are proud to say we will be offering this program to campers free of charge. Providing high quality tech education is the goal, and we believe that this summer coding camp is one of the first steps to exposing these teens to a viable future. Apply here!

We Just Closed a $8 million Series A Funding

Posted by Sylvain Kalache

We are proud to announce that we have just closed a new round of funding. Our Series A, led by daphni and Trinity Ventures and joined by new investor Omidyar Network. This new funding of $8.2 million will allow us to provide the Holberton School opportunity to even more students.

The school’s population has increased 6 fold – enrolling to date more than 200 students. We recently moved into a new location that can eventually accommodate 1,000 students. While we are about to graduate our first cohort, many of our students have already found internships and jobs at companies like Apple, Tesla, Docker, Dropbox, LinkedIn, IBM, Scality and more.

As Julien, our CEO, says “Everyone deserves a first-rate education. Students at Holberton come from all walks of life, from cashiers to musicians to poker players – as well as right out of high school – without the money, background and education needed to be ‘Ivy League material. With Holberton, they now have the same opportunity as the more fortunate and they leave with skills to learn for a lifetime. Our students compete with Ivy League graduates and get the jobs.”

We launched 2016, the school is free until students find a job. We use a project-based and peer-learning approach, where students learn by working on projects and helping each other. There are no lectures and no teachers, instead tech mentors who provide guidance to the students both on the curriculum and on their careers via keynotes and fireside chats.

Marie Ekeland, daphni co-founder says that “Holberton is not just supplying the STEM community with the highest level full stack software engineers, they are offering everyone, regardless of race, age, sex or family background the opportunity to be part of this amazing industry.”

Our students have published articles on popular websites and gone on to amazing jobs. Like participating in the future of self-driving cars at Tesla and even a coveted internship at NASA’s SETI Institute, protecting the earth from asteroids.

As our dear Board of Trustees member, NE-YO, said: Let’s make Holberton one of the biggest schools on the face of the planet.

Mentor Mania

Posted by Suzie Kirschner

Holberton’s curriculum is unique in the way that it’s continually iterating based upon feedback from mentors and industry trends. Mentors are professionals working in the Tech industry, from small companies like Gandi and Scality, up to the Facebook and Google of the world. It is our pleasure to welcome new mentors to the Holberton family. We’re excited about the varying areas of expertise these tech professionals will be joining us with.

Without further ado, we introduce you to the newest additions to the Holberton School Mentor program…

Evelyn de Souza

Evelyn is a Data Privacy and Security Strategy leader who serves as an advisor to several startups and has been overhauling and re-institutionalizing security and privacy in the smallest to the largest organizations in order to protect user’s personal data, as part of her consultancy. She has been recognized as one of the Top 10 Women in Cloud by CloudNOW and as a Silicon Valley Business Journal Woman of Influence. During a sabbatical last year, Evelyn took six months to launch a non-profit affordable housing initiative in her community which has become the launch pad for her next generation community concept.

Michael Kehoe

Michael is a Staff Site-Reliability Engineer (SRE) at LinkedIn working with various teams within the company to improve their operability experience. Thanks for Michael that your favorite professional social network is always up and running. Michael has experience in systems engineering from frontend proxies to backend databases. Before joining LinkedIn, Michael interned at NASA working on the PhoneSat project.

Paul Guermonprez

Paul is an autonomous drone software architect and drone big-data analyst for Intel. One of his projects is working with Intel clients to analyze data gathered from drones with computer vision, 3D reconstruction and deep learning using Intel Insight, Intel’s drone data solution. Another one is designing autonomous drone solutions for complex cases like indoor navigation and delivery fleets. He started as bioinformatician in human biotech for 8 years, then moved to tech to focus on high-performance computing and IoT. He is now helping Intel partners build autonomous and data driven drone solutions. In his spare time, Paul is a pedagogical consultant for higher education and is teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Toulouse University in France.

Han Yuan

Han, the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Upwork, has joined the mentor team at Holberton School. Han has a genuine interest in alternative education models. “Knowledge pays dividends for the rest of someone’s life.” In joining the mentor team, Han hopes to help pass along the valuable knowledge he’s gained over his 19 years working in tech. To Han, mentoring can be both personally and professionally gratifying adding that Holberton School is cultivating a strong and diverse talent pool.

We are proud to offer a malleable mentor program in which mentors have the opportunity to choose what areas they want to help with as well as how often they would like to be involved. If you’re interested in becoming a mentor at Holberton, check out the info here.