[OLPC-NYC] Hacker School Deadline THURS MAY 2nd 11:59 PM ET

Holt holt at laptop.org
Wed May 1 12:59:51 EDT 2013 

/OLPC Alum Mel Chua returns to teach NYC's FREE http://HackerSchool.com 
this //Summer//(early June to late August). //Location is Manhattan or 
Brooklyn.//Consider!/


    What Hacker School Is

http://HackerSchool.com is a [FREE AS IN BEER] three-month, immersive 
school for becoming a better programmer. It's like a writers retreat for 
hackers. We (Nick, Dave, Sonali, Tom, Alan, Allison, Zach and Mary) run 
the program every four months in New York and meet Mondays, Tuesdays, 
Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10:30am to 6:30pm. We provide space, time 
to focus, and a friendly community dedicated to self-improvement.


    Structure

Unlike most schools, there are no grades, teachers, or formal curricula. 
Instead, Hacker School is entirely project-based and self-directed.

We have a morning check-in at the start of each day. During this time we 
close our laptops and share what we worked on the previous day, what we 
plan to do that day, and where we're stuck or need help. This social 
pressure keeps everyone focused and accomplishing what they say they 
will. It also fights scope creep, because someone in the group will 
surely notice when your spell-checker starts turning into an OS.

There are no formal instructors at Hacker School. Rather, everyone is a 
de facto teacher, which works because everyone enters Hacker School at 
different levels of development. Some people are much more advanced than 
others, but everyone has something to share. The primary expectations 
are that people start with at least a general programming proficiency 
and finish much better than they started.

Students have written Ruby gems, Python web frameworks, JavaScript 
libraries, and code in everything from Erlang to Haskell. We highly 
recommend you take the opportunity to code in multiple languages, 
because we think it helps you grow as a hacker. Learning multiple 
languages lets you experience trade-offs, appreciate idiomatic code, and 
understand everything from type systems to scoping.

Everyone writes free and open source software, because it would be 
antithetical to Hacker School to write code that couldn't be read, used, 
and improved by others. Code you write in traditional schools is 
characterized by being both useless and destined for /dev/null. Code 
written at Hacker School is the opposite: Genuinely useful and written 
to be maintained and improved over time.

While most of Hacker School is spent working on your own projects, we 
occasionally work in groups on existing open source software. The idea 
is to focus the entirety of the group's energy on a handful of projects 
and contribute as much as we can in a four-day period. We pair program 
and fix bugs, write documentation and contribute new features. It's an 
opportunity to collaborate with other Hacker Schoolers and to experience 
working on (and giving back to) established OSS communities.

We invite other hackers to code with us on Thursdays. These are 
typically either alumni or experienced programmers we think will have a 
lot to share. Sometimes they give formal talks, and sometimes they just 
answer questions and hack with the group.

We all go out to dinner together every Monday. We also have movie 
nights, because movies are great.


    What we look for

You should genuinely enjoy programming. That's most important. We spend 
our time talking about technical problems and writing code, not working 
on startups and products. If you care more about startups than coding, 
you won't enjoy Hacker School.

We look for curiosity, passion, raw intelligence and a desire to build 
things. The best way to show us this is to have a track record of 
writing code and learning new things. If you're a smart, curious person 
who loves coding, it will come out naturally. Don't try to trick us. It 
probably won't work and it won't get you what you want anyway.


    Expectations

Because there is no certification or grading, the only reason to come to 
Hacker School is to become a better programmer. As such, you will find 
kindred spirits and tremendous energy. (A side benefit is you'll meet 
new friends. It's common to grab drinks or coffee with each other in the 
evenings or on weekends.)

You should treat Hacker School like a job, not in the negative sense of 
something you have to do, but in that it's a serious commitment you 
don't blow off. When you agree to do Hacker School, you commit to coming 
four full days a week for three months, and taking your time here 
seriously. Please don't do Hacker School unless you can make this level 
of commitment.

Hacker School is not startup school: Our focus is helping people become 
better programmers, not building prototypes or doing product design. If 
your primary interest is starting a company, you should apply to Y 
Combinator <http://ycombinator.com>.


    How we make money

Hacker School is free as in beer. This is possible because startups pay 
us to recruit. If after Hacker School you want a job, we will help you 
however we can. If you don't want one, or you'd prefer to search on your 
own, that's fine too.

Keep in mind that we accept people to Hacker School based on how much we 
think they would get out of and contribute to Hacker School. We don't 
take employability into consideration when making admissions decisions.

We ask that if you or a company you work for hire someone you meet at 
Hacker School, the company pays us. Our standard fee is 25% of 
first-year salary (excluding bonus), paid only if the person stays at 
least three months. This is honor-based, so you don't have to sign 
anything, and it doesn't apply if you co-found a company with Hacker 
School friends or simply continue working on projects together.


    Who are you guys?

  * David_albert_75

    *David Albert.* Dave spent his youth installing different
    distributions of Linux over and over again. On the way he picked up
    a bit of C, spent college coding in Java and then discovered Ruby.
    He's interested in concurrency, spends a lot of time yak shaving,
    and is going to learn Erlang one of these days.

  * Zach_allaun_75

    *Zach Allaun.* Zach went to college expecting to study political
    science, but quickly found computer science much more to his liking.
    After exhausting most of the CS classes his university offered, he
    left and came to Hacker School. Zach is particularly enamored with
    Clojure and spends at least some of his time implementing abstract
    machines <https://github.com/zachallaun/secd>.

  * Thomas_ballinger_75

    *Thomas Ballinger.* Tom studied physics and then worked in a
    neuroimaging lab, where he did image processing and made people play
    frustrating video games in MRI scanners. He was in the third batch
    of Hacker School, and is looking forward to continuing with SICP and
    learning either Go or Erlang in the next batch.

  * Nick_bergson-shilcock_75

    *Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock.* Nick fell in love with programming
    writing BASIC on an Apple IIe and making silly adventure games in
    HyperCard. He quickly moved on to C and now works mostly in
    JavaScript and Ruby. He's determined to finish SICP and is currently
    reliving his youth by building an Apple II emulator in JavaScript.

  * Mary_rose_cook_75

    *Mary Rose Cook.* Mary programs and makes music. She has released a
    programming language <http://islalanguage.org/> for young children,
    some <https://github.com/maryrosecook/androjs> JavaScript
    <https://github.com/maryrosecook/machinejs> libraries
    <https://github.com/maryrosecook/glazz> and two
    <https://github.com/maryrosecook/pistolslut> games
    <http://emptyblack.com/>. She was in the summer 2012 batch of Hacker
    School.

  * Allison_kaptur_75

    *Allison Kaptur.* Allison studied astrophysics at Yale, and then
    went to Wall St., where she built bank models and tried to wrangle
    Excel into doing large-scale time series analysis. Thankfully for
    us, she later fell in love with programming, and has since ditched
    finance to spend her days coding Python and C.

  * Alan_odonnell_75

    *Alan O'Donnell.* Alan studied physics and then supported himself by
    playing poker online. He didn't start coding until after college,
    when he fell in love with Haskell and never looked back. He's a
    polyglot and loves learning new languages. He's currently exploring
    Coq. He was in the first batch of Hacker School.

  * Sonali_sridhar_75

    *Sonali Sridhar.* Sonali's an interaction designer who went to art
    school and likes to play with circuits. She's now rolling up her
    sleeves and learning how to code for real at Hacker School.

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