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Comment by 2drew3 | Hacker News Reader

What's the closest thing to Hacker School in SF? Does anyone have experience going through alternative coding education programs (as opposed to colleges, books, self-study)?

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I did some research on my own as I am currently applying to these "hacker accelerators." I think that Hacker School is unique in its lack of structure. This is the second article I have read in which a Hacker School fellow has compared their experience to grad school.

Most of the programs here in the Bay (HackReactor in SF, Hacker Dojo in the Valley) are actually schools where there is a set curriculum in order to prepare you for the workplace.

This is correct. The point of attending HackReactor, Dev Bootcamp, etc., is to gain a specific set of skills (often starting from zero) that will get you a job. The point of attending Hacker School is to become a better programmer, whatever that might mean to you (note that you have to already be a programmer in order to know that you want to do this).

EDIT: I do think it's unfortunate that Hacker School is basically unique in this regard; its an amazing thing.

I see you're a current undergraduate and also a Hacker School alum. How was your experience? Did you feel that you had the adequate knowledge to get the most out of Hacker School? I'm saying this as someone who is trying to decide when to go (sooner or later).

Hacker School was an amazing experience for me; I had been programming on and off for ~2.5 years when I attended last summer. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to chat more about it (email in profile)

I studied at Hack Reactor and actually found some great opportunities to go off the beaten path. It's true that we spent a good deal of class time on set lessons dealing with data structures, algorithms, databases, and various JavaScript frameworks. However, I also spent a week writing a domain specific programming language and an interpreter for it. It was a new challenge for me, but I wanted to a DSL for a personal project I was working on, so I did it! I know quite a few other students who dove into more theoretical, less applied projects.

All in all, it was a great experience and really just whetted my appetite for further study. Since graduation, I've been taking Coursera classes on Scala, functional reactive programming, recommender systems and a variety of other topics. The hardest thing is no longer having time to learn as much as I want to now that I'm working full-time again.

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