“Scala hands” celebrate the last day of class for Hackbright Academy’s summer 2013 session.
Ten weeks at Hackbright Academy can fly by. The students arrived in June to Hackbright’s San Francisco with varied experiences programming before embaring on the 10-week engineering fellowships. Some students took a few Girl Develop It courses here, others tried learning to code on Codecademy. All had in common a strong, inspired desire to pivot their current careers into software engineering.
Before the first day of class at Hackbright, students are instructed to go through Learn Python the Hard Way. On the first day of class, they begin pair programming. After a few short weeks, students are writing web applications and manipulating SQL databases.
Students also give tech talks in front of the class, attend to industry events and embark on a final project of her own choosing at Hackbright Academy. At the end of Hackbright Academy’s 10 week program, students present these projects at Career Day to partner companies as they speed-interview for jobs as software engineers.
This year, the projects from Career Day included an oft-tweeted distributed database in – you guessed it – Scala, an assembly language code generator and a root kit. Other students created smart web applications. A few wrote their own programming languages. The diversity, range and depth of students’ projects is astounding.
The students were in equal parts challenged and aided by the instructors at Hackbright Academy, who helped them define and scope their projects, and also are also coaching with interview practice.
Not to be overlooked, the mentors at Hackbright Academy deserve kudos as well for pitching in countless hours helping Hackbright students with their projects. The mentors also provided much support through the engineering fellowship – thank you for your time!!
And a big thanks to all our partner companies who came out to interview Hackbright Academy’s latest batch of 24 software engineers last week! Thank you for supporting our initiative and students.
Anyone else interested in hiring out of our latest 24 software engineers from Hackbright Academy? Tweet at them and @Hackbright.