A New Kind of Education
Using project-based learning and peer learning, Holberton School’s mission is to train the best software engineers.
At Holberton School, there are no formal teachers and no formal courses. Instead, our teaching methodology is completely project centered. We give our students increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve, with minimal initial directions on how to solve them. As a result, students naturally learn look for the theory and tools they need, how to understand them and use them, how to work together and to help each other.
This method of education has been used by top universities overseas to train thousands of world-class software engineers. Today, those software engineers are working at Google, Facebook, Apple, Uber, Docker and thousands of other companies in the US and around the world.
As the world is rapidly changing, nobody knows what will be required of today’s students after they graduate. Therefore, focusing on learning tools and frameworks no longer makes sense.
At Holberton School, students learn the art of problem solving. They learn to learn whatever they need to accomplish their objectives. They find solutions to problems by using both offline and online resources, as well as their imagination, creativity and communication. By doing so, the students are able to adapt to the future and unknown challenges they will face in their careers more quickly.
"The founding engineering team at Docker - including the founder, Solomon Hykes, and myself - graduated from schools built around the same principles as Holberton School. Learning how to learn was key in my career, and the project-based and peer learning approach is the best way to become a highly skilled software engineer."
- Sam Alba, Senior Director of Engineering at Docker.
Our curriculum is both intense and exciting; students create, build, maintain and scale many applications and systems. They always work hands-on, on industry-level projects and build their own applications.
Read more about our education system.
Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Holberton
Frances Elizabeth “Betty” Holberton (1917-2001) was one of the six programmers of the ENIAC, which was the very first programmable computer, created in 1943 by the US Army.
In an environment when engineering and scientific research were considered to be jobs for males, programming, which was mistakenly considered to be clerical work at the time, was left for six female workers, who were not even allowed to see the computer!
Betty Holberton was one of the selected staff. Not only did she reveal herself as incredibly talented at putting down the foundations of what would later become our modern-day software engineering, but she went on to achieve numerous other historical breakthroughs. Most notably, she was later actively involved with the creation and design of the FORTRAN and COBOL programming languages, which paved the way for modern languages.
One of the Holberton School’s goals is to find people who, just like Betty Holberton and her five colleagues at the time, might not come across as fitting the usual “software engineer” profile, but will nonetheless become leaders once in the industry, and give them the means to become just that.
On top of being proud to give voice to Mrs. Holberton's name, the founders of Holberton School are immensely grateful to Pamela Jane Holberton, Betty Holberton's daughters, for their blessing to use their family's name.
"I am so proud of that the people at Holberton School are using our name to do what they are doing. Their insights into people and creating a vision to foster these young men and women to become who they really might be and help them reveal to themselves their undiscovered talents is remarkable."
- Pamela Jane Holberton, Betty Holberton's daughter, and writer.