Our program is built on a maximalist idea: anything a teacher could do to genuinely help their students, we do.
No one offers real eyes on your work at the frequency we do (as often as daily). Our system simulates how code reviews are done at the most competitive firms, and has been carefully adapted for the learning context. This allows us to provide detailed feedback on the nuanced aspects of program design, as well as more advanced topics like performance (time and space complexity). Contrast this with most schools that rely on autograders and "feedback" from teaching assistants and bots.
Our strict mastery-based system ensures that you deeply understand what you're doing at every step before moving on. Teaching this way requires us to hold students to the highest standard—higher than even the best students would do on their own. The type of person who prioritizes the progress bar over real understanding will be frustrated by our approach, but if you're looking for depth and mastery, there's nothing better.
Our algorithms track incorporates live 1:1 assessments that are structured like interviews at top-level companies. Each one is dynamic and includes multiple parts, twists, and probing follow-up questions, just like the real thing. Regular benchmarks like this help our students manage "the live gap", the difference between what you can do on your own and what you can do live.
When you come across a nuanced issue that's difficult to resolve in writing, nothing beats jumping on a call with us. No other institution, public or private, offers this level of service at any price. We can offer this level of service because we carefully manage the size of our student body. Students have access to our schedule on Calendly and can directly book sessions on their own.
Get live problem-solving practice every single week. This is of course useful for technical interviews, but it's also immensely useful for everyday programming. If you get better at live problem-solving, you'll do better with unlimited time too. The weekly cadence is important because for whatever reason, weekly things with structure make people show up.
Every Friday, you'll post what you accomplished during the week in our Slack group following these guidelines. Along with the Friday problem-solving meetings, this acts as an important accountability mechanism, and helps you make the most out of our program. It also gives us insight into your progress, so we can proactively intervene if needed.
The best career advice depends on the nuances of your unique situation. We'll work closely with you and help you craft the perfect resume, cover letter, and overall job application strategy. We'll also work with you to adjust and optimize your process over time.
Many interview mistakes are obvious to the interviewer but invisible to the candidate. We fix this by objectively assessing how you actually did in real interviews. Immediately after an interview, create a transcript of what happened. We'll use this transcript to analyze your performance and provide recommendations on how to tweak your approach so that you can make the most of the next opportunity.
Most quiz software coddles students by giving up the answer at the first sign of struggle. This creates weak students that don't understand anything. Frustrated by this situation, we created our own quiz engine that helps you identify issues and actually fix them so that you can transform weaknesses into strengths.
The average teacher presents algorithms as formulas to be memorized. When taught this way, students disengage and think of algorithms as unapproachable. Our assessments are designed to push students to derive classic algorithms on their own. Not only is this more satisfying, but it also provides crucial insight into the heart of algorithm design—how basic concepts can be thoughtfully composed into a whole far greater than the parts.
For every assessment in the algorithms track, solutions must meet minimum standards for time and space complexity. In addition, you must analyze your solution and include correct time and space complexity figures. Outside of the assessments, there are dedicated guides and quizzes focused on performance analysis. We include so much practice because analyzing performance is tricky and gets more difficult over time. Without enough practice, most people develop dangerous blindspots and misconceptions.
One of our most ambitious goals is to teach sophisticated students how to rigorously think about correctness with mathematical proofs. Most teachers ignore this because they don't know how to do it themselves. Instead, they naively advocate for testing specific inputs. To encourage students to think about correctness in a more serious way, we include detailed proofs for every algorithms assessment and emphasize "proofs thinking" in both our feedback and live sessions.