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New Silicon Valley Software Engineering School Expands Mentor Program to Include IBM Fellow & CTO, Symfony Founder and Top Engineers From Apple, Google

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- Nov 12, 2015 -- Holberton School announced today that it had added fourteen new mentors (including IBM's Fellow and CTO, Symfony's founder and top engineers from Apple and Google) for the innovative new software engineering school. The latest additions join 81 mentors already backing the school, including leading developers from Uber, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Microsoft, Google, Docker, Ticketmaster, Salesforce, Pinterest, Netflix, Flickr, Amazon, Cisco, Mozilla, Panasonic, CoreOS, Scality and Gandi, among others. The mentors give Holberton students the ability to meet and work with real-life engineers to better understand best practices, how top development teams work, technology trends, what employers really want and to network in a larger global community.

The school, launched last month by industry veterans from Apple, Docker and LinkedIn, is responding to the demand for software and system engineers worldwide by attracting volunteer mentors who love education and helping talented people grow their skills. The program also gives opportunities to mentors to expand their network by connecting with other mentors and future software engineers.

"Holberton is doing some innovative, exciting and ultimately I believe, extremely helpful breakthrough work in training the next generation of outstanding software engineers," said Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO. "Helping their students, who will become the high-value engineers of the future, is an honor and I believe a responsibility for us all who work in high tech."

"Without creative, dedicated and well-trained software engineers, much of the things we take for granted could soon become frayed," said Fabien Potencier, founder of Symfony and currently CEO of SensioLabs and Blackfire.io. "It is our responsibility, as those that came before, to help those that follow. Holberton's exciting new approach to training the software engineers of the future is a unique opportunity to do just that. Using open source code and techniques, these students can see how the process -- and the code -- actually works."

In addition to Cuomo and Potencier, new mentors include:

"Mentors are the backbone of our school, giving students a great way to network, gain insight into the 'real world' and get some great projects," said Julien Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Holberton School. "Mentors create many of the projects for our students, interact with the students as well as other mentors to make the school reflect the creativity, innovation and working demands of building great software in the real world."

The San Francisco-based school offers an alternative to college, online courses and coding bootcamps -- training high quality full-stack software engineers in two years by using a project-based and peer learning system already proven in Europe to scale to graduate thousands of elite engineers a year. The school has received more than 1,000 applications in just 3 weeks, as well as hundreds of requests from industry leaders to become mentors.

Those interested in becoming a mentor, may apply here.

About Holberton School
Holberton School is a project-based alternative to college for the next generation of software engineers.

Using project-based learning and peer learning, Holberton School's mission is to train the best software engineers of their generation. At Holberton School, there are no formal teachers and no formal courses. Instead, everything is project-centered. The school gives students increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve, and give them minimal initial directions on how to solve them. As a consequence, students naturally look for the theory and tools they need, understand them, use them, work together, and help each other.

Read more about Holberton School:

Editorial Contact:
Joe Eckert for Holberton

jeckertflak@gmail.com
+1 203-300-2649