The Founder
Gonzalo Romero
I have been teaching since 2011, computer science since 2017, and more than five hundred students have come through my classes in that time. Most recently I taught on a nine-month engineering residency and helped build its curriculum.
The students who shaped this are the ones who did not get it
Most of what I know about teaching this came from the people who struggled, rather than from the ones who read a lesson once and moved on.
What did not make sense to them, and why. What they were doing instead of the thing the lesson asked for. Which sentence they read three times without it landing.
Do that for long enough and the pattern stops being anecdotal. People hit the same walls in the same order. A misspelled property. Printing instead of returning. A loop that stops one step early. The research helps, and the page on how this works names every study it leans on, but the ordering came from watching it happen in a room.
That is what the exercises here carry: the specific mistakes people make on that specific exercise, written down in advance.
Where my students work now
Arkestro · Asana · Bloomberg · Con Edison · Datadog · FanDuel · JPMorgan · Microsoft · The New York Times · Palo Alto Networks · Pinterest · Ro · Salesforce · Travelers · UBS · Upscale AI
Every one of those is a software engineering role. Those are the ones I can name from memory.
They were hired before this product existed. I am not claiming it placed them. I am claiming that the way I teach has a track record, and this is that way of teaching, built to work when I am not in the room.
What I actually do
The part I like most is the space between building something and explaining it.
I have taught the PERN stack for years and I build in whatever the problem calls for, including the custom stack this runs on. Grading pipelines, architecture specs, curriculum. It all comes down to the same thing, which is figuring out how something works and then making it usable for someone else.
Who I have been doing this for
Most of my work has been getting people into this field who would not otherwise have had the chance. People without a computer science degree, without a network, without anyone at home who could explain what a terminal is.
That is who this is built for, and it is why the first two chapters are free and always will be.
If you were one of my students
Get in touch. I still want to know how it is going.