When Hacker School made a big splash in the news last spring, it was due to their new grants for women. Sponsored by Etsy, GitHub and Palantir, the grants were aimed to help make Hacker School more affordable and inviting for women interested in attending the three-month student-led educational program. Hacker School is actually free for the accepted few, but living in their New York locale for three months can get pretty pricey.

Blah blah blah Hacker School. Logo from hackerschool.com

While some applauded the effort made to get more women into programming, there was a backlash at the reverse sexism. Even so, Hacker School reported recently that their last two batches have been 35%-45% women so they must be onto something. They are offering the grants for women again for the next winter session, and applications are due January 1st at 11:59pm EST. If you're worried that you're not cool or good enough to be a "hacker" in the popularized connotation of the term, don't be. Hacker School made it very clear what their definition of "hacker" is (curious go-getters) and what it is not (pompous know-it-alls).

I had the chance to chat with Betsy Cannon, who just finished the fall session at Hacker School. She has a degree in physics and was working as an environmental community organizer through Lutheran Volunteer Corps when she decided to apply to Hacker School.

GeekMom: What is your background? How did you get into programming?

Betsy Cannon: I was introduced to programming my senior year of high school. My school required CS for graduation, but I put it off until my final term. All of the students who were into programming were gamers. Since I didn't play video games, I didn't particularly care about coding. Once I began the class, I discovered that programming was simply a series of logic puzzles and a lot of fun! I majored in physics in college but continued to take a handful of CS classes. Between my junior and senior year of college, I interned at Rocky Mountain Institute constructing a model of the US electric grid and its possible futures. During the internship, I realized how much I enjoyed the programming, sitting down and choosing the best algorithm for a problem, and decided to take more CS during my final year of college.

Hacker School in action. Photo by Sitong Peng, used with permission.

GeekMom: How did you hear about Hacker School? Why did you choose to apply?

Cannon: I first heard about Hacker School last spring when Etsy began offering grants for women. My sister emailed me an article talking about the grants. I wasn't available for the summer batch, but I kept the idea in the back of my mind. I found out that one of my classmates had completed Hacker School and began pestering him with questions. By the time that the fall applications opened in August, I knew that I had to be a part of the program. I was particularly drawn by the culture of intellectual curiosity and collaborative learning around programming.

GeekMom: Was it a scary leap of faith to move to New York just for three months?

Cannon: Honestly, moving to New York was one of my primary concerns with Hacker School. I grew up in rural South Carolina and then attended college in small town Minnesota. Thus, Seattle was the first city that I lived in. I loved Seattle and wasn't sure about leaving the West Coast. Plus, the population of just Brooklyn is over four times that of Seattle, so I wasn't sure how I'd handle the city. However, the transition went well. Having immediate friends from Hacker School with whom to explore NYC was ideal. I even survived Sandy! (Thankfully, some other Hacker Schoolers lived near-by and met up to code together before we became too stir-crazy.) In fact, I enjoyed my time in NYC so much that I am now interviewing for software engineering positions in NYC.

GeekMom: How has been the experience at Hacker School?

Cannon: Hacker School has been an incredible experience. As there are no assignments or grades, each person chooses to attend because of his/her/zer intrinsic desire to learn and love of programming. There is no competition, only a desire to share one's knowledge while seeking to become a better programmer oneself. Due to the wide array of backgrounds, whenever you have a question about a new language, wonder about the assumptions made by a particular function, or have difficulty visualizing a particular algorithm, there's another student who has had the same question before and is happy to explain it to you or point you to the most useful resources.

Hacker School students of the fall 2012 batch. Photo by Sitong Peng, used with permission.

GeekMom: What is it like to attend an informal school like Hacker School, compared to college/university?

Cannon: As all Hacker School projects are self-selected, you're devoted to the project and are determined to see it through. Whether you are building the app that you always wanted or coding a solution to a particularly intriguing problem, you are working on it because you want to. This sense of ownership is distinct from traditional school assignments and encourages creativity and dedication. It's also great for collaboration. Many Hacker Schoolers pair together on a project or fork someone else's code to expand upon the first person's product.

GeekMom: What did you work on/learn at Hacker School?

Cannon: At Hacker School, I experimented with distributed programming, delved into functional languages, wrote a Javascript interpreter, played around with graph algorithms and more. One of my favorite projects was writing a seam-carver, a program which modifies the aspect ratio of an image by removing less important pieces of the background while preserving the key elements.

Much of what I learned came from helping others with their projects. When someone hit a road block, I would have them walk me through their code. This helped me learn to quickly dive into a new project, see new ways of organizing code, and uncover others' thought processes. Of course, the code review was mutually beneficial, as I give the other person feedback on how to speed up their code or point out the location of a bug that they hadn't been able to track down.

GeekMom: How do you feel about Hacker School giving out grants for women? Do you think it's a great way to get more women in the tech industry, or that it's unfair to men?

Cannon: I'm immensely grateful to Etsy for providing me with a grant to attend Hacker School this batch, and to Palantir and Github for offering additional grants to women in my batch. I absolutely could not have afforded to live in New York for three months without the grant. The grant made it possible for me to take a risk, turn down a job offer, and move to the opposite coast to pursue my passion for programming.

Diversity in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, educational background, and nationality is one of the greatest parts of Hacker School. It is rare to find such an intelligent, eclectic mix of people learning from and teaching each other. To this end, I believe that the grants are beneficial for Hacker School. The grants help to combat the gender wage disparity, lower the opportunity cost from those who may perceive a higher risk, and explicitly tell women that they are welcome here.

Thank you, Betsy, I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors. And to all who have decided to apply to the winter session, good luck!