Publishing the Hacker School User’s Manual

We want to be more transparent about Hacker School. We think this will help the world understand Hacker School better and make it easier for us to attract the kind of friendly, ambitious, and rigorous students who excel here.

As a first step towards more transparency, we’ve decided to publish the Hacker School User’s Manual. This was written as an internal document to help new students navigate Hacker School, but we also think it’s a good way to help people understand what we’re about. Hopefully this will answer some of the more common questions about how Hacker School works and maybe even encourage a few more people to apply.

The document is virtually identical to the version we use internally, except for the “Other resources” section. This section has a bunch of URLs and email addresses that are only useful if you’re a Hacker Schooler. It has been replaced with a brief summary.

There are many parts of this document we’d like to rewrite. There are sections that are out of date or no longer accurately reflect our opinions, but we don’t want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The information in the User’s Manual is much better than anything else we have published so far, and if it helps a few more people better understand Hacker School, it’s worth it.

There’s a lot more to do in our quest to be more transparent – there are blog posts to write, copy to revise, and of course the User’s Manual has to be updated before the next batch starts – but we think this release is a good start. Happy reading!