It is an ordinary day for many in the town home to the Dalai Lama, but for a group of people inside a seemingly ordinary building, every day is a learning. Learning possibly the most important skill in the 21st century, coding.

AltCampus, a coding school that runs a six month program to train ordinary average people into serious software engineers that can do some serious damage is not based in a major city like Bangalore, but rather in the quiet little town of Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh, India. Most people who’ve heard of Dharamshala would have possibly only heard of it due to the presence of the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Tibetan government in exile, but the town is home to a quaint tech community that works silently and continues to create software.

I stumbled upon this place when I was searching for places to learn coding in a physical space. As most people know, while coding has everything to do with a computer, the hardest way to learn it is also from the computer, alone. I found a list of places that teach coding in physical school type settings on Quora and found this to be the only place which was not in a major city. You might be thinking, who would want to go to the middle of nowhere for six months to learn coding? Personally, I love living in a city, especially a big city, we have a lot of things that are going for us and the big city structure allows us to remain relatively possession-less. However, something I realised after coming to AltCampus and Dharamshala is that we have ZERO distractions. Yes, the touristy vibe of the place maybe a little distraction, but I’m here on a mission. A mission to master coding over the next six months, at least I hope to ;).

This approach is actually working wonderfully for me. At this time, near AltCampus, I have no car, no public transport, cabs are expensive and the only way to move around cheaply is to walk. In addition, the lack of movie theatres and other places that could possibly create an interest in going places are far away and I couldn’t walk all the way. This leaves me with relatively little to do except for learn how to code by doing the exercises given at AltCampus everyday.

I seem to be learning to code fairly easily, perhaps it is a natural predisposition I have towards programming or it is the result of having been with on computer since age 5, either way, this is working for me. I like coding, I like things that I can do using code, the power that software gives people like me to be able to impact large numbers of people. If not all of the above, it could be that I am simply in the ‘Honeymoon’ phase that my instructor told me that we would encounter for the first fortnight before getting into the ‘Desert of Despair’ and eventually, if we persist, we get to the promise land where we get good at coding and can build software products.

The Experience at AltCampus

Although I’ve been here for only about ten days, being a process engineer, I can say that this method of learning code works. I have made more progress in two days here than I made in the past six months sitting at home and trying to figure things out on my own or going through a MOOC.

I arrived at AltCampus on the 7th of April which happened to be a Sunday, there was nothing much to do. The classes were only from Monday to Saturday. My first impressions weren’t the best, there were two buildings under construction of which one was to be the accommodation and one is the place where we learn. AltCampus is a small place, I’m in batch 7 and there has only been one batch that has graduated from the program until now, they’ve got placed in jobs paying upwards of INR 50,000/mo and have started paying AltCampus back for the program. AltCampus works on a unique principle where people go through the program without paying a fee during the program and pay only once they get a job paying Rs 50,000 or more per month. You are to pay 15% of the income for an year after the program which adds up to around Rs90,000 at a minimum.

This approach is kind of scary for me coming from a business perspective as it puts an enormous amount of faith into the students, but as a student, it gives me immense faith in the program as the school has taken all the risk and is only asking me to pay if I get a job paying upwards of 50k. We don’t have to pay if we do not get a job paying at least 50k, this is what they say on their website.

The food is good at AltCampus, it is not great, it is not bad, it is good. Being a south Indian, I don’t have many complaints although I do miss idly and dosas for breakfast, but rice is served for lunch and rotis for dinner.

They’ve put us up in a comfortable guesthouse at this point as the accommodation building is under construction however, I doubt if the accommodation is going to be as comfortable as the guesthouse, but I guess I can manage.

AltCampus is a loosely structured program, it is not too rigid and the founders also are taking things as they go and trying things out with every new batch. The one thing that I have got going for me is that there are so many people I can talk to about coding which is something that didn’t happen to me in my circle back home.

If there is something that I would like AltCampus to do is to be more strict with the processes and structure in addition to the filtering mechanism for new students. I feel that certain students have absolutely no knowledge about coding might face a certain difficulty in the beginning which may cause the student to not be super enthusiastic till the end. Although I believe that they will definitely pick up the skill if they stick through the program and hammer it out until the bitter end, but if they give up mentally early, I doubt if they will stick through it.

Structure and processes could be a little more rigid so that people know that they’re not in Dharamshala for a vacation and that they have only six months to pick up the difficult skill of full-stack development. I see people fooling around and whiling away time without a care in the world or without any guilt whatsoever about not completing the projects assigned. I strongly believe that I need to complete assignments every day in order to be at par with learning the skill on time, but perhaps everyone else does not think the same way. Using the pain and pleasure methods to our advantage is a good thing and I think AltCampus could use this better to ensure higher quality of graduates and higher satisfaction among graduates.

I do not wish to give any conclusion to the story perhaps because it is a work in progress but soon, I know that I will benefit from this coding school called AltCampus as I deeply needed such as school myself and it never existed but now it does. If you are interested in coding and would like to invest six months of your life to change the rest of your life, I would suggest you apply to AltCampus.

If you wish to apply to AltCampus, you can go to AltCampus.io and click on Apply. There is a batch starting every month as of now, you could get into the next batch at the earliest.

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