How we teach.
Our curriculum is empirical, built from years of real workshops and client work. Learners join a team, build a real product, and grow into capable engineers by doing the work, with feedback at every step.
Learn by building from the first week
From the first week, you build real software in a team and ship it together, and you learn the discipline by carrying it.
Each cohort takes one real product from first principles to a deployed application. Along the way you practise what professionals use. Test driven development without mocks, pairing, version control, continuous delivery and real time web development.
You work on our own open source tools, EkoLite and EkoFlow, which run on modest hardware, so the way you learn is the way the work is done.
What you will learn
Every way is taught on real code, test first. Choose one to see its curriculum.
For anyone with code to improve or an idea to build
A working developer beside your own code, or your own idea. The material is your work, so the lessons follow you.
1 Before you decide
Your first hour, free
An hour with the sensei on your own code, so you know how we work before you pay for anything.
2 Private lessons
Two hours, twice a week
Your work is read line by line between lessons, and each lesson ends with the single thing to practise next.
3 The practice
One discipline at a time
Test first, small pull requests, clear commits, then refactoring under a passing suite, chosen together and practised until it holds.
4 Idea session
From an idea to a plan
Bring a tech problem or an idea. We think it through together, and you leave with a written plan and the next step.
Every change is checked, including ours
You work on real repositories where every claim the code makes is verified before it ships.
A mistake costs a failed build, and the failed build is the lesson. You learn the discipline by being caught by it, until the check is in your head as well as in the pipeline.
Every change is checked
The tests, the types, the linting and the documents generated from the tests run on every change, and nothing ships that cannot be verified.
The standard applies to us
Our pipeline is public, and so is its record on our own work. When it catches us, we publish what we found and what we changed, and it becomes teaching material.
Your skills, measured on real work
Connect your GitHub repository, and our dev metrics platform reads the work itself, every merged pull request, green build and unbroken streak.
It turns that work into a measure of your skills, so you and your mentor see where you stand and what to practise next.
Visit the platform (opens in a new tab)Every seat includes the Solo plan, yours forever. The Open Mat plan is free, with no card needed.
What it measures
Delivery
Your own DORA metrics, deployment frequency, lead time and change failure rate.
Code health
The quality of your code, from the scans that run on every change.
Rank
XP from real work, climbing the belt ladder from Apprentice to Sensei.
Your code stays yours
It reads pull requests and build results through GitHub and keeps no copy.
Participatory, learner centred, grounded in real work
Our method is participatory and learner centred. Learners are active makers of their own knowledge, not passive recipients of content, and the curriculum is built around what they do rather than what they are told.
Learners pose and frame real problems, build in pairs, and reflect in structured cycles. Knowledge is constructed between people, through pairing, code review and honest peer feedback. It draws on project based, learner centred traditions, for example Freire and Dewey, delivered as concrete practice in coding dojos.
Understanding and action stay together. Engineers who understand the systems they build, technically and in context, gain the confidence and agency to shape their own communities.