Recurse Center

Allison and Zach are Hacker Schoolers

Allison

Allison

Zach

Zach

We’re thrilled to announce that Allison Kaptur and Zach Allaun have agreed to join us as Hacker School facilitators!

Zach and Allison were both students in our summer batch, where they blew us away with their love of programming and how quickly and voraciously they learned. They’re exceptionally friendly people, with phenomenal social and communication skills. They also have a penchant for always going deeper, whether they’re hacking on the ClojureScript internals or studying the subtleties of C pointers. Plus, they’re just really fun people to work with.

Allison studied astrophysics at Yale, and then went to Wall St., where she built bank models and tried to wrangle Excel into doing large-scale time series analysis. Thankfully for us, she later fell in love with programming, and has since ditched finance to spend her days coding Python and C.

Zach went to college expecting to study political science, but quickly found computer science much more to his liking. After exhausting most of the CS classes his university offered, he decided to leave to study programming on his own. He’s since taken off like a rocket, and has already coauthored an essential piece of Hacker School infrastructure (a TrueSkill implementation in Clojure, which we use for our ping-pong tournaments.

We are unbelievably lucky to have found Allison and Zach, and we couldn’t be happier to have them as part of the team.

– Hacker School (Nick, Dave, Sonali, Alan, Tom, Allison, and Zach)