I first learned about GeekSkool when I was trying to learn Common Lisp. In Sep. 2016, I quit my job to learn Lisp full-time and make a career in it. A friend told me to go to GeekSkool. But I thought it would be just another factory bootcamp. 5-6 months went by, and I became inconsistent in my learning after the initial motivation faded. So, I was looking for Lisp jobs just to see if I would get one. Google led me to HasGeek’s (a job portal) website, and I saw GeekSkool’s banner at the top of the page. Since I wasn't doing much, I tried to give it a shot. Sometimes, the second time's the charm. I had the time required to go every day, and I needed some accountability and a better environment to be and stay consistent. But what I got was much, much more.
Santosh had his doubts about me staying because somebody with a similar profile (I already had done masters' in CS) came for a couple of months and then went abroad for further studies. He was optimizing the couple of months he had here before flying out, but he never told Santosh about it. But somehow, he trusted me and let me join. He believed in people until they broke a rule. Rules were non-negotiable.
He asked me to switch to Clojure (Lisp on JVM) as there were no jobs in Common Lisp anymore. But he never nudged me toward a mainstream language to make my placement easier. He wanted people to become better programmers; language was just a medium. You could use whatever medium your mind worked best in. There were three people in my batch alone who were using Clojure(Script). And this was a principle he followed that I observed throughout my time there. He will not override your decisions or suggest something if you already have a plan in mind and are committed to it. He will treat you as an equal in that regard — no senior-junior thing. He will give you advice only if you ask or in the Friday demos, which are explicitly for feedback. If you have a project in mind, you are free to work on it. He will make sure you have enough complexity so you get to learn new stuff. He will ask for specific features or specific ways to do something so that you learn and apply a new concept, code organization, best practices, or a library, etc. If you don’t have a project in mind, he will suggest a project and tell you why he thinks it is a good fit - it will have a certain level of challenge that will keep you interested but just enough so that it is not out of your current skill set and demotivates you. Not too low, not too high — just right!
As I already mentioned, he did not nudge me towards a mainstream language for easier placement. Money was always an afterthought. It was just the tool to sustain the place and was not even on the agenda. And I don’t know for sure whether GeekSkool was net positive on the balance sheet in the long run. He told me multiple times, after I graduated, that the market was bad (the layoff era) and that GeekSkool was in a bad financial state. Very few jobs are available, so he takes very few students. Small batches are not good, financially, for a bootcamp. He never asked students even for operational costs - rent, electricity, etc., even if a student could afford it. Sometime in 2024, he told me that a student wants to just join and pay a monthly fee because he will not take a job from GeekSkool. He just wants to learn to program. I said it makes sense, but I don’t know whether Santosh allowed him in.
True Gurukul. The Guru Dakshina will come after, once you get a job, and it will not be a part of your salary. The company will pay for it separately. And that too, if you get placed at all. You are free to take a job on your own, and the company or you have no obligation to pay anything to GeekSkool. No loans, no burden on your head, no keeping your degrees as ransom. None of that bullshit. Pure learning and growth. Become the best you can.
There were students who did not even pay for lunch(it used to come from outside, and you could opt for it). I don’t think money was even a consideration. All the financial bookkeeping was done by the students. Sure he was a flawed man(we all are), but the purity with which he started and ran GeekSkool till his last breath was untainted and beyond a speck of doubt. Santosh, GeekSkool, and Simba(THE GeekSkool dog and Chief Happiness Officer!) were the holy trinity. They were fused together, and none could survive without the other two.
GeekSkool, as it was run, was an entirely new thing for me - no curriculum, no fixed-duration batches, just a few non-negotiable rules. It was like a Montessori in a horde of traditional rote-learning schools. We smoked and drank on Friday nights after the weekly demos(weekends were off). A couple of beers, a tea or two after that, and I was ready for an amazing coding/debugging session — a perfect Friday. Also, somehow, it was a place for a lot of misfits. Very few normal, sane people. Most people had unique, non-normal backstories.
Evening tea with friends. Khuska, when you are working till dinner. And the Friday demos were very effective. You work for the whole week toward a goal, and the praise you receive carries you through the next week, and the feedback makes you better. The learnings from the feedback on other people's demos are a bonus. It was a very well-thought-out system with only the essential parts: strict timing, a daily morning quick stand-up and meditation, focus time, challenging projects, weekly 1-on-1s, weekly demos, and post-demo parties. All the chaff was thrown out. Not too restrictive to constrain your learning, not too free that you get lost. Just the right amount of structure - the sweet spot! It was the best learning experience of my life, and I have a strong hunch that it will remain so. And I had been to two colleges before coming here - one was one of the worst, and one was one of the best in the country. And it beated the latter by a huuuuuu……..geeeeee margin. This only happens when you conceive and design something, just thinking with your heart, no head involved. You give a callback to the head only when it’s absolutely needed and then leave it alone. You don’t give it the power to make the decisions. It is just a minion and not the owner. His dream was to have a 100+ room campus - closer to nature, where anybody can come and become a (better) programmer. Classes, food, hostel - everything included. Zero fees.
He left this realm in January 2025. Hey Santosh, have a great time wherever you are. I hope we all carry some of that purity forward and help people in whatever way we can. Goodbye, old man :)
Rest well and teach compilers and monads to the Gods. You were special and will remain in many people’s memories for a long, long time! Hope to meet you again!
Feb 8, 2026
Bangalore
<aside> 🔔 To discuss anything or say hi, you can email me at [email protected]. You can get updates via *WhatsApp* or email*.*
</aside>