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Practitioners judge the curriculum and the events

Our judges review the curriculum and assess the projects learners present.

5 judges·Curriculum read each term·Event panels

The judges

  • Studio portrait of Liz Zhang

    Liz Zhang

    Founder, AI developer relations

    The Multimodal Society

    San Francisco Bay Area

    AI developer relations, two companies founded, and a community of 250,000. Studied at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

  • Studio portrait of Yunbin Bae

    Yunbin Bae

    Designer and HCI researcher

    a1mobile

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Design and human-computer-interaction research, and one company founded. Studied at the University of Maryland.

  • Studio portrait of Abhinav Balasubramanian

    Abhinav Balasubramanian

    Staff AI engineer

    NVIDIA

    Santa Clara, California

    Generative AI, agentic systems, RAG and AI observability. Studied at San Jose State University.

  • Studio portrait of Abhi Vasanth

    Abhi Vasanth

    Senior data engineer

    Pacific Gas and Electric

    San Francisco, California

    Data engineering at one of the largest utilities in the United States. Studied at Udacity.

  • Studio portrait of Sachin Gupta

    Sachin Gupta

    Engineering leader

    eBay

    San Francisco Bay Area

    Engineering leadership on systems built for massive scale. Studied at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Judge on this program

The board is taking judges

A judge reads the courses each term and sits on the panel that judges the events where learners present the workflows they deployed. It is the one role here that can send a learner back for another pass at the workflow.

A seat is held by one person for one discipline, that person's name is on the board in public, and their verdict is on the record under it. Every judge reaches their own verdict and signs it. The advisory board seats a small fraction of the people who apply.

Apply to judge

Have your profile links and a portrait to hand before you start.

How to apply

Create an account, fill in the form, send it

About fifteen minutes in total, and you can spread it over as many sittings as you like: save a private draft at any point, then send it when it is ready. The advisory board reads every application that arrives.

  1. Create your privileged access account

    The same account that opens the courses. Your application lives behind your own login because the second half of it asks for your photograph and your phone number, and those belong somewhere only you can post to.

  2. Fill in the form

    Your portrait, your profile links, the discipline you would read, and the evidence behind it. Save a private draft at any point, then finish it another day.

  3. Send it to the board

    Add your phone, whether you can sit on a panel in person and in which city, and anything else worth knowing. Pressing send puts it in front of the advisory board, and the same page then shows you where it stands.

What the board looks for

Every one of these is something a stranger can check for themselves, which is the standard the rest of this site holds itself to.

  • Depth in one discipline, measured in years of doing the work yourself.
  • A public record somebody else can check: published work, a product shipped, a panel sat on, a profile that matches what you claim.
  • Judgement that has been tested in the open. Hiring, reviewing, grading, funding, or shipping to a deadline somebody else set.
  • Independence from the course you would be reading, and the willingness to say so if that ever changes.

What it asks of you

Stated before you apply rather than after you are accepted. A seat is a commitment across a whole term.

  • One curriculum review per term, filed against the sentence that defines your seat.
  • Score the outcome sheets learners submit against the rubric, reading the work rather than the name on it.
  • Sit on the event panel when there is one.

Advisory board

The advisory board decides who teaches and who judges

Every application to teach or to judge is read by the advisory board, and the decision belongs to the board alone. Its advisors sit outside this program, holding their own roles elsewhere in the field, and what they read is the evidence rather than the name on it.

  1. Everything in one file

    Your evidence, your links, your portrait and how to reach you, sent from inside your account rather than emailed around.

  2. Measured against what the seat requires

    Your application is measured against what the seat requires, so a strong intake keeps the bar where it is and a thin one keeps it there too.

  3. A conversation, if it gets that far

    Anyone the board is seriously considering talks to an advisor, and for a teaching seat that includes watching you explain one thing you built.

  4. An answer either way

    The page you applied from shows where your application stands, and it changes the day the board decides.

The advisors

1 advisor·Independent of the program·Reads both tracks

  • Sean Kelley

    Advisor and angel investor across climate tech, regenerative agriculture and talent tech

    Sage&Sea Ventures · Folsom, California

    Sean Kelley on LinkedIn

Every advisor here has agreed to sit on the board, and this is the whole of it. The board is still being seated, so it will grow.