[ddrum001]

I'm from Insight - our program is kept free for our Fellows because the companies that we partner with pay for the Fellowship. Rather than classes, we believe that the best way for advanced engineers to learn the detailed nuances of these tools is to use them, so the concept is to learn them by building a data platform. You're right that it's really difficult to understand distributed systems in a few weeks, but our Fellows already have several years of programming, so they have been able to pick up a general understanding quite quickly.

[bogomipz]

The site is somewhat lacking in any kind of syllabus or any details of how past fellows(not really sure what that means, in context of a hacker school, although I am familiar with the term in the context of IBM or Sun from days past)

What are some past projects that attendees built?

[ddrum001]

We don't have a fixed syllabus since we don't operate like a school per se. Instead, the Fellows choose a project and have to make engineering tradeoffs about which tools to use. With that said, most of the past participants focused on distributed systems like Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Kafka, and NoSQL DBs. You can check out past projects on the blog (http://insightdataengineering.com/blog/) and the past Fellows are here (http://www.insightdataengineering.com/fellows.html)