Lattice is a small, opinionated atelier for software engineers who want to think more clearly about what they build. Twelve weeks. Six instructors. One discipline. We've been quietly running cohorts since 2024.
The short version: most software education optimizes for getting hired, not for becoming better. We wanted a place that did the second thing.
In late 2023, three of us — two engineers and a teacher — sat in a Berlin café and listed every coding programme we'd ever taken or taught. None of them taught the things we kept learning the hard way ten years into our careers.
The omissions were specific: how to read code well, how to disagree productively about it, how to stay curious about a system after you're already shipping in it. The list ran to two pages. Most schools were busy teaching frameworks that wouldn't outlive their cohort.
We started Lattice to teach what we wished we'd been taught — and to teach it the way our favourite professors taught their seminars: small rooms, hard reading, and instructors who still ship.
The first cohort (Cohort I, January 2024) had eight students and three instructors. The first week was overscheduled, the second week was chaotic, and by the third week we'd thrown out the syllabus and were teaching what people actually needed. We've been refining it ever since.
Four cohorts in, the model has held. Small groups. Working practitioners as instructors. A reading list that takes itself seriously. A discipline that does too.
We are not trying to scale, and we are not raising capital. We will accept thirty-two engineers per year for as long as the work stays good.
Six rules that shape every decision we make about the school — admissions, curriculum, hiring, even how we write the website you're reading.
Engineering is a discipline with a thousand-year intellectual lineage. We treat it that way — with reading, criticism, and a long arc of practice.
No cohort exceeds 32 students. No track exceeds 8 students per instructor. The classroom is a working group, not a lecture hall.
Every instructor still writes the kind of code they teach. If they stop shipping, they stop teaching. No exceptions.
The reading list is not optional. The papers we assign are the papers we still re-read. They show up in lectures, labs, and conversation.
If we use a tool, we read its source. If we use a protocol, we implement a small version of it. Magic is a bug in our curriculum.
We will not scale, franchise, or accept more students than we can know personally. The school's first responsibility is to the work.
Lattice was founded in 2024 by two engineers and a teacher. We still teach, still write the curriculum, and still review every application personally.
Principal Engineer · Cloudflare runtime team
Twelve years writing kernel and runtime code in three languages. Spent two years teaching graduate systems before Cloudflare poached her back. Lattice is the school she wishes she'd taught at instead of leaving.
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Former Staff Engineer · Stripe distributed systems
Spent twelve years on Stripe's payments infrastructure. Wrote a widely-cited series on practical consensus. Joined Mira on the café night that became Lattice — the one where the list of "things schools don't teach" reached two pages.
A third co-founder, our director of pedagogy, prefers not to be listed publicly — they spent twenty years teaching at a Berlin Gymnasium before joining us, and they'd rather be remembered by their students than by a website.
We're a young school, and we're proud of how slowly we've grown. Here's the abbreviated history.
November. Three of us list every programme we'd ever taken. None match. We start writing a syllabus that night and stop at 4am.
January. Eight students. We rent a corner of a coworking space in Kreuzberg. Three weeks in, we throw out the syllabus and rewrite half of it in real time.
Spring and autumn. We expand to twenty-four students per cohort. Faculty grows to six. We move into our own studio in Friedrichshain.
We publish the first essays under the Lattice masthead. Alumni groups self-organise — a small Slack we don't moderate becomes its own institution.
January. The fifth full programme. The Studio launches as a public broadcast. We begin admitting via a structured take-home plus interview, capped at thirty-two seats.
Cohort XIII opens January 2026. Thirty-two seats. Apply once, hear back personally within forty-eight hours — never from a no-reply address.
Begin your application