In what might well be a technology industry first, an enterprising student at the Holberton School of Software Engineering in San Francisco, California, penned and posted a three-minute in-class rap performance about bash scripting. As the video went viral (at least inside the software community), it even caught the attention of Linus Torvalds, creator and principal developer of the open source Linux kernel.

“He was like, ‘Are you the one who was rapping bash?’” recalled Elaine Yeung (pictured), Holberton software engineering student, as she described a recent meeting with the legendary programmer. “Yes, that was me,” she told him.

Yeung stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, California. They discussed the Holberton curriculum and Yeung’s views about the open-source community. (* Disclosure below.)

No student bills until employment

Holberton offers aspiring software programmers a two-year alternative higher education model that includes nine months of programming, followed by a six-month internship and then concluding with nine more months of specialized learning. The opportunity was attractive to Yeung because students don’t pay for their education until they graduate and obtain work, when the school is paid back through an income share agreement.

“It’s really cool to have a school that trusts in the education they’re going to give you. Now I can fully focus on learning C and Python,” said Yeung, describing two general-purpose programming languages taught at Holberton.

The school is named after Frances “Betty” Holberton, one of the programmers responsible for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, or ENIAC, the first programmable computer initially used by the U.S. Army in 1946. Holberton has just over 100 students, and Yeung attended Open Source Summit on an award, with hopes to expand her network and land an internship in the fall.

“I just feel that this whole movement of Linux and open-source is a step in the right direction,” Yeung said. “I know that I’m going to be able to add to that.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Open Source Summit 2017. Neither The Linux Foundation nor Red Hat Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE