Mike Hale Solana Foundation is running Solana School's Fall Class from August 31 through October 16, a free, seven-week, cohort-based program that takes developers from Solana fundamentals to a shipped program every session, three times a week. Registration is open now on Luma and requires host approval. Solana Summer School, which ran a five-week lesson phase starting June 15, was limited to current college students with a valid school email. The Fall Class drops that requirement, open to any developer who applies.
Sessions run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 1.5 hours each, for seven weeks, roughly 21 live sessions in total. Every class ends with working code, not slides. Between sessions, students get a challenge to work through solo, then come back and debug it as a group.
What the Fall Class covers
The curriculum moves from Solana's account model to the tools builders actually reach for in production:
Solana architecture, PDAs, and setting up a dev environment
Anchor: building a vault and an escrow from scratch
Token 2022 and transfer hooks
Native Rust with Pinocchio, including compute unit optimization
Metaplex, Codama, and client generation
Indexing with Geyser and real-time data streams
Open office hours with Solana Foundation DevRel
Guest lectures from working Solana developers run alongside the core track, and the office hours slot is a direct line to Solana Foundation's developer relations team rather than a scheduled lecture. The curriculum also moves past hello world territory faster than most free courses. Token 2022's transfer hooks and Geyser's real-time indexing are topics a lot of intro programs skip entirely, and both show up here inside the first seven weeks.
Why cohort-based Solana education works
Reading docs and watching tutorials gets a developer to code that runs. It rarely gets them to code they understand well enough to debug at 2 a.m. or defend in front of judges. The challenge-then-group-debug cycle forces students to hit the same errors a solo learner hits, but with people in the room who've already hit them too.
The program closes with a Demo Day on October 16, where every student presents what they built over the seven weeks. It's explicitly framed as practice for Colosseum, Solana's hackathon and accelerator program, so the pitch students give on the last day of class is a dry run for the one that could land them a spot in a Colosseum Accelerator cohort with $250,000 in pre-seed funding behind it.
Who this is built for
The curriculum assumes a developer who can write code but hasn't necessarily written Solana programs before. It starts with PDAs and the account model, then builds up through Anchor to native Rust. By the later weeks, Pinocchio and Geyser have students reasoning about compute budgets and real-time indexing, the kind of production concerns a builder runs into once a program actually has users.
Solana Foundation is summing up the pitch as "come curious, leave shipping." Registration for Solana School's Fall Class is open now, ahead of the August 31 start date.
Learn More: Solana School: Fall Class