The full FAQ across six categories. Short answers up top — long answers in the disclosures. If your question isn't here, email hello@yourbusiness.com and we will add it.
Who this cohort is for and — more importantly — who it isn't. We have a low rejection rate from applications, but we'd much rather decline than take a tuition you'll regret.
Six months minimum, one to four years typical. Most graduates have written Rust as their primary language for 1–3 years before signing up. The cohort assumes you are comfortable with:
Honestly — no, and we will likely decline your application. Cohort_07 will be hard for you, you will not enjoy it, and the $1,200 will not have been worth what you got out of it.
If you're new to Rust: read The Book end to end, then Rust by Example, then ship a small project (a CLI tool, a parser, a tiny web server). Come back in six months. We'll be here.
No. About a third of graduates are self-taught or boot-camp grads. What matters is whether you've shipped Rust, not how you learned to.
We will say: weeks 05 (memory ordering) and 11 (FFI) lean on some computer-architecture knowledge. We don't assume you have it, but if you're going to be the one engineer in your group who has never seen the C++11 memory model, expect to do a couple hours of supplementary reading.
unsafe. Is that ok?Perfect, actually. That is the most common starting point. Week 02 walks you through the unsafe contract from scratch and the cohort artifacts use unsafe deliberately and minimally. By week 12 you will have written, reviewed, and rejected unsafe code with a clear sense of when it earns its keep.
Possibly. We have had three rustc r+'s graduate cohorts so far and each gave us mixed feedback. The lifetime / variance / Pin material was review for them; the embedded and FFI material was new. Email Vela directly at vela@yourbusiness.com if you're already at this level — she'll give you an honest read on whether the cohort is worth your time.
No. We do not teach interview prep, leetcode, system design, or behavioral interview material. Many graduates have gotten Rust roles after the cohort — see the graduates page — but that is a side effect, not a core promise.
If you are an experienced systems programmer in C++ or another systems language, and you have done at least one Rust project end-to-end, yes. If you have never written Rust, see "Can I take this if I'm new to Rust" above. The cohort syntax-velocity is too high for true beginners regardless of background.
Yes. Live sessions are in English with auto-generated captions. Recordings have human-reviewed captions within 12 hours. The Slack supports any language but the bulk of conversation is in English. Past cohorts have had graduates whose primary languages include Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Tamil, Polish, Hungarian, and Arabic.
Be honest with yourself about the hours. ~10/week is an average; some weeks are 6, some are 14. The artifact ship-weeks (4, 8, 12) bias high.
Average ~10 hours. Roughly:
Weeks 04, 08, and 12 are ship-weeks and run closer to 14 hours. Weeks 02, 05, and 10 tend to be lighter (8 hours) because the topics are more reading-heavy than coding.
About 80% of cohort graduates have full-time jobs while taking the cohort. The schedule is designed for it: Tue+Thu live, Fri office hours, weekend code work. The cohort Slack is most active on weekends, mirror-imaged to the live-session weekday cadence.
About a third of cohort participants are in this situation. The recordings are the answer. Watch async, stay current on Slack, ship the artifacts on the soft deadlines (week 04, 08, 12). The live sessions are valuable but not strictly required.
Yes — we have a "defer once" policy. If life happens between now and ship-day, email Vela and we'll move your seat to the next cohort at no charge. We've done this 14 times across cohorts 01–06, no questions asked. We do not do "defer twice" — at that point we refund the unused portion of tuition.
Tuesday + Thursday, 5:00pm Pacific Time. That's 8pm Eastern, midnight UTC, 9am+1 Tokyo, 4am+1 Sydney. The Friday office hours rotate between 12pm Pacific and 9pm Pacific to give every continent a viable live touchpoint roughly every other week.
No. Watch async if you have to. The thing you cannot defer is the artifact ship-day at week 12 — though even that has happened (we've delayed two graduates by 4 weeks each, on bereavement leave). Email vela if you need it. We are not VC-backed and we have flexibility to be reasonable.
How sessions actually run, what software you'll use, and what hardware is shipped to you. The boring details that make or break a cohort experience.
~75 minutes. We open with 5 minutes of cohort updates and ship-week status. Vela presents the lesson topic with slides and live code for ~50 minutes, with anyone able to interrupt at any time on Zoom. The last 15 minutes are open Q&A and code review on whatever someone shipped that day.
Sessions are recorded and the recording is up within 12 hours, captioned, indexed by topic. The Slack carries the rest of the conversation across the week.
If you're on the mentor tier: yes, weekly, in detail, with line-level PR comments before each 1:1. You will get more code feedback in 12 weeks than most engineers get in two years.
If you're on the single tier: Vela reviews your three artifact submissions at three checkpoint dates (weeks 04, 08, 12) with ~30 lines of written feedback per artifact. Peer review (cohort partners, rotated weekly) covers the in-between work, and Vela sees that too.
Working cargo 1.74 or later, plus a Rust nightly toolchain (the +nightly install). For phase 03 you'll add probe-rs and espflash. Detailed setup instructions go out one week before cohort start, including Docker images for anyone who can't get a local build going.
Any laptop running macOS, Linux, or WSL2 with at least 16GB of RAM and 30GB of free disk. The ESP32-C3 dev board for phase 03 is mailed to you free during week 08. We cover international shipping. We support every country except those under U.S. export restrictions.
Slack. Single workspace, channels per cohort plus a #all-cohorts channel where alumni-from-cohort-01-onwards still chat. The cohort Slack stays open after graduation; we have not closed any cohort Slack to date.
Yes. Live sessions have auto-captions on Zoom (Otter.ai integration). Recorded sessions get human-reviewed captions within 12 hours and are indexed by topic. Past students with hearing impairments have called this the most accessible cohort they've taken.
Yes — alumni keep access to all past cohort recordings indefinitely. The video index lives at alumni.yourbusiness.com. We do not hide content behind "graduate-recently-only" walls.
How we charge, what's refundable, and how scholarships work. We try to be embarrassingly transparent here.
$1,200 single tier (no 1:1 mentorship), or $1,800 + mentor tier (12 hours of 1:1 with Vela across the cohort). Both are payable in full or 3-installment plans (3× $420 single, 3× $620 mentor — small surcharge to cover processing).
Yes — we have invoiced employers in 18 countries. Email billing@yourbusiness.com with your company's PO process. We'll generate an invoice with W-9 and EIN within 24 business hours. Stripe and direct ACH both work. Most engineers expense it under "professional development."
Refundable in full through end of week 02 — no questions asked, no exit interview. Email vela@yourbusiness.com. Average refund processing time is <6 hours.
After week 02 we don't refund. Honesty: by then, the live sessions and the artifact PR-review time we've spent on you have real cost, and the seat we held cannot be filled. We've made 14 refunds across cohorts 01–06; all 14 were within the first two weeks.
Yes — four full audit seats per cohort and a small pool of sliding-scale tuition (anywhere $300 to $1,200) for current students, open-source maintainers, underrepresented groups in tech, applicants outside G20 economies. Mention "scholarship" in the application notes; we do not require documentation.
Beyond the scholarship pool — repeat alumni get $300 off the next cohort, and three-or-more cohort signups from the same company get $200 off each. We don't run sales or promotional discounts, ever, on principle.
The 3-installment plan is for you. $420/month for three months is the lowest-friction way to take the cohort if your company isn't covering it. Some past graduates have also paid out-of-pocket and then expensed under "training" the next quarter — every company is different.
Yes — within the sliding-scale pool, we prioritize applicants from underrepresented groups in software (women, Black engineers, Latinx engineers, Indigenous engineers, LGBTQ+ engineers, engineers from majority-world countries). About 30% of sliding-scale tuition has gone to applicants in these groups historically. We do not require documentation.
Yes — we process through Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1). We do not store card numbers. We do store name, email, country, and (for invoiced employers) company and billing address. Full privacy policy at yourbusiness.com/privacy.
What you actually get on paper at the end of the cohort, and where it does and doesn't help.
Yes — a printable PDF "Your Business cohort_07 graduate" certificate, plus a verifiable URL on yourbusiness.com that confirms your name and the cohort number.
That said: no graduate has ever told us this mattered to them in a job search. The thing that matters is the three crates on your GitHub. The certificate is decoration; we ship it because cohort participants asked us to.
Most do. We provide a 1-page PDF "course summary" with hour count (~120 hours), syllabus, and instructor credentials. About 60% of cohort participants have gotten the cost reimbursed by their employer this way.
No. We are not an accredited educational institution, we are not affiliated with any university, and we don't pretend otherwise. The credential is what you make of it: the artifacts you ship, the cohort relationships you build, and the depth of Rust you walk away with.
Sure. Most graduates list it under "Education" or "Licenses & certifications" with the cohort number and graduation date. We don't have an official "LinkedIn issuer" badge.
What happens to your access, your code, and your cohort relationships once week 12 is over.
It means the cohort Slack workspace stays open. As of January 2026, the workspace contains every cohort from 01 onwards — about 178 active members across the alumni channels. Cohort_01 alumni still post regularly, mostly in #help-rustc and #jobs.
Yes — alumni keep access indefinitely at alumni.yourbusiness.com. We have not removed any past cohort's content. New cohort sessions are paywalled until you graduate, then become alumni-accessible.
Yes — we offer a $300 discount to repeat alumni. About 6 graduates have taken a second cohort. They tend to focus on whichever artifact was tightest the first time around (usually artifact_03, the embedded one).
Yes, within reason. Vela responds to alumni emails — it's a question of pace, not policy. If you're looking for ongoing dedicated mentorship, the mentor-tier 90-day post-cohort check-in is included. After that, alumni-Slack channels are the main avenue.
Not formally. We don't take placement fees, we don't run a recruiting service. Vela writes referral notes for graduates who ask, and the cohort Slack has a #jobs channel that's reasonably active. About 71% of graduates take a Rust-primary role within 6 months of graduating; that statistic is a side effect, not a core promise.
Email hello@yourbusiness.com or vela@yourbusiness.com. We respond within 24 hours, and we never use a sales sequence. Mention "FAQ" if you noticed your question wasn't covered above — we'll add it.