Capstone Program
Capstone
Launch Your Career
Duration: 4 - 7+ months
Instructor-led, Team-based
The Capstone Program is an optional, admissions-based, and final phase for students who have completed the Core Curriculum. The goal of the Capstone Program is to give students an intense finishing experience that results in a career-launching job. Because the end goal of Capstone is very ambitious, it requires in total 4 to 7+ months of full-time focus, and possibly even longer. The first 16 weeks will be synchronous classroom instruction Monday-Friday all day; after that, there will be a 1-3+ month Career Search process. To participate in Capstone, students need to complete the Core Curriculum with high marks. It's not uncommon for Capstone participants to call it the hardest thing they've ever done. The projects, graduates, and salaries coming out of Capstone are industry leading and rival those at top-tier universities. See the Results & Outcomes page for salaries and average duration to accepted offer.
The Capstone Program is a transition away from Mastery-Based Learning with the goal of applying already-mastered fundamentals to higher level concepts. We call this Just in Time Learning.
Capstone will cover all relevant topics that top employers demand, including the following (not a comprehensive list):
Capstone Project
Besides covering the above topics, we will spend a significant amount of time on the Capstone Project. The Capstone Project is modeled after a Master's thesis or a PhD dissertation. They are research projects meant to force participants to dive deeply into a narrow problem domain. There are no project templates from which to choose and every Capstone project will be a unique research project. It's common for participants to read books, watch videos, read whitepapers and published research, and even reach out to subject matter experts in the domain. The goal is to review all pertinent literature in a domain so that at the end of the process, Capstone participants themselves become subject matter experts in that domain. The role of the Capstone Instructor and Capstone Project Mentors is to provide guidance, but Capstone participants earn everything themselves based on their own work and research. Only when you have a superb team can this type of research-oriented project be undertaken, and this is why we are only able to do this after the Core Curriculum.
Capstone Project Mentors
During the Capstone Project phase, each team will be assigned working software engineers as mentors. These mentors work at industry-leading companies and will meet with you periodically to help provide guidance on the research and the project. All mentors were themselves Capstone graduates, so not only will they be able to offer guidance and insight based on their work experience, they will also be able to do so based on their own Capstone experience. The Capstone Project Mentors are an additional layer of support specifically for the Capstone Project phase on top of the normal Capstone Instructor(s). Below are some of our mentors (shown in random order).
















No Upfront Cost
Other than a small down payment, we do not collect any fees upfront to participate in Capstone. The Capstone fee is calculated based on an Income Sharing Agreement (ISA), which as of this writing, is 18% of your first year salary or $18k, whichever is higher. Please note that while we do not foresee any upcoming changes, we reserve the right to change this number at any point (until you sign the ISA contract). We collect a small down payment that goes towards the total fee, and you pay us the remainder of the Capstone fee after you start collecting paychecks.
The Launch School ISA only looks at base salary and doesn't include bonuses or equity compensation. Raises, too, won't affect the total as we are only looking at base salary in the offer letter. This is the lowest cost ISA being offered by any company, which means we have the industry's best results at the lowest cost.
Requirements
To participate in the Capstone program, you should understand that:
- We're incentivized to help you compete for a top job at the best company possible, and your goal should be the same.
- You must be able to learn full-time, often during evenings and weekends. Time commitment will be a minimum of 45 to 60 hours/week.
- You must be prepared to work really, really hard.
Performance Requirements
- You must have completed and mastered all the fundamental materials in the Launch School Core Curriculum, and you must have done well on all or vast majority of the assessments.
- You must be available full-time for the entire duration of Capstone, including the Career Search phase. In its entirety, it could last 4-7+ months.
- You must have passed all assessments within the last 18 months. If completion of an assessment has been over 18 months, then you have to retake that assessment.
- You must have demonstrated excellence in technical proficiency throughout the Core Curriculum.
- You must have demonstrated excellence in professionalism in all your interactions with everyone at Launch School.
Location Requirements
- You must be legally able to work in the United States (US citizen or Permanent Resident).
- You must reside in the United States.
- We have preferences for certain cities, but we are also able to take on remote-only participants. Make sure to note the salary differences between city-specific and remote salaries in the Results and Outcomes page.
We would especially like to encourage residents of the following cities to apply to Capstone: NYC, SFBA (San Fran/Bay Area), Austin, Boston, Chicago, Portland, Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle. If your city isn't listed above and you've done well on the assessments, we can work with you on a remote-only job hunt.
If you're not a resident of the US but would still like to participate in Capstone, see the FAQ questions at the bottom of this page.
Logistics
There are three Capstone cohorts throughout the year: Spring, Summer, and Fall. The spring cohort typically starts in mid-January, summer in mid-May, and the fall cohort in early September. The cohort finalizes a couple of months before the official start date. Capstone participants must finish the Core Curriculum at least 6 weeks before the cohort start date in order to complete the Capstone preparatory work.
If you're seriously considering Capstone, it's imperative that you speak with an instructor when you're at approximately course 210-225 range (if you are beyond course 225 and are interested in Capstone but haven't spoken to an instructor, please do so now). Most applicants to Capstone are known to the admissions team many months in advance, and the cohort starts to form about 2 months prior to the cohort start date. You should be nearing the finish of the Core Curriculum about 1 to 2 months prior to the cohort start date to have a chance to participate in that cohort. This includes retaking any expired assessments.
The Capstone application is at the end of the Core Curriculum. For further inquiries regarding Capstone, please email hello@launchschool.com (but please read the FAQ at the bottom of this page first).
Admission Preferences
In general, we're looking for the following attributes:
- You have completed all of the Core Curriculum.
- You have excelled on all the assessments.
- You're actively looking for an engineering job.
- You can make finding a job your top priority.
- You can make Capstone a full-time activity (45-60 hours/week).
- You must be legally able to work and reside in the US (see FAQ for exceptions).
Along with the above, we're also looking for people who:
- ... have demonstrated extremely high work ethic.
- ... are a pleasure to work with and be around.
- ... have high character and integrity.
- ... are professional and courteous.
- ... know how to study and learn things deeply.
- ... are well spoken and can communicate professionally.
- ... have superior writing ability.
- ... are extremely positive.
To increase your chances of being admitted, produce artifacts that can convince us of the above attributes. We can determine a lot of this from your assessments since most people have been at Launch School for months or years by the time they apply. But if you have great writing samples or recordings of you speaking in public, we want to see them. We also look at well-received blog posts or threads/comments that you've contributed over the years in the Launch School community and in the courses.
Capstone Testimonials
These are students who have completed the entire Launch School curriculum, from the Core Curriculum through Capstone. The entire process typically lasts for 1-2+ years. Read their stories to get a feel for their journey and transformation.


















































Capstone Projects
As part of the Capstone Program, students organize into teams to work on a Capstone Project. Below are some of the engineering projects that have come out of Capstone.

Fjord is an open-source framework that allows end users to receive Kafka streaming data in real-time.

Retrospect is an observability tool that allows you to record back-end activity in an easily searchable manner replacing the process of pinging servers and searching logs.

Tapestry is an open source orchestration framework for the deployment of user entity data pipelines.

Guardrail is an open source tool that generates regression tests for microservices using captured HTTP traffic.

Pioneer is a self-hosted feature flag management tool which lets users manage the rollout of new features in a deployed application.

Pilot is an open-source multi-cloud framework that provisions an internal PaaS with a workflow-agnostic build deploy and release pipeline.

Gander is an open-source solution for deploying isolated ephemeral apps based on your pull requests.

Tacklebox is an open-source serverless framework that offers webhooks as a service.

Jolt is a lightweight open-source framework that builds and deploys JAMstack applications with serverless functions.

Ekko is an open-source framework allowing developers to easily add realtime infrastructure and in-transit message processing to web applications.

Dendro is an open-source serverless monitoring framework for small distributed applications.

Beekeeper is an open-source Backend as a Service (BaaS) built to handle traffic from one-off events. It is an NPM package that creates a CLI tool to spin up AWS services which make up a virtual waiting room.

Haven is an open-source developer tool for managing your application secrets. Built using Node.js and Amazon Web Services it is easy to set up and integrate with your Node applications. It protects your secrets through encryption access control and injection at runtime.

Stagehand is a drop-in solution that provides review apps for modern frontend applications. Using AWS GitHub Actions and some Stagehand client-side code we set-up deploy manage and teardown review apps for your frontend application.

Campion is a free open-source tool to help protect your site or service from dependency failure. It is an edge-based circuit breaking middleware that utilizes an automatic fail fast mechanism when a dependency is down.

Satellite is an open-source GraphQL backend-as-a-service (BaaS). It lets teams easily deploy and manage GraphQL backends for web applications.

River is a drop-in real-time service for web applications. It provides an easy-to-deploy and ready-to-scale solution for existing applications with real-time needs.

Maestro is an open-source easy-to-use framework for deploying serverless workflows using Node.js and AWS Step Functions. Using Maestro aids development not only in the initial phase of a project but throughout the ongoing maintenance as well.

Jade is a framework that makes it simple to deploy and maintain JAMstack applications. Jade abstracts away the time and complexity of provisioning services and writing backend code related to the underlying infrastructure so developers can focus on building their applications.

A blazing fast serverless video transcoding pipeline that can be easily deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS)


An open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) that exposes an API for common backend functionality like database persistence and user authentication.

An open-source framework for deploying and managing stream processing pipelines using Kafka for users who want to set up a streaming pipeline with minimal hassle.
An open source Heroku-like and self-hosted platform as a service built with a multi-tenant architecture using Docker and Docker Swarm.

A web-native computational notebook designed for sharing executable code alongside stylized notes. Supports multiple-languages webhooks and API calls.

A centralized logging management framework that allows for easy setup configuration and deployment using Kafka and InfluxDB

A progressive web application (PWA) compliant offline-first database for web-based mobile-first applications

An open source easy-to-use data pipeline orchestration and monitoring framework for small applications that deploys to the GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

A serverless framework for consuming webhooks at scale that deploys on AWS (Amazon Web Services)

An open-source browser-based REPL for Ruby JavaScript and Python that enables real-time collaboration between users.

A highly scalable query optimized hosted prefix search service for building autocomplete suggestions

An easy-to-deploy event capturing framework built with NodeJS Apache Kafka TimescaleDB and PipelineDB

A serverless framework that makes it quick and easy to get small applications up and running using Node.js and AWS
An open-source real-time collaborative text editor for the browser built from scratch in JavaScript

A decentralized (p2p) cloud storage system built atop Kademlia DHT that enforces data integrity privacy and availability through proofs of retrievability redundancy and encryption with cryptocurrency-based incentive scheme

A JavaScript framework and in-browser database adapter for building offline-first collaborative web apps



Open Source Watch gauges the activity of open-source projects on Github and finds out who the heroes of open-source are.
Allograph is a framework for rapidly developing GraphQL servers. Co-created by Ting Chou and Rachel Minto, Allograph provides a flexible and convenient way to create a GraphQL server for your existing or new application, and it was designed to solve the most common problems encountered when creating a GraphQL server.
CorvoStore is an in-memory key-value store with complex data types in the value space and optional persistence. It was inspired by Redis, and built by Peter Reznick and Preeti Viswanathan.
Ouroboros is a peer-to-peer snake game that was created to experiment with fast-paced, real-time, direct peer-to-peer data exchange over the WebRTC data channel.
Lodge is an open-source self-managed logging framework for small, distributed applications. Lodge allows users to ship, transform, store, visualize, and monitor their logs.
Plinko.js is a real-time, multiplayer, physics-based game using only JavaScript and the basic features of a browser. The clients and authoritative server communicate over WebSockets, and the game employ snapshots and extrapolation to synchronize game state across nodes.

Horus generates, stores, and visualizes telemetry data so you can always see the health of your application - in real time.
Monsoon is an open-source, serverless framework for running browser-based load tests in the cloud.

Aria is a tool which allows users to simplify the creation, configuration, and analysis of canary deployments.
Able is an npm package that allows you to quickly and easily deploy A/B tests to Cloudflare Pages applications using Cloudflare Edge Workers with the capability to launch an optional analytics dashboard to your custom domain powered by AWS and open source Umami software.

Synapse is an open-source tool to build, deploy, and monitor a GraphQL Gateway, enabling you to put your legacy APIs behind a single GraphQL endpoint.

Bastion is a customizable, open-source Backend-as-a-Service that gets deployed to the cloud with AWS, allowing a front-end developer to quickly set up a backend while maintaining control of the code and infrastructure.

Chimera is an open-source tool for performing automated canary deployments of containerized microservices, allowing software development teams to safely and easily deploy new versions of their code by taking advantage of the features provided by their existing service mesh.

Sentinel is an open-source PaaS that provides built-in support for canary deployments.



Tailslide is an open-source feature flag framework for easier code deployment with automated failure protection.
Qmantis is an open-source, easy to set up observability solution for GraphQL APIs, enabling seamless analysis of slow requests, errors, resolver performance, and identification of backend bottlenecks.
Kuri is an open-source Dead-Letter Queue-as-a-Service for distributed applications deployed on an AWS infrastructure.

Conifer is an open-source framework that simplifies parallelizing Cypress tests on AWS infrastructure.

Arroyo is a lightweight framework that granularly rehydrates logs kept in cloud storage.
Fána is an open-source feature flagging platform specializing in audience targeting to enable developers to build confidence in their feature releases while testing in production.



Armada is an open-source tool that automates the configuration and deployment of development environments in the cloud.

Triage is an open source consumer proxy that enables parallelism and provides a dead letter store.

Nexus is an open-source framework that generates an instant GraphQL server from multiple data sources.


Constellation is an open-source, serverless, framework that simplifies geographically distributed API load testing.


Bard is an open source application for recording, replaying and analyzing how users interact with your website.

Skopos is an open-source API monitoring tool designed for testing multi-step API workflows in sequence and independent workflows in parallel.
Capstone FAQ
If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us at hello@launchschool.com.