Holberton Cheatsheets
March 2026
The problem
The school I attend, Holberton School, uses an American project-based learning method. There are no formal lessons, no textbooks, no teacher explaining the chapter. Every Monday a new project drops, and it's due Friday. We have to figure everything out by ourselves: searching the internet, reading documentation, piecing things together from scattered sources. At some point I realized that every student in my class was losing time searching for the same things. There was no central place to find what we needed, nothing built for our curriculum, nothing that spoke our language.
My approach
For each chapter, I built a cheatsheet grouping the key concepts of that chapter in one place. To handle student requests efficiently, I configured an AI with the exact cheatsheet format and structure. When a student asks for a new topic, I feed the request to the AI and deploy the output to my VPS via SSH. Creation time went from hours to minutes.
The POC
A growing library of cheatsheets covering our entire first year curriculum: C, Git, Docker, Python, Security and more. A gamification system with XP and difficulty levels. A request form so students can ask for new topics directly.
What I took away
Precision of audience matters more than quality of the tool. I didn't build for students in general, I built for my cohort, with their exact curriculum and their specific needs. That's why the cheatsheets are still being used today.
What I'd do in prod
I'd build a full agentic pipeline: an AI agent that reads incoming emails via a mail API (Gmail, Mailgun), extracts the requested topic, generates the cheatsheet autonomously in the exact same structure as the others using the Claude API, validates the format, and deploys automatically via a simple SSH command to my VPS. Zero human intervention, from student request to live page.