Monthly Deploy: April 2025

Welcome to the Formation Monthly Deploy, our monthly newsletter highlighting achievements, insights, and innovations from across the Formation ecosystem. Whether you're a current Fellow navigating challenges, an Alumni building your career, a Mentor guiding others, or a job hunter considering Formation, this space is designed to keep you connected to your community.

🚀 Recent Launches

It was another exciting month for Formation! Here’s what’s new...

Targeted Mentorship

Weekly benchmarking is key to growth, but we know it can be frustrating to finish a benchmark and think, “Now what?”

That’s why we introduced Targeted Mentorship: a new card that appears in a Fellow's Feed when they don’t pass a benchmark and we have a relevant mentorship session available. Fellows can just RSVP and attend to get focused, actionable feedback that helps them improve and come back stronger next time.

It’s a small change that we hope makes a big difference.

👉 Learn more and check out all our recent releases

Upgraded SD Benchmarking Experience

You asked, and we listened! Many Fellows shared that System Design benchmarks didn’t go far enough in explaining why an answer was incorrect.

So, we’ve moved all System Design benchmarks to the Platform and added instant feedback. Now, when Fellows select an incorrect answer, they’ll get a clear explanation right away. No more digging through resources to figure it out.

In the long term, this move towards on-platform benchmarks will allow us to experiment with new and innovative question types and provide more level-specific feedback and insights to help you understand how your performance squares with expectations at your experience level.

👉 Learn more and check out all our recent releases

Product Advocates

Thanks to Fellows great feedback and enthusiasm around the new AI chat tools in the System Design challenge, we’re launching an initiative to keep the momentum going! 🎉 

As we continue improving ✨ Nova’s ✨ capabilities to better support our Fellows, we want to open up more space for insights and ideas.

Fellows who become Product Advocates will have a direct say in how our product evolves.

🎉 Placement Celebrations

We're thrilled to celebrate a few of the latest placements at Formation. Help us congratulate these talented Fellows on their new roles!

John Chen→ Hashicorp

John’s insights: "I don't think job hunting is ever fun. But what's amazing about it is we're all in a network that's in it together, and we have so much opportunity to lean on one another here. I'm really grateful that I got to connect with so many talented people during my time here at Formation, and I've genuinely learned a lot from talking to fellows & mentors alike. I've had so many sessions run over time because I wanted to hear more from others and how they were doing. I left inspired that day and was able to inch out a few more of those LeetCode/System Design problems. Trust yourself. I've had many times in the program where I've struggled because I didn't really know when I would get hired. You'll get a lot of suggestions, and ultimately, you'll have to pick the ones you like and continue to grow and shape yourself. Do just that, and believe in yourself, seriously. It just takes time and diligence."

Arjun Kaul → Amazon

Arjun’s insights:  "You just have to stick with it. There will be moments that'll feel discouraging, but they will also occur regularly. These can serve as a powerful excuse to "take a break," but the only way to get that concept or algorithm through your head or to make a process intuitive is to stick with it. It's okay to not know when or how you'll accomplish your goals, doubt is fine; keep taking the next step."

Lighthouse Award

Lighthouse Awards are given to Mentors who positively impact Fellows' weeks. This month, we're featuring Clint Hall!

“Clint is a super welcoming mentor who truly cares about helping people ace their behavioral interviews. He gives great feedback and has played a huge role in helping me prepare."

🌎 Engineering Tip from Daniel Tomko

The goal of Formation is to improve your skill at solving problems, and this takes a lot of dedicated practice across a full spectrum of topics and difficulty levels. Along this process, there will be moments for everyone when we feel stuck on a problem or topic. 

In this age of AI, it’s very tempting to use these tools to make progress, and you definitely should, but be aware that while asking AI for a solution may help you solve a problem quickly, it is unlikely to help you make progress on improving your own problem-solving skill. 

Here are some great ways to use AI as a constructive part of your learning:

• Ask a very narrow question as a way to get a hint or get feedback on an idea without risking the answer giving too much away.
• Give AI your code or solution and ask for feedback. Don’t take this at face value, but critically consider any suggestions you receive. Do you agree or disagree?
• Ask AI to refactor and improve your code. Compare the results with your original version. What changes do you like and dislike? Why?
• Have AI give you a buggy solution to a problem you have seen before. Can you find and fix the bugs?

See you next month!

That wraps up our update! We're so happy to see our community doing well—with Fellows landing great jobs and mentors making such a positive impact.

As things keep changing in tech, remember you've got Formation behind you. Keep pushing forward, celebrate your wins (big and small), and support each other! Have questions or something cool to share? Just reach out — we'd love to hear from you!

Until next month,

The Formation Team

This blog is adapted from our monthly newsletter, The Monthly Deploy. If you're not yet part of the Formation community but would also like these updates directly in your inbox, subscribe to our blog.