BITSHALA is a 24-week, build-first bootcamp in HSR Layout, Bengaluru — and online across India. Three tracks, nine shipped projects, code review from working engineers. Pay upfront, or pay only after you're placed.
BITSHALA started in 2021 in a two-room office above a dosa counter on 27th Main. Two engineers were tired of interviewing candidates who had watched 300 hours of video and could not read a stack trace. So they built the opposite of a video course: a room where you write code every day, break things, and defend your choices in front of someone who has shipped to production.
Five years later the room is bigger and the format has not changed. You build. Someone senior tears it apart. You rebuild. That is the whole method.
Roughly 70% of a BITSHALA week is you writing, debugging and reviewing code. Lectures are short, recorded and exist to unblock you — not to fill a timetable.
Nine projects go live on a real URL with a real database, a README and a walkthrough video. Your portfolio is not a folder of screenshots.
Instead of grades you get line-by-line review from a working engineer. Twice a week, on your own pull requests, with the comment history kept for you to reread.
Roughly one in four applicants gets a seat. Not because of pedigree — the entry task is a small logic problem and a 20-minute conversation — but because a cohort only works when everyone can keep pace.
Language fundamentals, version control, the terminal, and how to read documentation without panicking. Everyone ends this phase at the same floor.
Weeks 1–6The real machinery of your track — frameworks, databases, pipelines or infrastructure. Two projects, both reviewed and deployed.
Weeks 7–14Design under constraints: caching, queues, observability, cost. This is the phase interviewers actually probe, and most self-taught paths skip it.
Weeks 15–20A four-week capstone with a real brief, then mock interviews, resume surgery and introductions to our hiring partner network.
Weeks 21–24Pick a track, drag the scrubber, open any week. You will see the topics, the thing you ship that week, and the exact tools you touch. This is the same document your mentor works from.
This is a real JavaScript runtime, not a screenshot. Type in the editor, hit Run, and the output pane shows exactly what your console.log printed. Three warm-up exercises are below — the same style we use in the entry test.
Write a function sum(a, b) that returns the sum of two numbers. Then press Check answer — we call your function with four hidden test pairs.
Most bootcamps show you the income-share number and hide the total. We show both, side by side, with the cap. Drag your expected salary and the maths updates live — including the case where paying upfront is simply cheaper for you.
15% of your monthly gross, for up to 24 payments.
Paid in three instalments across the 24 weeks. Nothing after that, whatever you earn.
Nothing until you are placed above ₹4.5 LPA. Capped, and it pauses if you are between jobs.
ALL FIGURES EXCLUDE 18% GST
The full curriculum, recorded sessions and the project briefs. You set the pace, we do not chase you.
The full 24-week programme in HSR Layout or online-live, with twice-weekly review and the whole hiring track.
The live cohort, with nothing to pay while you study. You pay a share of income only once you are earning.
Each cohort caps at 30 learners so the 1:6 mentor ratio holds. Pick one to add it to your enquiry — the bar at the bottom carries it to WhatsApp with everything filled in.
Seat counts shown are illustrative for this demo and refresh when a cohort closes.
Every mentor at BITSHALA is a practising engineer with production experience — they are not full-time trainers. We deliberately do not print employer logos on this page: mentors teach here in a personal capacity, and no company endorses this programme.
Full-stack lead
Spent most of his career on high-throughput payment systems. Runs the week 15–20 systems block and is famous inside BITSHALA for the sentence “show me the query plan”.
Data engineering
Builds warehouses that finance teams actually trust. Teaches modelling from the messy end — you will start from a broken CSV, not a clean tutorial dataset.
Cloud & DevOps
Has carried a pager for a decade. Designed our week-19 on-call simulation, where a service breaks at 11 PM and the cohort has to find it with logs alone.
Frontend craft
Runs the interface weeks. Every project has to pass her accessibility pass — keyboard-only, contrast, and a real screen-reader run before it is called done.
Interview coach
Has sat on more than 400 hiring panels. Runs the mock-interview block in weeks 21–24 and writes the brutally specific feedback notes learners keep quoting years later.
Product engineering
Owns the capstone briefs. She writes them the way real product requests arrive — vague, contradictory, and due sooner than you would like.
No bootcamp can guarantee an offer, and anyone who does is selling you something. What we can commit to is the machinery: a portfolio worth reading, six mock interviews, resume surgery, and warm introductions to companies that have hired from us before.
Two DSA, two system design, two behavioural — each recorded with written feedback.
Startups and product teams across Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad and remote-first firms.
Every one deployed on a live URL with a README and a three-minute walkthrough.
Placement help does not stop at graduation day. It runs for 18 months after.
We rewrite your resume with you, line by line, in a 90-minute session — then run it past two people who screen resumes for a living.
Where a hiring manager in our network is open, we introduce you directly with a note about what you built. A referral beats a portal application every time.
A live role-play of the offer call, including the awkward parts. Most first-job candidates leave money on the table simply by answering too fast.
Every Saturday, 10 AM to 2 PM, the HSR Layout floor is open to anyone in Bengaluru who wants to build something. Bring a laptop and a half-finished idea. Mentors float. Filter coffee is on us.
Get the Saturday address on WhatsAppCapstones and mid-programme builds from recent cohorts. Filter by track. Project briefs are written by mentors from real problems they have hit at work.
Sector 2, HSR Layout — eight minutes from Silk Board on a good day, which is admittedly a strong assumption. Forty desks, three whiteboard walls, two review rooms, a quiet corner for people who think better alone, and a kitchen that runs on chai and stubbornness.
I had done three online courses and still could not build anything end to end. Week 9 here I deployed a thing with a real database and a login, and something clicked. The difference is that someone reads your code and tells you why it is bad.
The on-call simulation in week 19 was the most useful four hours of my career so far. A service went down at 11 PM, we had logs and nothing else, and I learned more about debugging in that night than in two years of tutorials.
I took the pay-after-placement plan because I could not put down three lakh rupees. What convinced me was that they showed me the total on the cap, in writing, before I signed. Nobody else would give me that number.
Coming from a mechanical background I assumed I would be the slowest in the room. The foundations phase is genuinely built for that. By week 6 I was not behind anyone, and by week 14 I was reviewing someone else's pull request.
The honest part is that they told me in week 3 that my capstone idea was too big and made me cut it in half. That was annoying and completely correct. The smaller thing actually shipped, and it is what I showed in every interview.
Quotes are illustrative sample content written for this design demonstration.
Walk in on any weekday, sit at the back of a session, and talk to learners without a salesperson in the room. If you are outside Bengaluru, we will do the same over a video call.
3rd Floor, Aranya Court, 27th Main Road, Sector 2, HSR Layout, Bengaluru 560102. Landmark: above the Corner House end of 27th Main, opposite the BDA park gate.
