Nicolas Sadirac – Keynote Speaker

Nicolas Sadirac is a computer engineer with a strong knowledge of international hacking.
He has worked for 20 years in the IT security field.

Passionate about pedagogy, Nicolas Sadirac co-founded the school “Epitech” in 1999.
More recently, he co-founded the innovative coding school “42” with Xavier Niel and has been the director of the school from 2013 to 2018.

As a former student in Computer Science from the best universities (University of California, Stanford University, HEC), Nicolas Sadirac has always been pursuing his quest for excellence along his career.

After graduating he became an IT Security engineer of “Epita” in 1992, a school specialized in training engineers in computer intelligence.
Working in the education field for many years, Nicolas wanted to shake up the current educational system and innovate. He ardently defended the “active pedagogy” still little developed in France at that time.

Nicolas Sadirac started from the observation that students get greater satisfaction when they “learn by doing” and obtain increased performance thus creating a virtuous circle. This principle of “active pedagogy” carried the Nicolas Sadirac’s ambitious projects that ensued.

Nicolas Sadirac started with the creation of a new department within the school “Epita” itself, before creating the school “Epitech” in 1999 of which he took the direction later.

“Epitech” embodied excellence and performance for learning computer science in France, and quickly became a reference among students and large companies in the sector.

With the ambition of spotting the future talents of computing without excluding anyone, Nicolas decided to co-create with Xavier Niel a free school to give everyone a chance to succeed. The selection is based solely on the skills of the future students.

It is also a collective and peer-to-peer school, reflecting the concept of the collaborative web which has no limit to its development.

This school was just like Nicolas Sadirac: a free and disruptive electron.

More recently, Nicolas Sadirac launched the “Web@cademie” based on the innovative pedagogy of “Epitech” which allows young people to train in the digital professions, thus responding to economic realities and needs.