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Apply now for our July 31st full-time course! Applications Due July 7th.Shriya Nevatia is a current student at Rithm who previously worked at two small startups in Community & Operations. She has a Computer Science degree from Tufts and is very involved in women in tech communities, including the Spectra hackathon and Ladies Storm Hackathons Facebook group. In her spare time she enjoys dancing, reading, painting, and exploring San Francisco.
Here at Rithm School, we have seen value in providing scholarships to highly motivated web development students. The practice of offering scholarships is not only a way to support learners working with tight budgets, but also a method of engaging and motivating nontraditional students of all backgrounds and experience levels who are interested in breaking into tech.
Self-driving cars, voice activated home automation, text translation, automated style transfer: Applications for deep learning seem to be everywhere nowadays. It has proven to be a powerful, effective tool for solving very difficult problems. And, in this humble author's opinion, we are just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with the technology.
But wait a minute, what is deep learning? If you're new to programming, or even if you're an experienced programmer who is new to machine learning, you may be a little lost when it comes to deep learning. In fact, until recently, I felt a little lost myself.
Angelina Davis has recently joined the Rithm Team as our Admissions Manager, supporting students throughout the application and admissions process as they decide to take the leap into full-stack web development. Here we learn a little bit more about Angelina, her role on the team and the secret to her guacamole recipe.
At Rithm, we believe that one of the best ways to prepare students for jobs as web developers is by giving them opportunities to work on real-world projects. Working on personal projects can be fun, but working in a team or on an existing codebase gives students insights into the day-to-day challenges of a developer that they might not otherwise learn.
Last month, our students spent several weeks working on two company projects: one in partnership with the BAND Lab at UCSF, and another with a venture capital firm in San Francisco. Towards the end of these projects, we spoke with student Torre Taylor to get his perspective on the experience.
Part of being a strong developer means having the willingness and the drive to perpetually continue learning. In an ever-evolving industry where the rate of iteration and innovation is high, you will need the ability to teach yourself new conventions, design patterns, and technologies to stay relevant in a competitive marketplace.
Does this mean that as a newer coder you should opt for a self-directed program? Would a program with less oversight from instructors teach you to be a stronger and more self-reliant developer? My answer is: absolutely not.
I have to be honest. In the past, I did not like going to conferences. I found them boring and not too productive. The main reason for all this dislike was the type of conference I used to go to. I started out my career in the academic world. I was in a computer science PhD program at Georgia Tech, and I can safely say that I did not find the conferences that I attended to be very helpful. I "dropped out" of grad school with a masters and then became a software engineer at Amazon. Amazon did not have a culture of sending developers to conferences, so again, I avoided them.
Andrew Mundy is a late twenty-something somehow living in beautiful San Francisco. He likes bikes, jazz, and his gin martini stirred, with a twist. You can catch him in the wild either basking in Dolores or frequenting local watering holes.
Andrew is also a student in Rithm School’s current full-time web development program. Here, Andrew talks about his experience thus far and what to expect from the bootcamp experience.
So many amazing things happened on International Women’s Day that it was difficult to keep track, in a good way. For me, this about sums it up, but here’s a list of other awesome things we did across the country and the world.
To keep up the momentum of uplifting and empowering women in tech during Women’s History Month, I wanted to highlight a few organizations who have already made major moves to expand access, equality, and inclusion in the space. Read on to get inspired, motivated, and involved in your community.
I’ve been a student for most of my life. By the time I completed my Ph.D. in 2012, I’d spent a decade as a student in higher education (four years as an undergraduate, and 6 years as a graduate student).
Now I teach at a program that trains people for web development careers in just a few months. While I’m no longer in academia, I’m also skeptical of claims that coding schools reduce the need for college graduates with computer science degrees. Both options have a lot to offer, but they’re fundamentally different and serve different needs. In this post, I’d like to share some of my own experiences teaching and learning in both environments.
The ecosystem around programming is filled with tools intended to make writing code easier. And indeed, developing a workflow that makes sense to you is essential to becoming a productive programmer and problem-solver.
Using the right tool for the job can help illuminate blocks when you're solving a problem, and suggest ways to a solution. But if you use the wrong tool, or don't know how to use the many tools available, your work can come grinding to a halt. This brings us to one of our most important strategies: using tools strategically.
We've talked about how to initially approach a problem by understanding what it's asking and exploring concrete examples. We've also discussed developing a plan to solve the problem, by breaking it down into smaller and more manageable pieces.
But planning is sometimes easier said than done. After you've broken a problem down, you may find that one of the components is quite difficult. For particularly challenging problems, you may not even know how to break down the problem at all. In these situations, it may help to turn to our next problem solving strategy: solve a simpler problem.
In this day and age, everyone is trying to learn how to code. Between a 27% increase in job outlook (through 2024) and everything becoming automated, having programming know-how has never been more valuable. From a professional standpoint, you increase your value by knowing how to program, as companies are realizing the benefits of having their employees know how to manipulate basic code. From a personal standpoint, you gain the ability to make side projects become a reality.
While there are plenty of benefits to learning how to code, we’ve noticed there isn’t a clear roadmap for getting there. The majority of what’s out there only covers the basics or requires payment.
Below we list what we believe to be the best bang-for-buck resources available.
As it turns out, not everyone who starts a boot camp will finish. Last year, I graduated from a six-month immersive program. My cohort began at eighteen students and dropped to eleven. By the last week, only five of us consistently showed up to class. That kind of attrition is unusual, but those unique circumstances really highlighted how much of an impact class size can have on student experience.
Our first cohort is finishing up their projects at Rithm before they move on our program’s third stage: Outco. We’ve seen first-hand the work, time, and effort these guys have put into absorbing everything that’s been thrown at them. From learning theory to working on real-world projects, we’re extremely proud of everything they’ve accomplished thus far.
One of the most common questions we get from prospective students is, “how do I prepare for the technical interview?” In this post, we’ll outline what we look for and what you need know in order to be successful. But first, let’s make sure you understand how the interview works.
Once you have a clear understanding of the problem at hand and have convinced yourself of what the result should be in a few specific cases, it's time to think about a more general approach. Very often looking at specific examples is enough to generate a roadmap for a solution. But if you find yourself still struggling to come up with a solution, here's a strategy that can help.
In How To Solve It, mathematician George Polya breaks the problem-solving process down into four pieces: understanding the problem, making a plan, executing the plan, and reflecting on the solution. We've already talked about understanding the problem, but the next parts of this process could benefit from a little unpacking.
Whether you're building a new feature for an application with millions of users, or in the middle of a whiteboard interview, it's essential that you have a plan before you start coding. But planning often requires forethought and insight that comes from experience. Because of this, beginners often feel trapped in a sort of catch-22: they need experience in order to formulate plans effectively, but they need to plan effectively in order to solve problems and gain experience!
One of the biggest challenges for the aspiring web developer has little to do with the details of programming. As an engineer, you'll be tasked with understanding and solving problems on a regular basis; regardless of the specific technologies you use, then, strong problem-solving ability is critical.
And while your problem-solving skills will certainly develop naturally as you write code, it's worth being a bit more intentional, and think about problem-solving strategies in general. In this series, we'll take a look at some common problem-solving strategies, and adapt them to the life of a web developer. (Note: many of these strategies are adapted from George Polya, whose book How To Solve It is a great resource for anyone who wants to become a better problem solver.)
You’ve heard that we are currently in the midst of a coding “revolution.” You’ve seen the job market prediction for the next twenty years. You’re looking to grow yourself to develop a more valuable skill set.
And that has brought you here.
Every developer's workflow is slightly different. And because people can have such strong opinions about the best text editor, web browser, and tooling, finding the workflow that works for you isn't always easy.
However, once you've found the tools that are right for you, and know how to use those tools successfully, the rate at which you can program can increase tremendously. And after working with a number of students, we've got our own opinions about tools a beginning developer should absolutely have. In this post, we'd like to offer up the technologies that we think are the most helpful, as well as instructions on how to install those tools (or access them, in the even that they're already installed). Please note: the installation process assumes that you are using a Mac with OSX.
Over the past few years, JavaScript has exploded in popularity. According to StackOverflow's 2016 developer survey, JavaScript is the most popular technology for full-stack, front-end, and back-end developers, and isn't showing any signs of losing momentum. So how did we get here, and what does it mean for someone who wants to learn to code? In this article, we'll trace back some of the history, project a little bit into the future, and offer up some reasons why, if you're interested in programming, you should give JavaScript a shot.
We've been talking to a number of potential students over the past few weeks, and have had some great conversations with students from a variety of backgrounds. As we've been having these conversations, though, a challenge has emerged. With so many resources available for people who want to learn on their own, and with the emergence of short courses like First Step Coding aimed at people who are on the fence about a career change into web development, people are coming to us from different backgrounds and with varying levels of experience. So how can we try to level that playing field, and assess who would be a good fit for our program as objectively as possible?
One of the nice things about working at a coding school compared to a more traditional educational environment is that we don't need to grapple with some of the headier philosophical questions surrounding the purpose of education. For us, the purpose is clear: get students job-ready in 17 weeks.
With that clarity of purpose also comes a straightforward metric to measure our own success: are students getting jobs? If students leave our program and can find and retain jobs as developers, that's a pretty clear signal that we're on the right track.
Hi! Welcome to the Rithm blog. We're a team of passionate educators and developers who have decided to open a web development school in San Francisco.
To the casual observer, this may seem like a strange choice. After all, there are already plenty of options for the aspiring web developer. Do some quick research and you'll find all kinds of programs: 12-week programs, 24-week programs, 36-week programs, and more; full-time programs and part-time programs; online programs and in-person programs. The list goes on, and is particularly long in the Bay Area. So why throw our collective hats in the ring?