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Three years ago, our co-founder and lead instructor Tim, wrote a wonderful post on 5 Topics to Master Before Learning React. Since then, React has evolved tremendously and has only continued to become more and more popular. In this post, we’ll revisit some of the essential JavaScript features you should be comfortable with before learning new frameworks, especially the most recent major change in React, React Hooks.
Most programmers with more than a year or two of experience will know more than one programming language. This happens often because they joined a new work team or company that was using a different tech stack. Separately from work project requirements, learning a new language can be one of the most helpful things in your development career. New languages can introduce you to different ways to express problems, different tooling, and even different ways to think in code. You'll often hear advice on what others think is a hot new *must learn* language, but before jumping immediately to that, it can be helpful to think about what you want to get from a new language.
If you’re currently learning how to code, or have recently graduated from a bootcamp and are job searching, it’s natural to have anxiety surrounding hiring and retention in the software engineering industry. The spread of Covid-19 has undoubtedly turned everyone’s life upside down (here at Rithm, we had to quickly adjust our class to a live-over-Zoom delivery). Whether or not your employer is a software company, it depends on software.The nature of that software is always evolving, which is good news for the software engineering community.
Choosing your first coding language is an important decision, the more time you spend with a language the more comfortable you will feel writing it. It’s a good idea to focus your learning on a language that is not only in demand for today’s job market, but also expected to be in demand in the future.
George came to Rithm School by way of Baltimore after dabbling in a handful of personal projects and finding himself wanting to join a more structured learning environment. George took some time to share more about their experience with us at Rithm, and to give some advice for anyone looking to transition into web development!
In the wake of massive protests around the country in response to continued acts of racial violence and murder against individuals like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade (among so many others), there's been a noticeable uptick in book sales about racism in America. At the time of this writing, the top four books on Amazon's bestseller list are White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo, So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, and the books How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, both by Ibram X. Kendi.
JavaScript is constantly evolving! Since 2015, the language has added new features every year including some of our favorites like the rest and spread operator, destructuring and async/await.
Networking is the single most effective way to land a job, yet it is often a major source of struggle for many students. As a way to jump-start the networking process, we provide every student with a mentor. At Rithm, our mentors are mostly alumni who are now employed as software engineers at a wide range of companies from small startups to big well-known tech companies such as Dropbox, Pinterest, Twitter, and more. Mentors offer help and advice throughout the program and into the job search. Due to our small class sizes, we know our mentors and students quite well and are able to match students with alumni who compliment their personality and/or career goals.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Rithm School has temporarily transitioned our program to a live remote model. While we love in-person education and we think there is a lot of value in being physically there to instruct our students, we will continue to observe the recommendations and protocols established by the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and local health departments in regard to congregating in person. Our transition to running fully online has been very successful, with little to no changes to our student success. Read more about how we plan to continue, and the small things we do plan to change (including scholarships!) until we can safely transition back to in-person learning.
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 code base gives students insights into the day-to-day challenges of a developer that they might not otherwise learn. Our 14th cohort is wrapping up their company projects; one of them is building an internal app for inputting and holding client information for a law firm focused on helping disenfranchised communities receive fair wages and safe working environments from their employers. The other being LiveStack, which allows professional creators to monetize their work through live-streamed video events. We asked a few of our students to share their experience working together with us:
It’s important to define a successful job search based on the process and not just the outcome, especially during these quarantine times. Focus on creating and maintaining momentum. Creating a process and consistently following it will ultimately land you a job. Yes, even now!
San Francisco residents are fortunate enough to live in the middle of one of the most dynamic tech landscapes in the world. There you can find people with top technical skills that land amazing jobs and command top salaries, and all it takes is a few months of training to get started on the same path. Coding bootcamps such as San Francisco’s Rithm School aim to make a tech education accessible to anyone who wants to get one. (Link to original post).
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Rithm School has temporarily transitioned our program to a fully remote model. We love in person education and we think there is a lot of value in being physically there to explain something when you get stuck. However, given the current state of things, an in person experience is not currently possible. These past few weeks, we have worked hard to make the online experience as close as possible to the in person experience that has been so successful. So here are some frequently asked questions about how our program currently works remotely.
At the end of 2019, sitting down as a company and reviewing the year behind us, we decided that increasing the number of women enrolled in our program was something worth prioritizing. In an effort to do so, we decided to host an event series targeted at women with no previous programming experience.
For years, it's become increasingly common for developers to get to work from home a few days a week or even full-time, as members of "virtual" teams. During the current novel coronavirus pandemic, many tech firms are adopting WFH policies to allow their staff to practice "social distancing", where people limit their contact to fewer people, to help reduce the spread the COVID-19 virus. Many of our readers may be at companies already doing this or will adopt this soon.
Learning to code is a lot like learning an instrument. Before you can play a song, you need to learn how to make the notes, then you can put the notes together to make a song. Before attempting whiteboarding challenges it's important to first learn the basic fundamentals. Regardless of the language you are learning you will need to master the following:
Have you been excitedly sending out your polished post-bootcamp resume and cover letter, but are disappointed with the response rate? Maybe you have sent out over 100 applications but you have only received automated rejection emails? Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common, but it’s easily remedied by using the cold email strategy:
So you've been practicing JavaScript for a while, and you're feeling confident in your problem solving skills. You land an interview, and you spend hours solving technical challenges. But when you get in the room with the interviewer, your confidence evaporates. You clam up, your nerves get the best of you, and you walk out of the interview feeling shaken.
Have you ever been curious if you have what it takes to become a software engineer? We recently launched a 6-part event series for women, to answer exactly that. Our lead instructor Alissa has been manning the helm of this initiative, and took some time to craft this blog post to identify the top 8 questions successful developers considered before learning to code:
Over the next 6 weeks, Rithm School is offering a new format of full-day coding workshops, available both in-person and remotely. In this blog post, workshop instructor Michael Hueter will give a sneak preview of a topic covered the upcoming Intro to Modern React workshop.