Things are moving fast! As we approach the new year, we’d like to give you an inside look at what’s been going on at Rithm.
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 our students, Greg, took some time out of his day to chat with us:
Hey, you’re almost done! How are things going?
Things are going well. I’m having a lot of fun with the projects we’ve been working on the past few weeks. It’s cool being able to apply what we learned.
What project are you currently working on? Can you tell me about it?
Right now I’m working on an app called Local Concert Radio. It uses two API’s: Bandsintown and Spotify. The user enters a city, state, radius around city to search, and a date range. It gives you back an embedded Spotify playlist with tracks from all the artists playing within your selected location and search dates.
I chose this project because it’s something I would like to use but doesn’t currently exist. I enjoy going to concerts and love discovering new music. Before when I wanted to see some live music, I’d have to go to bandsintown or local venue websites to look up the bands, then search each individual artist on Spotify or youtube. It can be pretty time consuming. With this app I can just stream the music from every band that’s playing whatever date I select, and if there’s a track I like I can just add it to my interested events, and then decide on which band I want to see that night.
What has been the most enjoyable thing you’ve learned so far?
Hard to pick one thing… I enjoy Python. If that’s too broad of an answer, then I’d say working with API’s. I have access to vast amounts of data and get to choose what I want to do with it, how I want to organize it, and use multiple API’s to make something unique with all that information (like my local concert radio app). Like the bandsintown API gave me access to just concert dates and times, and the Spotify API gave me access to look up artists and grab tracks from those artists to make a playlist. I was able to make something unique each of those apps by themselves wasn't able to do.
If you could give one piece of advice to the incoming cohort, what would it be?
Definitely finish all your pre-work and practice as much as possible (I like doing Codewars problems for practice). The class moves very quickly, and it’s pretty easy to fall behind. Also, if you don’t understand something, don’t be afraid to ask or be embarrassed that you don’t know the answer. Elie, Tim, and Matt are all extremely patient and never make you feel rushed while you’re trying to understand something you’re confused on.
Their journey isn’t over, but we’re glad to have helped this first cohort transition to web development!
We still have a few spots left for our January cohort. If you or anyone you know wants to get into web development, send them our way.
If you want to read more about us, we recently got featured by Switchup!
