JavaScript is increasingly popular for developing backend servers, often using the Express library with Node. While many tutorials show using Node/Express with NoSQL databases, like MongoDB, these kind of databases are often not as good for common, relational data requirements. Many projects would benefit from a more scalable, transactional relational database.

However, this leads to developer design decisions: should I write SQL queries directly in my code? Should I use an abstraction layer? Should I use an Object-Relational Mapper?

In this post, we'll explore a few approaches to the same problem. We'll use a tiny application, but develop it for each approach, so you can get an early sense of how it would be to work in these different styles.

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August 28, 2018

No matter where you are in your career, looking for a new job is an incredibly stressful time. It's common to experience feelings of inadequacy, rejection, and general imposter syndrome.

This is a natural consequence of company hiring practices, which typically are engineered to minimize the rate of false positives (e.g. hiring someone unqualified for the job). Knowing this doesn't always ease the pain of not landing that dream job, though.

Even so, it can be helpful to try to zoom out and take a high level, objective look at the job search process. That's what I'd like to do here. My hope that by exploring a model of the job search, you'll be able to more effectively budget your time and more quickly find success.

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August 20, 2018

Daniel came to Rithm School with an impressive background as a university lecturer and researcher. Outside of his interest in coding, his love of cars and driving started at the age of three when he disengaged his family car’s parking brake and caused a traffic accident. Fortunately, his driving record has improved since then! Daniel’s job search is winding down (congratulations!), so he was able to take some time to share more about his experience with us here at Rithm School:

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August 08, 2018

Welcome to Rithm School, prospective students! This post details Frequently Asked Questions we get about the Rithm School interview process as well as key information about the interview itself. If you are looking to get into Rithm in the near future, hopefully this gives you more insight as to how best to prepare and what exactly to expect on your interview date.

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August 01, 2018

We’re ecstatic to report that Rithm School has been officially approved by the Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE). Since 2010, the BPPE has served a regulatory function in California, ensuring that postsecondary institutions are legitimate organizations that meet certain requirements in order to operate within the state. We’ve been working with the BPPE on our approval since our founding in 2016, and this approval shows that Rithm meets the standards for educational quality, integrity, financial stability, and rigor of curriculum as determined by the California agency.

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July 25, 2018

In June, the Python Software Foundation released the newest version of Python,3.7. In this post, we'll look at one of the nicest new features, "data classes".

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July 11, 2018

I've worked with hundreds of budding engineers and mathematicians. And while every student is unique, everyone I've worked with has at least one thing in common: at some point, they've all been stuck on a problem.

I can relate; I've been stuck many times as well! And while it's easy to tell students to persevere, this kind of general advice is rarely helpful. In this post, I'd like to outline a few concrete strategies to turn to when you're stuck on a problem.

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June 22, 2018

This blog post is next chapter of the "Roadmap for Learning How to Code" series for beginners, check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't yet!

In this chapter we are going to learn the fundamentals of web scripting using JavaScript.

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June 13, 2018

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 6th cohort is nearing the end of working on these projects, so we spoke with our students Miranda Howitt and Paula Goyanes to get their perspective on the experience.

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June 05, 2018

As we begin our outcomes period, we’ve started to have one-on-one conversations with our students about how they can be successful in the job search. This part of the program is always the most stressful, but at the same time anxiety can be a powerful motivator. The job search is never easy, but I wanted to outline a couple of rules and dispel some rumors about the job search.

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May 31, 2018