{ The Rithm Blog. }

Student Interview: Pair Programming And Company Projects

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 12th cohort is wrapping up their company projects with Numero, a modern financial platform that Members of Congress, Senate, and Presidential candidates rely on to manage the $4.5 billion in payment processing, accounting, and compliance for their political campaigns. Gabe and Joanna have been working as a pair, as well have Andrew and Chantal. We asked them to share their experience working together with us:

September 03, 2019

Getting Acquainted With A Production Code Base

At Rithm School, company projects have started. If you’re not familiar with company projects, it’s a three week portion of our curriculum where students work with instructors and outside companies on a real production code base. It can be a challenging time for both students and instructors as we’re all working together on problems and code that we’ve never seen before. But the challenge is definitely worth while. It’s a great tool for teaching good coding practices and how to work with a team. By the end of the three weeks, the students have a lot more confidence that they can contribute to a production code base.

June 18, 2019

Staff Spotlight - Zach DeRossette, Career Coach

We’re excited to have Zach DeRossette join the Rithm team as our Career Coach! You can find him meeting with and supporting our students and alum throughout their job search. Here we learn a little bit more about Zach, his role on the team and his advice to job seekers (including spend less time applying online!)

May 22, 2019

Student Interview: Lena Ryoo on Company Projects

May 15, 2019

Debugging Like a Scientist

When you're first learning how to code, error messages can be intimidating. Because of this, beginners sometimes ignore error messages entirely. Instead, they will favor more of a "guess-and-check" approach to fixing bugs. While we don't encourage this approach at Rithm, we recognize that in the context of solving small, isolated problems, it can be successful. But when it comes to working on larger applications, professional engineers need a more sophisticated set of tools to fix problems.

April 29, 2019

The Benefits of Code Reviews

Code reviews can be a common practice for many developers: another engineer, often more experienced with the language, library, or code base being used, meets with the author-developer to read through their work, ask questions, and provide suggestions for improvement.

March 29, 2019

Three More JavaScript Mistakes That Beginners Make

Despite its best intentions, JavaScript is not the most beginner friendly language. After working with thousands of beginners, here are a few common mistakes we see with applicants and students.

March 07, 2019

Alumni Spotlight: Miranda Howitt

Before joining us for Rithm’s 6th cohort, Miranda worked as an executive assistant and office manager in the tech industry, after getting her BA in Psychology from NYU. A San Francisco native, she also is a volleyball player and a self-identified graphic novel enthusiast. Miranda took some time to discuss her job search, her experience at Rithm, and her steadfast friendship with Whiskey the dog.

February 12, 2019

Alumni Spotlight: Kristen Lingwood

February 06, 2019

Alumni Spotlight: Tyler Ketron

Before joining us for Rithm’s 7th cohort, Tyler Ketron got his hands dirty (and sometimes still misses it!) as a hydrogeologist at government agencies and a consulting firm. When he’s not busy at his new job as a Front End Engineer, you can find Tyler competitively weight lifting, raising chickens in his backyard, or flexing his classical musician skills with the oboe and piano. Luckily, we were able to catch some time to sit down with Tyler and discuss his journey from growing up in a small town in Tennessee to becoming a software engineer.

January 30, 2019

Avoiding Burnout

In May of 2018, Blind (an anonymous community work app) released a survey that revealed that close to 60 percent of employees surveyed considered themselves burned out. With over 11,000 respondents from the biggest tech companies in the game, it verified what those in the trenches were already well-aware of: burnout in tech is ubiquitous.

January 09, 2019

Student Interview: Sarah + Zac on Company Projects

December 18, 2018

A New Tuition Option: We Make Money Only When You Do

When we first started Rithm in 2016, we made a bet. We believed that there would be people willing to pay a bit more for an immersive coding program that placed the quality of the education and student experience first.

December 11, 2018

MongoDB is Easy

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database provider. Here at Rithm School we used to teach MongoDB in conjunction with Node.js. Recently, however, we have switched our Node.js curriculum to utilize PostgreSQL. For a taste of what that looks like, check out Joel's blog post or our free online curriculum on relational databases with Node/Express.

December 06, 2018

Meet The Instructor: Alissa Renz

We are elated to have Alissa Renz join the Rithm instruction team! You can find her teaching and supporting students throughout the course as they take the leap into full-stack web development. Here we learn a little bit more about Alissa, her role on the team and her advice to all aspiring web developers (starting with, "you got this!")

November 14, 2018

Error Handling in Express

Express is a flexible framework for building server-side JavaScript web servers using Node. We teach it here at Rithm School, and students often enjoy getting a chance to use their JavaScript skills on both the front-end and back-end, using Express to build API servers.

November 05, 2018

Four Tips for Moving Faster as a Developer

When lecturing, I'm commonly asked how I move so quickly between windows, between tabs and in applications like Terminal or the browser. In this post, I’d like to briefly highlight four essential tips and tricks for becoming a faster and more productive developer.

October 16, 2018

Five Tips to Manage the Emotional Side of a Coding Program

A lot of people who decide to come like a program like Rithm's spend a lot of time trying to prepare as much as possible for the technical curriculum. We'll often get e-mails from accepted students before the program starts asking what else they can learn or study so that they'll be ahead of the curve when the program begins.

October 08, 2018

Does Emotional Intelligence Get You Paid More in Tech?

Until recently, many people thought the sole source of success boiled down to their intelligence (IQ). However, research has been emerging since the late 90’s that there is a definitive link between career success and emotional intelligence (EQ). Intelligence is your ability to learn, which remains the same whether you’re 15 or 50 years old. EQ is not a steadfast metric, it’s a flexible set of skills that can be learned and improved with practice. You may be saying to yourself “but my technical skills will speak for themselves - why should I care about this?”

October 03, 2018

Post-Outcomes Blog: Top 3 Insights for Job-Seekers

Last Friday, Rithm School's seventh cohort finished the outcomes section of the course and graduated! 🎉 🎓 This was Rithm's second iteration of our in-house outcomes program, during which we had quite a few industry guest speakers come speak with students. Our guest speakers hailed from a wide range of companies from small startups like Desmos to massive corporations like Netflix. Most had substantial experience interviewing candidates, and all had sound advice to share with our students about the job search process. In this article, I have compiled what I believe to be the top three job search insights based on that experience.

September 27, 2018

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