{ The Rithm Blog. }

New Year, New Outcomes

We would like to officially announce that starting with our February 2018 cohort, Rithm School will be overseeing our student placements and outcomes in-house with our very own Career Services Manager! We are very excited about this development. However, it means we will no longer be working with Outco to help place our students. This was a decision we arrived at very carefully, and in the name of transparency we would like to share our process and plans with the community.

December 11, 2017

Five Tips for Landing a Job as a Bootcamp Grad

During my tenure as a tech lead at Emsi, I had the opportunity to screen and interview a few dozen candidates for junior front-end engineering positions, and I looked at quite a few bootcamp grad applications. I want to be candid up front: I had a slight bias towards people with computer science degrees from universities (I also had one myself) over bootcamp graduates. The CS degree indicated they had spent several years thinking about challenging technical problems and could probably pick up frontend skills quickly -- even though the bootcamp grads, in theory, would be better-prepared for immediate frontend / web development type work. I was also concerned that bootcamp grads might be able to make web apps look pretty, but when it came to whiteboarding out a new algorithm (seldom as that might happen on the job), they might be all but useless compared to a CS major.

December 05, 2017

Our Newest Scholarship, Diversity, and How Rithm Supports Your Coding Education

We have seen the value in providing scholarships to highly motivated web development students over the course of our tenure. The first official scholarship we offered was in late 2016, where we awarded 50% of tuition costs to mission-driven individuals with a positive impact on their community. Since then we have offered many partial scholarships based on merit and need, and one full Diversity Scholarship.

November 28, 2017

Why Pay For School?

At Rithm, we recently released three new online courses on our website: Intermediate React.js, Flask and SQL Fundamentals, and Intermediate Flask. No other coding school that we’re aware of has released so much of its curriculum online at absolutely no cost. We also recently released a course on Udemy that covers a lot of intermediate and advanced material for aspiring web developers.

November 21, 2017

This Holiday Season, Give Back to Tech for Good

It’s November already, can you believe it? The year is almost over, and we all know what that means: the holidays are here! A joyful stretch of ugly sweaters, raucous company parties, big family gatherings and probably way too much food.

November 07, 2017

Meet The Instructor: Michael Hueter

Michael Hueter recently made the move from Idaho to sunny San Francisco to join us as a lead instructor here at Rithm School. When he’s not busy acclimating to his new city or working with students, he enjoys hiking, backpacking and playing the bass, guitar and piano.

October 24, 2017

Student Spotlight: Adele Landers

Adele Landers is a current student at Rithm School who worked as a pharmacist for the past 6 years. She graduated from the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a Doctor of Pharmacy. The first time she dabbled with coding in middle school, she built a website to showcase her pet chickens! Outside of her rigorous hours at Rithm, she enjoys skiing, camping and reading.

October 17, 2017

Do Web Developers Need to be Good at Math?

People often ask me about how I transitioned into a career in technology. When they find out I’m a former academic who transitioned from a career as a mathematician, I’ll often get asked whether my background made the transition easier and to what extent I draw from my mathematical training when I’m coding. For any aspiring web developers out there, I’d like to answer this question in two parts.

October 10, 2017

Top 4 JavaScript Mistakes That Beginners Make

When you first start learning JavaScript, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by all of the concepts and terms thrown at you! In this post, we’ll be going over four common mistakes that beginners make when learning JavaScript.

September 27, 2017

Interview With An Alumni: Katie Krieger

Katie came to Rithm School with an impressive background in Environmental Engineering. While she loved the field, Katie felt limited by her skillset and wanted to focus more on her interest in technology. She began to consider software engineering as a career that could allow for more hands-on problem solving.

September 19, 2017

What Makes a Successful Student?

When prospective students come in for an interview at Rithm, I’m sometimes asked if I’ve noticed any qualities that distinguish particularly successful students. While our admissions process does a fairly good job of assessing students’ preparedness - both technically and behaviorally - there are certain qualities that are hard to suss out over a couple of relatively short interviews.

September 05, 2017

5 Topics To Master Before Learning React

Welcome! If you're reading this, you have probably been told that React is the best thing since the internet. Or maybe you're a little React curious: you're coming from another front-end framework like Ember, Backbone, or Angular and wondering if there may be a better way. Perhaps you have thousands of lines of messy code written in jQuery and you know that there must be a better way. Unfortunately, this article will not be making grand statements about how React is the answer to all of your problems. However, you will be getting some suggestions and resources that will help you to build a solid foundation before you dive into the world of React development.

August 29, 2017

Soft Skills That Actually Matter In Tech

According to CareerBuilder, 77% of employers value soft skills just as much as hard skills. You can be writing some of the best code out there, but it will amount to little if you don’t work well with others. There are tons of people interviewing for boot camps and joining the masses in their post-graduation job search. Having strong communication and people skills are what’s going to reward you that winning competitive edge.

August 22, 2017

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Learned To Code

As a self-taught developer, I can easily remember feeling overwhelmed by how and where to begin learning how to code. Below are some lessons that I’ve taken away from my early days learning how to code and subsequent years teaching hundreds of students across SF.

August 15, 2017

Rithm School Scholarship Winner Interview: Michelle Huynh

This past spring, Rithm School offered our first ever Diversity Scholarship to our community of aspiring web developers. We received many impressive applications, and after careful consideration, Michelle Huynh was awarded a full scholarship to our web development training program in San Francisco. Here, Michelle tells us more about her background and journey in web development, how she has set herself up for success in the field, and what she hopes to do next.

August 08, 2017

A Bootcamp Bubble?

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the recent high-profile closing of two coding schools: Dev Bootcamp and The Iron Yard. Depending on where you get your news, the back-to-back shuttering of these schools is either an anomaly in an otherwise healthy industry, or it's the first indication that the industry Dev Bootcamp pioneered is now ending.

August 01, 2017

Student Interview: Julia Hazer on 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. Towards the end of these projects, we spoke with student Julia Hazer to get her perspective on the experience.

July 18, 2017

Five Tips to Get Into Rithm

It’s no secret that getting into a coding school is highly competitive. The most common question I receive from potential students is, "What can I do to stand out during the admissions process?" Here at Rithm, we have a particularly tailored admissions process to snag one of our coveted 15 seats, which can undoubtedly be nerve-wracking when applying.

July 11, 2017

Problem Solving Strategies: Look Back and Refactor

Welcome to Rithm's series on problem-solving strategies. If you're just joining us, you may want to start at the beginning. Here's a list of the articles we've written: