This week is an exciting time in the life of our cohort and Rithm School as a whole. Our students are wrapping up their assigned work as developers for our company partnerships and transitioning into the next stage of the process: the outcomes, job-search portion. For the first time, Rithm School will be doing this work in-house and officially taking over the full cohort experience.

We’ve gradually built toward this path over the past six months by listening to prior experiences of Rithm alumni, taking into account industry-wide recruiting experiences and approaches, and also advising previous cohorts as they pursue new roles, interview processes, negotiations, and offers. Each of these conversations and experiences has provided us with a greater sense of how we can best equip our students to excel in their job search.

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May 22, 2018

Here at Rithm, we teach both Javascript and Python. Most of our course is taught in Javascript, but two weeks focus on Python, particularly focusing on building web application servers for the backend.

During the period, we teach Flask, a Python framework for building web applications. Out of the box, Flask includes features such as:

• handlers for "requests" to the server (such as when a browser requests a web page)
• generating HTML (or other types of responses) using a server-side templating language
• support for cookies and sessions (common features for applications)
• support for writing tests of an application

Flask is a popular library for this kind of development, but it's not the dominant or most featured library in this space. Django is used widely in industry, and has far more features out of the box (including things like deeply built-in support for connecting to databases, an "Object Relational Mapper" for querying and updating those databases, a system for handling user registration/login/authentication, and more).

Given that Django is also very popular and even more featureful, why do we teach Flask at Rithm School?

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May 16, 2018

We talk to a lot of potential students here at Rithm. Many of them are incredibly passionate about learning how to code, and value Rithm's unique program, including our focus on small class sizes and exposure to real-world projects.

Even so, there's a fair amount of competition in our space, and potential students are right to shop around before finding the right fit. And while a lot of the value we think we add is hard to quantify, for some students the choice of which school to attend really boils down to a numbers game. For those people, I've cooked up a little tool to help you make a decision about which school to attend (or whether you should attend one at all). Let's take a look!

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April 25, 2018

This blog post is the sequel to Part 1.

In this chapter we are going to dive into CSS so we can learn the principles of how to layout things on a web page and understand how to build layouts!

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April 10, 2018

Joel Burton has recently joined the Rithm Team as part of our instruction team, 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 Joel, his role on the team and his advice to all aspiring web developers.

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March 27, 2018

Anna-Brit came to Rithm School (and graduated last month!) after dabbling in self-taught coding for years. Anna-Brit took some time from their current job search to share more about their experience with us at Rithm, advice for students, and their perspective on their company project with Groupmuse:

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March 19, 2018

Recently, we've decided to grow the services we offer to students. One of the most significant changes involves our transition to bring the outcomes component of the curriculum in-house. More on that here if you’re interested.

With this transition comes a great sense of excitement, namely with our ability to take ownership around the entirety of the student experience. We’re actively shaping the outcomes portion to have even more continuity with the technical instruction and ultimately prepare our students earlier, throughout Rithm’s first ten weeks, to more seamlessly transition into their company projects and job search. That said, another component of the process that we find exciting is in crafting curriculum. And this week’s blog post is aimed at highlighting a section of that curriculum: outreach.

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February 28, 2018

The most important tool for developers is that which lets us author code: the development environment. At Rithm School, we think it’s essential for all of our students to be on the same page as our instructors in using the same development environment. Thus, we are going to recommend using Visual Studio Code for our current and future students. Here’s why.

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February 20, 2018

When you're working closely with students every day, you get really good at debugging. I pretty much see bugs all day everyday. Some are standard issues that I came across when I was learning the material myself, while others are really strange edge cases I may never have discovered on my own.

Helping students squash bugs is great, but what's even better is teaching them the skills they need to squash bugs on their own. In this post, I'd like to highlight a few of the techniques you can use to more effectively debug your code, and how to ask the right questions to help you track down the source of your problem.

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February 06, 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 5th cohort is nearing the end of working on these projects, so we spoke with our students Allie Antkowiak and Stephen Carrera to get their perspective on the experience.

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January 31, 2018