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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this blog post series, we will build a concrete roadmap to help you get started understanding the basics of programming. More importantly, we’ll help you figure out if coding is something you really want to do!
The difference between a computer science degree versus a coding bootcamp is something I often get asked about. I have put quite a bit of thought into it, since I have a second B.S. in Computer Science via OSU’s online professional CS program and have been teaching at Rithm for nearly 6 months.
Happy 2018! We're excited to continue training exceptional developers in the coming year.
Sean Mangosing is a current student at Rithm School who is making the transition from working as a web designer for a small design firm in Emeryville to full-stack web development. Outside of his rigorous hours at Rithm, you can find Sean spending time with his family at their home in Point Richmond, listening to a wide range of music on Spotify, or getting some good old fashioned line dancing in at a country bar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.