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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.
Something we see many students doing quite frequently when getting started, is returning from a function too early. When you first learn about functions, you’ll learn that the return keyword is used to provide output from a function. However, when a function encounters the return keyword, that function will end. See if you can spot what’s wrong with this function:
function sumOddValues(arr) { var total = 0; for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) { if (arr[i] % 2 !== 0) { total += arr[i]; } return total; } }
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.
While researching bootcamp options, Katie was drawn to the environment at Rithm School, particularly the small class sizes and individual attention from instructors.
Katie talks more about her experience in an interview with SwitchUp. She also offers her advice for students, and explains how the skills she learned at Rithm School will be used in her new position as a Software Engineer at ClassPass.
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.
There are definitely a few common qualities that seem to be relatively common among successful students, in programming or any other technical discipline. Here are my top four.
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.
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.
What soft skills can you improve on that actually matter?
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.
Focus on quality, not quantity
When I first decided I wanted to learn how to code, I tried to tackle all languages and technologies at once. I knew that I needed to learn JavaScript, but I was also fascinated by mobile and backend development. I spent hours learning PHP and JavaScript, watching Objective C tutorials, and building small web and mobile applications.
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.
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.
Neither of these extremes totally captures the reality; the truth is more complicated. While I was certainly surprised to hear about these schools winding down, the challenges they described in their public statements definitely resonated.
In this post, I'd like to dig into one of the biggest challenges I've seen discussed. It's tied to one of Silicon Valley's favorite buzzwords, but is also frequently at odds with high-quality education. That word is scale.
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.