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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.
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.
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!
Like many of our blog posts, this is just one opinion and one way of going about things. We believe it’s most rewarding to be able to build things that you can see in the browser and easily share with others, so the first place to start with that is by learning some HTML and CSS. You’d be surprised how much you can get done with just a little bit of markup and styling on the page!
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.
Disclaimer: the opinions expressed in this blog are based on my experience with Rithm School and Oregon State University, respectively.
Happy 2018! We're excited to continue training exceptional developers in the coming year.
Part of being a great developer involves continued learning. And there's no better time to make some commitments to your own growth than the new year. With that in mind, here are some ideas for new year's resolutions that can help you become an even better engineer in 2018.
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.
On the tails of our first scholarship, we wanted to honor future women developers alongside Women’s History Month. In March of 2017 we awarded partial scholarships to all women who were accepted to our third cohort. We were thrilled with the results of this scholarship initiative, as it resulted in a classroom comprised of 60% innovative and brilliant women.