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.

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December 05, 2017

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.

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November 28, 2017

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.

At the same time, we continue to offer a full-time paid immersive program here in San Francisco. To some, these two activities -- offering free curriculum online along with paid courses in-person -- can seem incompatible. Why charge for classes when so much of the content being taught is free?

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November 21, 2017

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.

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November 07, 2017

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.

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October 24, 2017

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.

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October 17, 2017

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.

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October 10, 2017

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.

1. Using the ‘return’ keyword too soon

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;
  }
}

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September 27, 2017

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.

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September 19, 2017

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.

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September 05, 2017