Meet the 2020 Graduates of our iOS & Android Bootcamps!
Our iOS & Android Bootcamps have wrapped — time to celebrate the graduates! See how the Bootcamps worked and meet the first RW Bootcamp graduating class. By Tiffani Randolph.
Congratulations to the very first graduating class of RW Bootcamps!
It’s been an exciting and intense past three months as we ran our very first online bootcamps, one for iOS, and one for Android.
The bootcamps were a massive success, with students going from having zero mobile development experience, all the way up to the level of a junior mobile developer.
We’re so proud of what the students were able to accomplish by the end of the bootcamp. Here’s a demo video showcasing some of their capstone projects:
Keep reading to learn more about what happened in these bootcamps, highlights from the sessions, meet our graduating class and more, including what to expect next!
About Our iOS & Android Bootcamps
Our bootcamp was designed for people who could use a leg up into the mobile development world, and who want to take advantage of any extra time they have to help advance their career.
We opened up applications planning to accept 40 students total and were overwhelmed with over 500 applications in just one week!
It was tough narrowing down this list with so many great applicants, but we felt it was important to keep class sizes small so that everybody could benefit from one-to-one help and so they could build community with their fellow classmates.
We had so many awesome applications, so we ended up accepting 50 students total (from 17 different countries) and our first RW Bootcamp class was born.
How Did the RW Bootcamp Work?
The students met for two live 1-hour sessions every week led by our mentors, watched videos from our iOS and Android learning paths, and worked through tons of coding exercises as homework.
Each Bootcamp had four breakout groups to allow for smaller class sizes. Team Kittens, Mushrooms, Santas Elves and Cacti.
Here’s a diagram illustrating the structure of a week in the RW Bootcamp:
And that continued for twelve straight weeks.
It wasn’t just these live sessions twice a week though, our students did so much more:
- Watched 8-10 hours videos weekly.
- Spent 12-16 hours on average every week on homework assignments.
- Met for 30 hours total in live sessions each week.
- Pushed over 1600 commits in total.
- Wrote nearly 40 thousand files and thousands of lines of code.
- Created 44 final capstone projects total showcasing new apps created from scratch!
What Curriculum Was Covered in Our Android Bootcamp?
- Week 1: Basic Kotlin
- Week 2: Advanced Kotlin
- Week 3: Android Studio, Android, XML, Views, Activities
- Week 4: Multiple Activities, Intents, AndroidX, Dialogs, FAB, SharedPreferences Activity results
- Week 5: SharedPreferences, Files, SQL, Room, MVP/MVVM
- Week 6: Threading, Concurrency, Thread Switching, Main Thread, Coroutines (basics)
- Week 7: Networking, Network status/info, HTTP, REST, JSON, Retrofit
- Week 8: WorkManager, DownloadManager, Services, AsyncTask, JobScheduler, AlarmManager
- Week 9: Coroutines (in depth), Testing with Mockito, Jetpack (some components)
- Week 10: MVVM, Unit Tests, Data Binding
- Week 11: Dependency Injection, Koin, Dependency Management
- Week 12: Capstone project
- Week 13: Graduation week
All of these Android Bootcamp sessions were recorded and are available for you to watch here.
What Curriculum Was Covered in Our iOS Bootcamp?
- Week 1: Controls, Outlets, UIKit
- Week 2: Swift Fundamentals
- Week 3: Swift Functions & Types
- Week 4: Layout, Testing, and Debugging
- Week 5: Table Views
- Week 6: Collection Views
- Week 7: SwiftUI
- Week 8: Saving Data
- Week 9: Networking & Design Patterns
- Week 10: Concurrency & Memory Management
- Week 11: Animation, Xcode Tips & Tricks
- Week 12: Capstone project!
- Week 13: Graduation week
All of these iOS Bootcamp sessions were recorded and are available for you to watch here.
Constant Interaction in RW Chat
The students and mentors kept in touch in between sessions and throughout the entire bootcamp with special channels on our public RW Chat Discord server.
There were main channels for each of the Android and iOS bootcamps for general announcements and questions, as well as separate smaller chats for the individual breakout groups.
These chats kept busy as everybody asked questions about homework, new concepts being learned, offered support and encouragement to each other and everything in between!
RW Chat allowed students and mentors to stay connected throughout the week for help, questions and encouragement!
RW Chat allowed students and mentors to stay connected throughout the week for help, questions and encouragement!
Interview Mock Sessions and Tips
In our final week of bootcamp, we also ran special interview prep sessions for all of the students!
iOS special guest Lea Marolt Sonnenschein and Android mentor Kevin Moore reviewed interview structures, sample questions/answers and tips with the students.
iOS special guest Lea Marolt Sonnenschein and Android mentor Kevin Moore reviewed interview structures, sample questions/answers and tips with the students.
In these sessions, students received help tips for the interview process, including sample questions, breakout sessions where they got the chance to practice them with fellow students, and then wrapped up with reviewing the best answers to the interview questions.
Students came away from these sessions with concrete interview skills, and increased confidence for starting the interview process!
Special Thanks to Everyone Involved
These bootcamps wouldn’t have been possible without the amazing mentors and special guests who volunteered their time!
Bootcamp Mentors
Each bootcamp was assigned four mentors each, and in each session students would break out into smaller, focused groups of 10 students per mentor.
These mentors volunteered extraordinary amounts of time running the live sessions, creating homework and challenges, arranging special guests and sessions and building an awesome community between our students.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you Bootcamp mentors!
Thank you Android Mentors: Filip Babić (lead mentor), Luka Kordic, Fuad Kamal and Jenn Bailey!
Thank you Android Mentors: Filip Babić (lead mentor), Luka Kordic, Fuad Kamal and Jenn Bailey!
Thank you iOS Mentors: Jeff Rames (lead mentor), Audrey Tam, Bhagat Singh and Jay Strawn!
Thank you iOS Mentors: Jeff Rames (lead mentor), Audrey Tam, Bhagat Singh and Jay Strawn!
Special Guests
We also had many special guests who attended sessions to give presentations to the students on various topics:
Thank you to our special guest speakers who gave our students presentations during the bootcamp!
Thank you to our special guest speakers who gave our students presentations during the bootcamp!
- Allen Whearry: From sales professional to full time iOS developer
- Gio Lodi: Unit testing
- Tim Condon: API Development with Vapor
- Lea Marolt Sonnenschein: Interviewing tips and sample questions & answers
- Gemma Barlow: Best practices for job searchers
- Jinju Jang: UI/UX Design in mobile
- Margaryta Chepiga: Landing her first iOS job and the importance of community engagement
- Matt Gallagher: App architecture
And we had two students who actually gave special presentations during the bootcamp as well!
- Shruti Sharma: A talk about Objective-C
- Abir Hasan Zoha: A demo of accessibility in iOS
- Will Matthews: BullsEyeGame with generics
- Abir Hasan Zoha & Islombek Khasanov: Working as a team on GitHub
Finally, we’d like to thank all of the video instructors whose courses were used throughout the bootcamp.
Thank you to all of the video course instructors whose courses were used during this bootcamp!
Thank you to all of the video course instructors whose courses were used during this bootcamp!
It was a full team effort to run these bootcamps and we are forever grateful to every single person who contributed their time to our very first bootcamps!