Software Built by Residents

Building Solutions To Real Problems

Codesmith's emphasis on creating open-source software and building products that benefit the software engineering community provides residents with real-world problem-solving and decision-making experiences that they can speak to during their job search. Open Source Products are significant software engineering accomplishments that are built within a team environment, using agile methodology that replicates engineering-team best practices.

Projects Residents Build

Solo Project

The Solo Project is the first project of the immersive program and is also the only project residents do solo. It is a time when residents connect everything the program has covered thus far. By building a project from idea to functioning minimum viable product, residents cement the core curriculum concepts they’ve been learning the first four weeks. Residents will usually focus on 1-2 technologies, integrate APIs, and dive deep into connecting the various parts of an application.

What I Built with Laurence Diarra

Scratch/Iteration Project

The Scratch and Iteration Projects allow residents to experience development as a team. These projects focus on learning team development processes such as GitHub for teams, SCRUM and agile methodologies, as well as working with more complex technologies. These projects are more advanced, require more research and result in a finished product at production level.

Open Source Product

The Open Source Product is the most important component of your education at Codesmith. The software created and launched by Codesmith grads have received thousands of GitHub stars, been featured on the main stage at world-renowned conferences, and are used daily in development. For many, this is the reason they choose to attend Codesmith Immersive Programs.

Reinforcement Project

The final project residents work on is designed to help focus on the upcoming job search by encouraging them to build with contemporary technology, or a highly used framework or library, to prepare for technical screenings. This project is a chance for residents to dive deep into a technology they aim to work with after Codesmith, especially if it was not part of the stack they worked in for their Open Source Products.

OSP Process

Ideate

Residents spend their time doing self-directed research on technologies that are interesting to them, and collaborating to hone their ideas.

Each team will develop 3 fully fleshed-out ideas for potential products (either original or iteration).

The Instruction Team provides support and feedback on their ideas and scope of the product.

Build

Residents engage in sophisticated and complex problem-solving to build out an MVP and stretch features for their product.

Teams follow Agile development workflow and practice regular code review, pair programming, and feedback within the group.

Instruction team members provide engineering mentorship throughout the process.

Launch

Formally launching products is the culmination of residents’ hard work

Each team receives a stipend for expenses related to launching their product.

Teams develop an outreach strategy, publish articles, engage with the Open Source community, and receive feedback from users and industry leaders.

Original vs Iteration Products

Original OSPs

Codesmith residents are encouraged to ideate on the most complex issues faced by engineers today and develop open source software that provides solutions to them. Through this process, open source product development teams work with some of the most contemporary and exciting technology in the industry, and grow immensely as autonomous problem solvers and collaborative teammates.

Iteration OSPs

As technology evolves, so too must the tools that support it. Some open source product development teams choose to focus on iterating upon an existing product built by previous teams. In this process, teams truly acquire valuable skills by inheriting an existing production level codebase, fixing bugs within it, updating UI, and adding substantial features following industry standards and best practices.

Types of Open Source Products

Tools & Integrations

Developer tools and integrations are an integral part of the development lifecycle for professional engineers. Codesmith residents have created tools and integrations to assist with many aspects of the development process, from debugging, code prototyping, testing, and even CI/CD processes.

Frameworks & Libraries

Frameworks and libraries are pre-built modules or systems that are available for download on popular software registries like NPM, and are some of the most commonly used tools in the industry today. Frameworks and libraries created by Codesmith residents solve complex challenges in cutting-edge technologies like Node, Deno, React, and GraphQL.

Tools & Integrations Built by Residents

Reactime is a Chrome extension created to help developers optimize and debug their React applications. Reactime remedies the increasingly difficult pain point of managing state by making the development environment more accessible and comfortable.

Check out Reactime

REACTIME

OverVue is a prototyping tool that allows developers to dynamically create and visualize a Vue application, implementing a real-time intuitive tree display of component hierarchy and a live-generated code preview. This provides experienced Vue developers with a tool that facilitates seamless prototyping and architecting their applications, and allows new developers to onboard a Vue application quickly and efficiently.

Check out OverVue

OVERVUE

ReacType is a rapid prototyping tool that allows users to visualize their application architecture dynamically, with a drag-and-drop canvas display and an interactive, real-time component code preview that can be exported as a React app. The beauty of ReacType is that you can use it in parallel with create-react-app or other boilerplate code generators. Instead of exporting an entire application from ReacType, you can simply export your components into an existing project.

Check out ReacType

REACTYPE

Using Spearmint, developers can easily generate React/Redux/Hooks/Context/Endpoint tests by using our user-friendly GUI. It dynamically converts user inputs into executable Jest test code by using DOM query selectors provided by the Testing Library. From its inception, Spearmint has sought to provide a simpler way to write tests for React Applications. Our user-friendly GUI allows developers to dynamically generate test files that can be directly exported into a project directory without writing a single line of code!

Check out Spearmint

SPEARMINT

If you’ve deployed a software application, monitoring is necessary for gaining insight into its usage and to prevent/diagnose failures. The growing trend towards microservice architecture and gRPC means there is a need for monitoring tools that support these technologies. Popular solutions either require haphazardly combining multiple open-source tools or paying for expensive monitoring software. Chronos bridges this gap, as an open-source tool for Node.js that can be used to instrument, collect, and visualize monitoring data.

Check out Chronos

CHRONOS

Docketeer provides a simple interface to manage Docker resources & visualize both host and container metric data. As a containerized application, it can be deployed alongside your application cluster with hardly any effort. Docketeer’s goal is to be a centralized management system where Docker command functionality, library viewing, and container health monitoring are all found in one place, overall simplifying and enhancing the process of the users container management environment.

Check out Docketeer

DOCKETEER

Swell is a cross-platform desktop app that is meant to be used alongside a developer’s existing environment to test your API. The market leaders in this space (Postman and Insomnia) have outgrown their origins as lightweight testing suites, and are also missing several important modern technologies. Swell picks up on their shortcomings and gives engineers a one-stop shop to quickly and easily test their REST / GraphQL / gRPC endpoints, with additional support for Streams (including SSEs), Web Sockets and GraphQL Subscriptions.

Check out Swell

SWELL

Frameworks & Libraries Built by Residents

Svelte is a well-loved and relatively new frontend framework/compiler that has been growing in popularity for the last few years within the developer community. However, unlike other industry frameworks such as React, Vue or Angular, Svelte does not yet have a comparable robust library ecosystem. Enter Svelvet: a lightweight Svelte component library for building interactive node-based flow diagrams. Svelvet is designed to be easy to use, intuitive and highly customizable. Other libraries that offer diagramming and visualization come with caveats: they are not free, flowchart-based, customizable, and/or intuitive. Svelvet fills this need!

Check out Svelvet

SVELVET

vno is a Command Line Interface that simplifies the use of Vue with a Deno runtime environment. As Paul Krill, editor at large of InfoWorld, says “with vno, a developer can employ the “elegance” of Vue while leveraging the “simplicity and security” of Deno”.

Check out vno

VNO

GraphQL is highly flexible, which makes it an amazing tool, but results in query responses being difficult to cache. That's where Quell comes in - with its minimally opinionated highly generalized front- and backend GraphQL caching libraries that can be used separately or together, make GraphQL’s flexibility more efficient.

Check out Quell

QUELL

Obsidian utilizes normalized caching strategies to store response data in both a client and server-side cache. Obsidian is Deno’s first native GraphQL caching client and server module. It utilizes normalized caching strategies to store response data in both a client and server-side cache. Obsidian supports mutations and implements a write through caching policy to maintain that the cache and database are in sync.

Check out Obsidian

OBSIDIAN

Chromogen is a UI-Focused Test Generation Library for Recoil and Zustand-based Applications. It allows any developer to generate meaningful unit tests for their frontend in minutes, just by interacting in the way a user normally would. Writing test suites is a major pain point for developers trying to validate their application’s reliability and functionality. Chromogen was inspired to tackle this issue by automating this process, aimed at saving both time and energy to reduce business costs and resources.

Check out Chromogen

CHROMOGEN

What I Built with Laurence Diarra

Meet Codesmith Engineering Fellow Laurence: A 2022 Codesmith Black Engineers Scholarship Recipient who transitioned from rocket science to software engineering with Codesmith.

Discover how her astronautical engineering degree inspired what she built for her solo project – a live tracker for upcoming rocket launches! Plus, see Laurence's process as she builds out the MERN stack to track launches.

Building at Codesmith

Reynolds, a graduate of Codesmith NY and now a Software Engineer at BlackWaspTech, worked with his team to create a middleware library for other engineers to use. This developer tool incorporated GraphQl, Apollo, and Redux, all of which the team learned during their time in the program.

We ended up making a product that the Deno community got excited about. We had external pull requests just days after we’d built it – people were using it and getting value out of it, and suggesting ways to improve it. It was a buzz that I’d never experienced before. I think my interviewers were very interested to hear about vno. It gave me a subject that I understood which they didn’t, and that felt like a huge selling point in the interview. That gave me a credibility that I previously didn’t have, outside of theater anyway!

Kyle Jurassic

Cloud Engineer @ IBM

Building something from the ground up, encountering incredibly tough technical challenges, and getting the opportunity to work with such amazing and talented people has been so powerful and contributed so much to my growth as a software engineer. The thing that surprised me the most was actually being able to break through the technical blocks with my team and learning and building with new technologies and libraries after only researching them for a few hours.

Rebecca Shesser

Software Engineer @ 2U

I loved OSP. I bonded closely with my group and I'm so proud of the product we made and everything we learned in the process. I really can't believe I'm able to create something on that scale - and I can't believe that I was one of the people who had strong opinions about how we did it! It was awesome.

Anna Larouche

Full Stack Engineer @ Integral

Learning how to learn, learning how to teach, and learning what it means to actually work with people in the process of building something – lots of folks don’t think about that as a software engineer. Yes, you have to solve problems, but most of them involve working with people and cooperating – to identify that problem and work out the solution.

Ashley Pean

Software Engineer @ Eventbrite & Software Engineer and Technical Mentor @ Codesmith

Learn More About Software Built by Residents on our Blog

A Deep Dive Into the Immersive Program's Project Phase

“The production project* is the meat of the project phase. This is where you develop with a group over the period of four weeks. Codesmith highly encourages creating or iterating on a developer tool for the production project*.”

Collaborative Learning at Codesmith

“This intensely collaborative environment enabled our cohort to not only grow closer as a team and intimately learn with one another, but this structure also meant we could learn wealths of information in a small period of time.”

How Codesmith Bridges the Gap between a CS Degree and a Career in Software Engineering

“Everything from the extremely supportive environment to the project based learning process is geared around helping individuals gain the confidence to attack tougher and tougher new issues.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Read All FAQs

Do people continue working on projects post-graduation?

Graduates do not typically continue working on their projects post-graduation, but that is a personal choice for you to make because team members own the projects they create. Some graduates will continue to maintain their projects at a lower capacity, while others have gone on to create their own startups based on their Open Source Products.

Can the projects be anything coding-related or do they have to be JavaScript specific?

Projects don’t have to be JavaScript specific, but many are! Some groups have chosen to use other technologies, frameworks or languages - such as Docker, GraphQL, Vue, and Kafka.

Even though we teach JavaScript, our pedagogy allows residents to pick up new programming languages quickly especially because many languages are similar which makes them easy to learn.

What do group dynamics look like when working on these projects?

Groups typically have 3-5 members. Each group is formed using preference forms which allow residents to list any cohort mates they'd prefer to work with. Groups are also formed based on the interest of the individuals on the type of tool they want to build or technology that they want to work with. Daily Scrum, standups, and project management tools are also utilized to help prepare residents for their future careers.

Can I contribute to these Open Source Products without being part of the Immersive?

Yes, all of our Open Source Products are open source on Github. We encourage pull requests, which will be reviewed appropriately by the engineering team managing the Product.

How many projects do residents build in the program?

Residents will build five coding projects in the Immersive program, which will take up approximately ⅔ of the program time. Projects are integral to Codesmith’s pedagogy and are key to facilitating deeper learning of the curriculum and better equip residents for their future careers as Software Engineers.

What’s the support we get throughout the program for projects?

We help guide Residents on product topics and ask that residents submit a case on why they believe their product will be impactful. This helps ensure that products benefit the greater developer community, are a good opportunity for professional development, and are within scope. Mentors are also assigned to help support in the process from start to finish.

What is OSLabs?

Codesmith is committed to open source and proud to be a featured Open Source Labs partner.

Open Source Labs (OSLabs) is a selective community of dedicated engineers with the shared mission of driving creative technological advances through open source.

Open Source Products are great for those who want to improve their coding skills while at the same time contributing to projects in a meaningful way that is used by many others. Codesmith’s commitment to open source and pushing forward the engineering community means that we encourage Open Source Products done in partnership with organizations like OSLabs, which hosts Open Source Products that our residents are able to iterate on. The OSLabs Github features Open Source Products that Codesmith Residents can iterate upon.

Are there any Open Source Products that worked with a company’s codebase?

Yes, we’ve worked with many partner organizations and companies. If you are interested in collaborating please email hello@codesmith.io. Some examples of previous Open Source Products that are out of Beta are:

YouDescribe, an online platform where users can describe youtube videos to aid those who need more than solely the video for context.

First Freight, a leading CRM provider for freight forwarding companies in the world, approached Codesmith Residents to build a custom email automation service. While there are a few services that already handle email automation - First Freight was looking for a solution that integrated deeply with their existing system. The team built an email automation tool for their marketing department that was simple to use and provided all the analytics necessary to make informed business decisions.

For more information, visit our Projects Built by Residents page.

Software Built By Residents