Solo projects are the first time you connect everything the program has covered thus far and build a coding project from the ground up with the concepts you’ve learned over the previous month and really dive into their complexities. You will usually focus on 1-2 technologies, integrate APIs, and dive deep into connecting different parts of an application.
Scratch and Iteration projects are a time when you experience development as a team. These coding 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, requiring more research and resulting in a finished product at production level.
The Open Source Product is the most important component of your education at Codesmith. The projects 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 the Codesmith Immersive Program.
Your final coding project is designed to help you focus on the upcoming job search by encouraging you to build with contemporary technology or a highly used framework or library to prepare for technical screenings. This project is a chance for you to really dive deep on a technology you aim to work with in your first job after Codesmith, especially if it was not part of the stack you worked in for your Open Source Product.
Open Source Products are an important part of your Codesmith experience because they build expertise in high value cutting edge technologies that are being used in the tech industry today. While working on your Product, you will sharpen your critical thinking, build your problem solving skills, and autonomy. This direct job training on hard technologies allows you to gain experience on what you will be doing in your future career and allows you to become an expert and refine your skills in a supportive environment, while giving you experience that will help you stand out in your job search.
Because Open Source Products are such an important part of the learning and job search process, Codesmith residents have one week with no instruction to ideate and fully focus on choosing the best topic for their group. Each group then presents their ideas to Lead Instructors in order to gain final approval on their topic and begin coding. The requirements of Open Source Products are that they must solve major challenges in the industry today and focus on tough engineering judgments and deep-diving on technology through developer-oriented projects in key web software engineering areas (UI frameworks, Node, DevOps) or client projects.
Open Source Products are done in the second portion of the program, known as the senior portion. This time in the program also includes the hiring program and advanced program lectures.
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”.
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.
WebDSP is a client-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssemblyto help developers break into the WebAssembly space by developing the first WebAssembly library for client-side digital signal processing (DSP), a fundamental building block for the full scale media-editing apps to come.
FlacheQL is a fast, lightweight, and flexible client-side cache for GraphQL that offers lightning fast retrievals for cached queries, typically on the magnitude of 150% faster than those offered by Apollo, as well as offering partial retrieval of query results on subsets of cached data based on fields and search parameters — a feature that no other GraphQL library offers.
Miguel G.
“Although I was certainly proud of the project I accomplished utilizing new tech stacks/technique, the Solo project truly reminded me of the importance of bouncing ideas off a team, divvying up tasks, and having another shoulder for emotional support.”
Taylor R.
“The project phase really gives everyone a chance to focus on subjects they felt less confident in, or to specialize in things they enjoyed learning about.”
Karandeep A.
“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.”
Veronica S.
“I really enjoyed working on our solo projects. I feel like I learn best through doing projects (rather than listening to lectures,) so it was really exciting to work on something from start to end and reinforce all the concepts we learned earlier in the program.”
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.
Reactide was created to facilitate the process of developing a React web application. React is a Javascript framework that is leveraged for its ability to construct highly scalable user interfaces. Though powerful, the set-up time involved is cumbersome for both upcoming and seasoned React engineers, but this Integrative Development Environment (IDE) allows veteran and upcoming React engineers to seamlessly develop React applications and forgo arduous set-up by automating the configuration process. Additionally, Reactide incorporates an in-app window browser with Hot Module Reloader capabilities to streamline the development process.
Recoilize is a Chrome devtool which provides a means to debug applications built with Recoil.js.Recoil.js is a new, experimental state management library developed by Facebook. Recoilize records an app’s state and its changes and allows users to debug with features such as time travel, a states history, and various graphs, to visualize render times and component / state relationships like the component graph, atom-selector network graph, and flame and ranked graphs. Since the technology is so new, it lacks a tool to debug and visualize the states, which are divided into two types in Recoil, atoms and selectors.
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!
Reactime was created to help developers optimize and debug their React applications. Reactime remedies the increasingly difficult pain point of managing state with a Chrome extension that makes the development environment more accessible and comfortable.
“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.”
Aesop was created by Codesmith Residents and absorbed into the Storybook ecosystem, where it has continued to be maintained by the Storybook folks.
Periqles is a React component library for Relay and Apollo that makes it easy to collect user input. Periqles abstracts away the dirty work of form creation with override switches built in for the design-conscious developer so you can be free to focus on business logic.
"Atomos integrates seamlessly with React DevTools to provide real-time visualization and facilitate the planning and debugging of a React/Recoil application’s structure and state... Atomos saves developers time and energy by taking the guesswork out of the state management debugging process."
React Proto is a React prototyping tool to streamline the initial process of mocking up and developing client side applications. To support a modern SPA with multiple views controlled by React Router's control of the browser history API, we developed the ability to support BrowserRouter routes for multiple page views. State management was also limited so we implemented the ability to create props at stateful components and mock prop drilling as done in real-time development.
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. OverVue aims to contribute to Vue’s ecosystem, providing experienced Vue developers with a tool that facilitates prototyping and architecting their application seamlessly. Additionally, OverVue allows new developers to onboard a Vue application quickly and efficiently.
PreVue is an all in one prototyping tool for Vue developers from component architecture to code exporting. Not having a blueprint of your Vue application architecture leads to unnecessary code and refactoring as the application scales. PreVue provides a cross-platform desktop prototyping tool that allows the user to conceptualize their Vue component architecture and export a fully functional Vue application. The application gives developers and designers the tools necessary for creating clean, organized, and intentional code from the beginning of the process.
Lucid is a chrome extension for React-GraphQL app debugging. Lucid offers in-depth introspection into aspects of a React-GraphQL app and allows developers to trace the flow of user interactions from the frontend, as they transform from GraphQL queries or mutations, to Apollo Server responses from the backend, that populate stateful data, and trigger subsequent changes to information that is rendered by the app. Lucid displays this information, a real-time component tree diagram, and historical logs of data flow externally and internally.
Travis F.
Software Engineering Immersive Graduate
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.”
Apache Kafka has a complicated architecture that has a steep learning curve as it involves multiple processes just to start up a Kafka cluster, including Zookeeper and Broker servers. As of now, there are limited free/open-source GUIs that provide visualization and a robust toolkit for interacting with Kafka clusters. Kafka Sprout addresses thus by providing a user-friendly and beginner-friendly GUI for interacting with Kafka clusters from kafka-server-start to kafka-server-stop.
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.
Obsidian 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. 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.
SQL sandbox, created for developers to test their Postgres databases and ensure their queries and schemas are optimized for the fastest performance possible. SeeQR also helps test database scalability by generating dummy data to simulate growth in a user base. SeeQR provides query runtime metrics, an isolated Docker instance to protect sensitive database information, visual comparisons to allow developers to easily keep track of each test, performance tuning, and determine additional metrics.
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