Software Built By Residents
Codesmith's emphasis on creating open-source software and building products that benefit the software engineering community provide 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.
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Residents build web applications and Open Source Products that push technology forward.
Codesmith's pedagogy is based on the importance of building projects. Creating projects from the ground up is a crucial part of the learning process that sets graduates up to be lifelong learners ready for the ever-changing tech industry.
Our immersive programs achieve this through a series of smaller projects which then culminate in a larger Open Source Product that is residents' main focus during the second half of the program. Even Codesmith’s Prep Programs, JavaScript for Beginners and CS Prep, prioritize project building by including JavaScript projects in their curriculum.
Projects Residents Build

Solo Project

Scratch/Iteration Project

Open Source Product

Reinforcement Project
What Is An Open Source Product And Why Is It Important?
Overview
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.
Requirements
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.
Timelines
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.
Featured Open Source Products
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Reactime
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.
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ReacType
“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.”
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Periqles
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.
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Atomos
"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."
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Aesop
Aesop was created by Codesmith Residents and absorbed into the Storybook ecosystem, where it has continued to be maintained by the Storybook folks.
Development Frameworks and Libraries Built by Residents

FLACHEQL

VNO
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”.

QUELL

WEBDSP
Hear from Codesmith Grads
Development Tools and Integrations Built by Residents

SWELL

REACTIDE

RECOILIZE

SPEARMINT
Prototyping Tools Built by Residents

REACT PROTO

OVERVUE
PREVUE

LUCID
Lucid is a chrome extension for React-GraphQL app debugging. Lucid offers in-depth introspection into aspects of a React-GraphQL app - it allows developers to trace the flow of user interactions, as they transform from GraphQL queries or mutations to Apollo Server responses that populate stateful data and trigger subsequent UI changes. Lucid displays this information, a real-time component tree diagram, and historical logs of data flow externally and internally.
By requiring these production projects* to solve problems faced by developers every day, students acquire an intimate knowledge of a corner of the industry, experience that can be spoken to in job interviews with authority.
* As of August 2021, Production Projects are now called Open Source Products.
Scalable Infrastructure And Analytics Built By Residents

KAFKA SPROUT

CHRONOS

OBSIDIAN

SEEQR
Learn More About Tools 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.”
*As of August 2021, Production Projects are now called Open Source Products.
Building at Codesmith
Interested in learning more about projects at Codesmith? Schedule a call with an Advisor to learn more about our programs and plan your next steps!
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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.
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.