Introducing RW Community Care! [FREE]

As a mobile developer, you’ve been challenged to find creative solutions to working, learning, and staying connected in our current upside-down reality — and the raywenderlich.com Tutorial Team wants to help!

Today, we’re excited to announce RW Community Care — a three-month series of office hours, livestreams, bootcamps, and more — and it’s all 100% free to the community.

These projects are designed for people who want to take advantage of any extra downtime to improve their mobile development skills, connect with other developers, or further their career!

Here’s everything we have planned for the next three months:

• Project 1: RW Office Hours
• Project 2: Review My Stuff
• Project 5: RW Bootcamp
• Where to Go From Here?

Keep reading to find out how to register for any of these free initiatives!

Project 1: RW Office Hours

Have you ever been stuck on a problem and wished you had a senior developer to talk to?

Maybe you’re not sure what the best architecture is for your app; perhaps you can’t quite wrap your head around reactive programming; or maybe you’re trying to decide between use Flutter or native development for your next project.

Not everyone has easy access to a senior developer, especially when everyone seems so busy these days and our teams are more physically separate then ever before.

Good news: RW Office Hours are the next best thing to having a senior developer right next to you! For the next three months, we will be hosting livestreams every Friday and Saturday where you can bring your iOS, Android and Flutter development questions to a a panel of expert developers from the raywenderlich.com Tutorial Team.

Even if you don’t have any questions for our team, you’re still welcome to attend. You’re sure to learn something new!

For more information, and to register to attend RW Office Hours, visit the link below:

• Office Hours Community Care Page

Project 2: Review My Stuff

Office hours are great when you have questions that can be answered with minimal preparation and time.

But what if you need someone to help you with deeper questions on your particular project, or to lend a critical eye to your resume or job search?

That’s just what the Review My Stuff livestream is designed to do! Every Tuesday , two senior members of the raywenderlich.com Tutorial Team will review “stuff” submitted by raywenderlich.com readers, including:

• Code
• Resumes or LinkedIn pages
• Apps in development
• Anything else you can point to with a URL! :]

The goal of Review My Stuff is to serve as a coach to help you learn and grow as a mobile developer. This is your chance to get your “stuff” reviewed by some senior developers, and hopefully learn some new skills or techniques.

Even if you don’t have stuff to review, you can still attend these sessions to hear about some best practices from senior developers!

To sign up for Review my Stuff, and to submit the “stuff” you want reviewed, visit the link below:

• Review My Stuff Community Care Page

Project 3: RW Talks

The iOS Office Hours, Android & Flutter Office Hours, and the Review My Stuff live events are great opportunities to come ask questions of and to interact directly with senior developers and team members.

But what if you don’t have anything to actively discuss, but instead are interested in taking in some classic conference-style talks, where you can watch a presenter and ask some questions in a live Q&A?

That brings us to our next event: RW Talks!

Asannounced last week, RW talks cover high-interest topics in the mobile development community. They’re held on a weekly basis, and are 100% free for anyone to attend.

These talks range from the deeply technical, to the inspirational and motivational. They’re exactly like conference talks — but in an online format instead!

You can interact with the speakers via Q&A on the livestream, and there will be a recording released later, if you can’t make it to the live session.

Here’s the schedule of upcoming talks in the next few weeks:

• May 13 : Future of Mobile: Android/iOS, Flutter and Native
• May 20 : How To Build a SwiftUI Framework… and make it work with Swift Package Manager, Cocoapods, and Carthage!
• May 25 : Increase Your Product Quality Through Accessibility
• Jun 3 : Everything You (Never) Wanted to Know about Making Coffee at Home
• Jun 10 : Writing Reliable Tests in iOS
• Jun 17 : MVVM Structure with Android Architecture Components
• Jun 24 : Event driven programming in Swift; Let’s create a chatbot!
• Jul 1 : You’re Not As Good As You Think You Are
• …and more to come!

We’ll be running these weekly until mid-August, so stay tuned as we’ll be announcing more sessions of RW Talks in the near future!

For more details on all RW Talks, and to register for the talks you’re interested in, head to the link below:

• Main RW Talks Community Care Page

Project 4: RW Chat

Can’t attend some of the livestreams above, or prefer to collaborate on discussions as a community? Or maybe you’re more the type to hash out challenges or problems with a group of like-minded developers?

We’ve got just the thing for you! RW Chat is a public Discord server that is 100% free for anyone to join!

The raywenderlich.com Chat is designed for discussion on the following topics:

• Questions related to iOS and Swift ( #ios-and-swift )
• Questions related to Android and Kotlin ( #android-and-kotlin )
• Suggestions for new tutorials or features on raywenderlich.com ( #suggestions )
• General chat with community members ( #random , #brag-about-my-stuff , and more)

To sign up for RW Chat, or to see our community guidelines, visit the link below:

• Main RW Talks Community Care Page

I’ll be in the chat as well, and I’d love to get to know you better! :]

Project 5: RW Bootcamp

As the capstone to RW Community Care, we will be running two online bootcamps, one for iOS, and one for Android, that will take you from having zero programming experience, all the way up to the level of a junior mobile developer!

Each week, you’ll attend live sessions led by our mentors, watch videos from our iOS or Android Learning Paths , and work through some coding exercises as homework. You’ll be part of a small, focused group of 10 students in the live sessions, so you’ll get to know some of the other students along the way!

These intense bootcamps are 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.

As such, these bootcamps are 100% free ; the only way to get in is to apply for and receive a student scholarship to the bootcamp.

If you’re accepted into the bootcamp, you’ll get a free, 3-month raywenderlich.com Beginner Subscription to access the courses, so you don’t need to be a subscriber to apply!

iOS Curriculum

Here’s what we’ll be covering in the iOS Bootcamp:

• Week 1 (May 25) : Controls, Outlets, UIKit
• Week 2 (Jun 1) : Swift Fundamentals
• Week 3 (Jun 8) : Swift Functions & Types
• Week 4 (Jun 15) : Layout, Testing, and Debugging
• Week 5 (Jun 22) : Table Views
• Week 6 (Jun 29) : Collection Views
• Week 7 (Jul 6) : SwiftUI
• Week 8 (Jul 13) : Saving Data
• Week 9 (Jul 20) : Networking & Design Patterns
• Week 10 (Jul 27) : Concurrency & Memory Management
• Week 11 (Aug 3) : Animation, Xcode Tips & Tricks
• Week 12 (Aug 10) : Capstone project!
• Week 13 (Aug 17) : Graduation week

Android Curriculum

And here’s what we’ll be covering in the Android Bootcamp:

• Week 1 (May 25) : Basic Kotlin
• Week 2 (Jun 1) : Advanced Kotlin
• Week 3 (Jun 8) : Android Studio, Android, XML, Views, Activities
• Week 4 (Jun 15) : Multiple Activities, Intents, AndroidX, Dialogs, FAB, SharedPreferences Activity results
• Week 5 (Jun 22) : SharedPreferences, Files, SQL, Room, MVP/MVVM
• Week 6 (Jun 29) : Threading, Concurrency, Thread Switching, Main Thread, Coroutines (basics)
• Week 7 (Jul 6) : Networking, Network status/info, HTTP, REST, JSON, Retrofit
• Week 8 (Jul 13) : WorkManager, DownloadManager, Services, AsyncTask, JobScheduler, AlarmManager
• Week 9 (Jul 20) : Coroutines (in depth), Testing with Mockito, Jetpack (some components)
• Week 10 (Jul 27) : MVVM, Unit Tests, Data Binding
• Week 11 (Aug 3) : Dependency Injection, Koin, Dependency Management
• Week 12 (Aug 10) : Capstone project!
• Week 13 (Aug 17) : Graduation week

When Will the Bootcamps Take Place?

This is an intense and focused bootcamp , and we expect that your coursework will take 20-25 hours per week . You must be able to attend the two live video chat sessions each week, which are scheduled below:

• iOS Bootcamp :
  • Start-of-week session: Mondays @ 9:30 – 10:30 PM EST
  • Mid-week session: Thursdays @ 9:30 – 10:30 PM EST
• Android Bootcamp :
  • Start-of-week session: Mondays @ 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST
  • Mid-week session: Thursdays @ 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST

The bootcamps will run from 25 May to 20 August .

How To Apply for a Student Scholarship

We can only accept a maximum of 40 students in each bootcamp; that maintains a healthy student-mentor ratio of 10 students to 1 mentor.

For more information, and to apply for an RW Bootcamp Student Scholarship, visit the link below:

• Main RW Bootcamp and Student Scholarship Page

Important : Applications are due by 12 midnight EST on Monday, May 18.

Where To Go From Here?

Phew – that was a lot! We’re excited about all of these projects, and we hope you are too!

To recap, all RW Community Care initiatives will run from today until Aug 22 , in order to help you out as best we can during these challenging times. No matter where we all are in our respective careers, we all could use a little help once in a while!

We’ve collected all of the various projects and initiatives on one central page, which will be updated regularly with all of these upcoming events:

• Main RW Community Care and Upcoming Events Page

I want to give a huge thanks to the more than 30 mentors, speakers, developers, and other team members who have generously donated their time to the raywenderlich.com community. Teamwork helps you dream bigger, and our team members are solid, living proof of that.

Please be sure to say “thanks” to any of the mentors, organizers, moderators or other people that have helped you in any way; if we help even just one person as part of this project, we’ll know it was worth it!

We hope to see you at some of these free events over the next three months — enjoy! :]