RTS Labs Hires Two Grads of Ironhack’s Web Development Bootcamp

RTS Labs, a Richmond, VA-based development company that specializes in custom software, data analytics, and Salesforce, has added Sarah Abogabir and Rachel Mahan to their development team.  Both women create web applications for clients in a wide range of industries, including insurance and cyber security.  They’re also both graduates of Ironhack, Miami’s #1 student rated full curriculum Web development and UX/UI design bootcamp.

“Sarah and Rachel are fast learners and work really hard,” says RTS Labs CEO Jyot Singh, who founded the company in 2010.  “We aim to achieve equality and diversity on our 48 member team, so the fact that they’re so talented made it easy to bring them on board – especially in roles that are usually filled by men.  Their training at Ironhack exposed them to a job opportunity that they didn’t know existed, and RTS as well as our clients are the beneficiaries of their skills.”

Abogabir graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a B.S. degree in Psychology.  She realized that she wanted to pursue coding as a career after taking an online bootcamp course.  Seeking a more comprehensive bootcamp experience, Abogabir temporarily relocated to Miami in 2016 to enroll in Ironhack’s eight week program.  Upon completion, she set her sights on Richmond as an employment destination, and was soon hired by RTS Labs as a front end developer (she’s currently working in Ruby on Rails back end development).

“Because I was learning so much in such a short period of time at Ironhack, I had to persevere and push myself to become mentally stronger, but the end result was well worth the challenge,” says Abogabir, who in her spare time is creating a blog for female web developers about how to attain a healthy life/career balance.  “The excellent developers at RTS taught me that the best way to master coding is just by doing.  As you break your program and create more errors, you have to let them guide you because in the process, you’re figuring out something new and becoming a better developer.”

Mahan is a 2009 graduate of Milligan College with a B.A. in Fine Arts Photography.  While working in retail management and then in luxury sales in the years following graduation, she sought to build her tech knowledge by taking online courses in digital design and programming.  She discovered that coding was her true interest, but in order to ramp up her expertise, she needed a traditional classroom learning environment.  She made a total life change in 2016 when she left her career and enrolled in Ironhack’s full time web development program.

“Ironhack’s fully-immersive coding course was extremely tough, but I knew that taking it was the right decision,” says Mahan, who is a back end developer at RTS Labs.  “I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for having found a career that I love, and for having the opportunity to join the ranks of the high-caliber developers at RTS.  The big lesson is that as a developer, if you keep on learning and investing in your abilities, the sky is truly the limit.”

About Ironhack

Ironhack is a global school offering full time and part time courses in Web Development and UX/UI design. Ironhack was ranked as the #3 student-rated coding and design bootcamp in the world by national rating site Switch Up. Since 2013, Ironhack has graduated over 1,000+ students who are building their careers at South Florida companies such as Magic Leap, CareCloud, and JetSmarter, as well as at global companies, including Google, Visa, and Twitter.