Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#51

Post by franciscop » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 12:30 PM UTC

ziikutv wrote: post #44

franciscop wrote: post #21

My first freelancing job (previous jobs were internships) came from this project getting to the HN front page: https://umbrellajs.com/ It basically skyrocketed from there to what you can see in https://francisco.io/resume/ , with basically all experiences afterwards building on top of that (either directly, by reference or just as credentials for the next ones). People (including Google) also seem to love https://pic…

Umbrella JS is a well deserving project. You won me over with the little animated illustrations. I feel like people have attached those to "quality" and "legitness"; at least I do. I am going to play with that lib this weekend. Could be good for small Eletron/NW.JS apps.

Thanks! Nowadays I am leaning on my own https://superdom.site/ for simpler/over the weekend projects. I almost made it into a next iteration of Umbrella JS but thought it'd be too big of a change and decided to separate it.

I prefer superdom syntax and I consider it the last and best iteration I could make following jQuery's philosophy (there are a bunch of dead jsfiddles from Umbrella to Superdom). It feels a bit hacky but it's quite legible and intuitive. It is not so compatible (no IE/old Android) and the main thing missing from Umbrella is the whole AJAX side, but for that I mostly use the new standard fetch().

I keep telling myself I gotta make superdom's website worth of the code, but I never get around to do it :)

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#52

Post by zimpenfish » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 12:35 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #49

alonsonic wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really like your resume layout. What did you build it with? Is that an open-source layout? Would love to use it.

I didn't think it'd be so interesting as to publish it separately, thanks! It's built on top of my own Picnic CSS (in above comment) but with many px/em/cm-specific adjustments as seen in https://francisco.io/resume/cv.css Feel free to reuse any of the code under the MIT.

That is a really nice looking CV. I might take advantage of your generosity and do mine in a similar fashion, thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#53

Post by cableshaft » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

I released this game on iOS (back in 2010), and it was the main thing that got me get a job as lead developer for a startup that made iOS games and apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy08ohBLGhE

Technically I had one other dev job before that (not in games, making websites and apps in ASP and VBA), although I got that job from a friend who knew I could code due to indie game dev meetups, convinced me to move upstate to the Chicago suburbs and be his roommate, then bugged his boss until he hired me. I barely knew him, but it ended up being a good decision because I ended up really fitting in here and I'm still in the area 12 years later.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#54

Post by palerdot » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

I participated in Mozilla dev derby and created - https://github.com/palerdot/hotcold, which landed me my first full time developer job as a full stack developer. At that time, Mozilla used to have demo studio which hosted both the code and the live static app. After Mozilla pulled the plug on the demo studio, I hosted the static app on github pages with a custom domain - http://hotcoldtyping.com

This project is closer to my heart and I would still be happy if I had not gotten a job because of this.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#55

Post by davidivadavid » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #21

My first freelancing job (previous jobs were internships) came from this project getting to the HN front page: https://umbrellajs.com/ It basically skyrocketed from there to what you can see in https://francisco.io/resume/ , with basically all experiences afterwards building on top of that (either directly, by reference or just as credentials for the next ones). People (including Google) also seem to love https://pic…

Just 'cause I'm a grammar nazi: you misspelled "Andreessen Horowitz" in your resume. Unless there's a company with a name awfully close to Andreessen Horowitz, of course.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#56

Post by blubb-fish » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

No job I ever applied to they even took a look at my GitHub profile - and I own or contributed to 34 repos and have 81 followers. Not even when the interview process was guided by technicians my GitHub account mattered. And I actively point out the various repos in my CV. It's honestly a bit frustrating.

I'm involved in interview processes and hiring decisions at my current company - and rest assured that any code versioning accounts will be checked out.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#57

Post by andywood » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

It was a screensaver that I wrote between tech support calls. The CEO asked me about it, I told him I wrote it, and he put me on the dev team that afternoon. It was C and C++, drivers and apps on Windows.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#58

Post by amrrs » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

Analysis/Comparison of Different Twitter Channels using R https://github.com/amrrs/TwitterAnalysis-in-R

Highlighted some insights based on the way Tweets were made. Got an offer from one of those brands' Data Science team and finally found out that my Analysis became benchmark in the company for Social Media Analytics of Twitter.

Edit: Though the job wasn't my first one!

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#59

Post by wglb » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

Well, I started before repos were a thing and even before source revision control was invented. I pestered a professor with questions about the assembly language that I got the CDC 3500 fortran compiler to cough up. Annoyed, he pawned me off to a professor who ultimately became my advisor and gave me my first job the summer after my freshman year. That job involved writing an input module for a program that he wrote that was finding Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors in a 500x500 matrix on a computer with 35k of memory. With no disk.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#60

Post by slackingoff2017 » Wed, Aug 16, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

Nobody ever looks at my repos :(.

Software hiring is stupidly broken. Google has done much research on hiring and a code sample+cognitive ability are the two most important predictors of job performance.

Tell that to anyone that hired me ever.... The first time you'll even talk to another dev is your on-site.

When I was in charge of hiring once we made a huge deal of user repos and probably spent more time looking at them than resumes. Got some damn good engineers from that. But almost nobody does it that way