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Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

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Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#1

Post by maury91 »

I got recently laid off (the first time in my life ), and I have worked for around 11 years without being more than 2 days unemployed; I'm currently doing rounds of interviews and for the first time in my life, I have an extreme amount of free time.

I can imagine people would recommend me to use this free time to follow my passions, get some rest, play videogames or do anything that is not working; but I'm not the kind of person that likes any of those things, I like to do something constructive, and I would like if this something can help me now or in future with my job search.

I saw many job posts asking for a Github account to see what contributions I have done to open source, and unfortunately, my contributions amount to none, the companies I have worked for do not publish open source code, and with 2 hours of commute + 9 hours being in the office when I'm home I don't feel like I want to open my personal computer.

With this in mind, I thought "Why not do a video series where I show my front-end skills". This will kill two birds with one stone, first I will get some contributions to dummy projects on Github and second I can show my reasoning on video.

The first problem is that I don't have video editing knowledge, and I feel that will eat the majority of the time, resulting in a project that is less focused on what I'm aiming for.

To avoid the video editing problem, I plan to do live coding, I believe thousands of developers did this before me, and I want to do a topic that is different than usual, with this in mind my topic of choice is to live code a web framework, my framework of choice is React.

I plan to go through these milestones:

  1. Rendering JSX directly into the DOM: get a js compiled through babel and just make it work
  2. Create a shadow dom  
  3. Optimise the shadow dom  
  4. Support all react hooks  
  5. Further optimisations  
  6. Re-create redux  
  7. Suspense ( Lazy loading )  
  8. Re-create react-router  
  9. Using babel API create a different output for jsx files ( different syntax )  
  10. Create browser extensions for developers
Note: I chose these milestones to make the video series help people understand how React works on the inside

And following these rules:

  1. No peeking on React source code  
  2. No stack overflow  
  3. No copilot/chatGTP/any AI  
  4. Looking at React documentation is OK
The idea is to retro-engineer React, I know this looks like it contradicts the point of helping people understand the inner workings of React, but I want this video series to have some challenges ( and external help will remove that ), and the final product must be compatible with a subset of React capabilities so with it being compatible it must have similar inner workings, so even if not identical I believe they will be similar enough to help people understand how React works.

Now that I laid out all my thoughts, I ask you for some advice:

  1. What platform is best to start? ( I was thinking youtube )  
  2. How to get the first views? ( My feeling is that I would be live-streaming to literally no one for months )  
  3. Any other advice that I could not think of asking?

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#2

Post by CharlieDigital »

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it.

Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit.

I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily.

Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few dozens of videos for any long running channel and they are almost always just someone sharing and doing so consistently even with miniscule viewer counts.

I follow a carpenter on YT (Scott Brown) and he had a great clip from his 100th episode where he talks about how you get better at things: you just do it, reflect, and repeat. Do this enough times and your 10th cycle looks nothing like your first. Your 20th looks nothing like your 10th because you learn with every attempt.

So with that said, I encourage you to not overthink it and just start making content. Every day, there is someone trying to learn React and JS and that person is trying to find the right voice to learn from. That's why there can be hundreds of thousands of videos and recipe posts on how to make fried chicken; everyone has an affinity for a different voice.

So with that said, challenge yourself to creating quality content once a day, even if it's short. Your first week, you'll struggle just to learn the tooling and workflow. Your second week you'll have nailed a pretty good process and focus on improving your content and defining your voice. The audience will come as long as you are consistent.

For professional reasons, I think written form is better (so GitHub project plus blog writeup). I think rather than your proposed approach, just build and explore something fun and topical. How about building an app using AI tools and you review the tools and their output? Compare it to a human and give your commentary.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#3

Post by deadcoder0904 »

1. Twitch/YouTube/Twitter/Instagram Reels/TikTok - Basically every platform is becoming a video platform. You might need to edit a bit if you want to post on other platforms or make short videos but it would pop-off if you write hooks well

2. It'll be a grind but you can post on places where followers don't matter. And if possible, create new accounts as new accounts are given more push. Also, pay the rent of platforms like blue check as it pushes the content to more people. Atleast that's how its on Meta/Twitter

3. Use AI & build a useful app like Job Application using Personalize AI messages. Someone might've build this but recreate it. Why? This will get you job faster & if it actually works well, you can make it into a SaaS so you never have to work a job again if that's what you want or you can sell it for 10x with the AI hype that's going on

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#5

Post by maury91 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it. Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit. I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily. Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few…

Thanks for the input, I like your proposed approach of "don't overthink it and just start making content", that is exactly what I will do.

I agree that written form is better, but it doesn't have any time constraints, this is why I was thinking more of live coding, or why not both? In the end, I will need to do the coding part in both cases, so why not stream it?

My problem with building an app is that I honestly don't know what app to build, and recreating React sounds fun to me

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#6

Post by PaulHoule »

Speaking as someone who learned to edit video on tape:

I disagree with the people who think you are overthinking it. If you are planning to do something this big you’d better have a plan.

How many hours on camera is this going to take? How much off-camera think time do you expect this to take? I’d imagine if I was coding something this big I’d make at least one major wrong turn that I’d want to if not have to redo.

I think you should try a mini-project that is not part of the series so you can test your setup before you make something that you want to promote. You want to design things so that you get an interesting series even if you quit early.

I’m a little skeptical of the turn to video in the last ten years. I mean, 10 years ago if I got stuck in a video game I could find the answer in a FAQ in less than a minute. Today I have to find the right video in a collection of 60 one hour videos and then seek to the right point in the video. From the viewpoint of a literate person this is a huge step backwards but I’m left with the feeling we’re on the path to Fahrenheit 451.

Who has time to watch it? Is a recruiter going to watch a video that is longer than Game of Thrones?

Myself as a photographer I’ve found that I want to share my works in progress and show people a bit of my behind the scenes work but I’ve found people don’t have time for anything less than the final polished works. People have never been rude to me the way they are to the Midjourney artists who always post the nine images they got without any filtering but I know the engagement isn’t here.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#7

Post by PaulHoule »

maury91 wrote: post #5
CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it. Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit. I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily. Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few…

Thanks for the input, I like your proposed approach of "don't overthink it and just start making content", that is exactly what I will do. I agree that written form is better, but it doesn't have any time constraints, this is why I was thinking more of live coding, or why not both? In the end, I will need to do the coding part in both cases, so why not stream it? My problem with building an app is that I honestly don…

Recreating React means you’ll really understand how React works under the hood.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#9

Post by CharlieDigital »

maury91 wrote: post #5
CharlieDigital wrote: post #2

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it. Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit. I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily. Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few…

Thanks for the input, I like your proposed approach of "don't overthink it and just start making content", that is exactly what I will do. I agree that written form is better, but it doesn't have any time constraints, this is why I was thinking more of live coding, or why not both? In the end, I will need to do the coding part in both cases, so why not stream it? My problem with building an app is that I honestly don…

Your feedback loop will be stronger with YT, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

#10

Post by maury91 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #6

Speaking as someone who learned to edit video on tape: I disagree with the people who think you are overthinking it. If you are planning to do something this big you’d better have a plan. How many hours on camera is this going to take? How much off-camera think time do you expect this to take? I’d imagine if I was coding something this big I’d make at least one major wrong turn that I’d want to if not have to redo. I…

I understand your point of view about polishing, and from the other comments too it is a common theme.

I believe polishing will be needed, but that doesn't exclude the creation of also unpolished worked.

From all the feedback gathered I will:

  1. Live stream the unpolished work, this will help creating a sense of community and people would be able to be part of the short feedback loop
  2. Collect the most interesting parts from point 1 and create polished videos
  3. Write articles for whom prefers this media
Regarding the audience I'm not thinking of mid-senior developers that like to watch something on the second screen while working
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