It wasn't my first FT dev job, but it helped A LOT for me to get in the past 2 jobs I've had. The combo of creativity and applied (?) optimization algorithm was very appealing to the people that interviewed me. It helped that it generated pretty pictures. https://github.com/clayheaton/blomster
Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#62Stack Overflow's "most dreaded X" in the developer survey is a good place to look. I work on Salesforce.com, the #2 most dreaded platform after Sharepoint.
Getting a job in that sector was as simple as having some general development experience and being moderately familiar with the platform.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#63Somehow I managed to land my first programming job in the most stereotypical means possible. I had connected with this young startup through my budding network. I was young, they were young, and we were both involved in TeensInTech (formerly a community of teens interested in startups). I had done a couple rounds of UI/UX feedback for them, that they had requested via TinT. The company made a password & bookmark mana…
Are you saying that the password field returned a password hash of the correct password when you mistyped it?
That's extremely bizarre.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#64Stack Overflow's "most dreaded X" in the developer survey is a good place to look. I work on Salesforce.com, the #2 most dreaded platform after Sharepoint. Getting a job in that sector was as simple as having some general development experience and being moderately familiar with the platform.
I've worked on Salesforce, SharePoint, and Lotus Notes, integrating them and migrating between them. Maybe I should just specialize in all the platforms nobody else wants. (Or maybe I accidentally already did.)
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#65Nobody ever looked at my code. I was working your standard IT support job, and just started writing tools to help the team. I learned, the tools worked, the job evolved into a coding job.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#66Before I landed my first job:
- I found AngularJS a few weeks before AngularJS 1.0 came out in 2012. I started using it for pet projects and became a serial user and answerer on the AngularJS google group for a few months. I spent 1-2 hours every day answering questions.
- A few people from that group started a library making AngularJS UI components for Bootstrap CSS, and I helped: https://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/. This was what really got me "slightly known" in open source.
- I moved on to making other AngularJS libraries: most known were angular-promise-tracker and angular-mobile-nav (slide transitions for mobile AngularJS apps). And then eventually, because of my experience, I landed my first job on the Ionic Framework team.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#67Honestly as a self taught dev with no professional experience your repos aren't going to impress anyone, but github activity will.
Put together working projects and deploy them, make it easy for someone to see what you've built. Provide evidence that you are capable of working with external APIs and common frameworks.
I am self taught and landed my first job pretty easy with just a basic portfolio site, and a few FreeCodeCamp projects that were deployed on digital ocean.
I am now involved in hiring with my company and very rarely do I see an impressive repo let alone an active github, but whenever I see someone consistently committing they always end up with an interview and more often than not end up with a position.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#68It's different for me, since my company uses a relatively obscure language (Rust, it might not seem obscure if you hang around on HN but most people just look at you quizzically if you bring it up), but contributing to the compiler and having a library that was being used by a reasonably well-known project was very helpful. I think the single biggest factor in me getting hired was a couple of blog posts I made, however. Nothing proves your aptitude for software to a company than having an extended, long-form writeup of your thought process. Even if you're not that great a writer it's extremely useful to have a technically-focussed blog that a prospective employer can read through.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#69Stack Overflow's "most dreaded X" in the developer survey is a good place to look. I work on Salesforce.com, the #2 most dreaded platform after Sharepoint. Getting a job in that sector was as simple as having some general development experience and being moderately familiar with the platform.
I've worked on Salesforce, SharePoint, and Lotus Notes, integrating them and migrating between them. Maybe I should just specialize in all the platforms nobody else wants. (Or maybe I accidentally already did.)
Ha! That's what I've done at work. I handle the custom code integrations - a Jenkins plugin, some gradle glue, a VSCode plugin and some custom git server side hooks. Everybody loves me for taking on the undesirable things.
Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?
#70For me it wasn't actually a repo but doing a lot of https://www.codewars.com challenges until I was proficient enough in js to pass the technical interviews