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Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#61

Post by camb416 »

bad_interivewee wrote: post #44
vmception wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

incorporate your software company list a couple clients if you can point out that you’ve been working for that (your) software company for several years as a senior software engineer pass bullshit brainteaser problems viola

ive had a corp for a while but never called myself "senior engineer". maybe ill give that a shot.

As a Tech Director, I don’t like this. We’re not fooled by this kind of thing. I’d rather see someone dedicated to learning and growing, but that’s just me maybe.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#62

Post by brightball »

Pandabob wrote: post #27

I'll give this a shot: 1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java. 2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments. 3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems…

I’d bump 7 to the front of the list but otherwise, totally agree.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#63

Post by Pandabob »

brightball wrote: post #62
Pandabob wrote: post #27

I'll give this a shot: 1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java. 2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments. 3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems…

I’d bump 7 to the front of the list but otherwise, totally agree.

I don't disagree with this. SQL keeps the world turning.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#64

Post by vanusa »

lytefm wrote: post #46
Pandabob wrote: post #27

I'll give this a shot: 1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java. 2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments. 3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems…

This sounds like good advice. Don't worry about Containers, deployment or testing "best practices" until you really need it. You'd be surprised at how many software companies' testing is "clicking around in the app", deployment is "upload to store/ rsync to server" and containers aren't used at all. Start learning React (you can also take a look at Vue), do some tutorials and build some CRUD app which has a database.…

You'd be surprised at how many software companies' testing is "clicking around in the app", deployment is "upload to store/ rsync to server" and containers aren't used at all.

Not only that - a non-dockerized, bare-metal, but otherwise cleanly coded "rsync to server" app can be -- compared to the usual non-spec'd, undocumented cluster-f hairball shoved into a container, with a shiny layer of CICD thrown on top -- can be surprisingly joyful to maintain.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#65

Post by vanusa »

brightball wrote: post #62
Pandabob wrote: post #27

I'll give this a shot: 1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java. 2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments. 3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems…

I’d bump 7 to the front of the list but otherwise, totally agree.

Yup - it's probably the most resilient innovation in software out there, right after assembly language.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#66

Post by bad_interivewee »

camb416 wrote: post #61
bad_interivewee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive had a corp for a while but never called myself "senior engineer". maybe ill give that a shot.

As a Tech Director, I don’t like this. We’re not fooled by this kind of thing. I’d rather see someone dedicated to learning and growing, but that’s just me maybe.

not trying to “fool” anyone, trying to get an opportunity. ive had to apply to hundreds of places to get a handful of replies.

been learning and growing for 3 decades starting on a IIe but highlighting that part hasn’t worked so why not experiment with my approach?

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#67

Post by gxespino »

bad_interivewee wrote: post #41
mkoryak wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look for a company where software is not their main focus. Get hired there by showing them some projects on GitHub. Don't have projects on GitHub? You can make those be there right now for free. You will also need to interview there. Your username indicates that you suck at interviewing. I hate to break it to you, but interviewing is a skill that can be learned. With. Practice. You can either interview at places or t…

i don't have any public facing repos, so i'll clean some up and try to emphasize that a bit more. in terms of interviewing, no opportunities so no experience. in the past ive had to apply to roughly 80 jobs to get one interview. recruiters on linkedin are a little better at ~30 conversations per interview but its plain exhausting, takes a ton of time, they demand replies instantly or ghost, but really its overwhelmin…

Spend less time applying and more time truly polishing up one or two repos/side projects. Cleaning up a few repos is the bare minimum here.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#68

Post by cunac »

Mave83 wrote: post #19

Simple, you usually don't need that. Most devs now a days don't know how to build efficient websites. That's why they need a tech Stack like the Mount Everest and create a dependency hell. It was possible to serve more then 250k unique users per day from a single VM more than 10y ago on shitty hardware. You can deliver so much more on modern tech if you stick to KISS principle. But yes, some rare sites do need to sca…

not to be rude but 250K uniques users is 3 new users per second and doesn't say anything about concurrent users. Concurrent users are scaling problem

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#69

Post by vanusa »

cunac wrote: post #68
Mave83 wrote: post #19

Simple, you usually don't need that. Most devs now a days don't know how to build efficient websites. That's why they need a tech Stack like the Mount Everest and create a dependency hell. It was possible to serve more then 250k unique users per day from a single VM more than 10y ago on shitty hardware. You can deliver so much more on modern tech if you stick to KISS principle. But yes, some rare sites do need to sca…

not to be rude but 250K uniques users is 3 new users per second and doesn't say anything about concurrent users. Concurrent users are scaling problem

There's a natural distribution to these things, so actually an average of 3 does in fact say "something" about the tail behavior of concurrents (that is, the highest values you can expect under peak load).

As a rule of thumb: it's probably on the order of 5x-10x (absent outlier events); then look at your data to find out what it actually is (users are not evenly distributed across the day/week); then apply the usual 4x or so rule for capacity planning.

That is to say - it isn't necessarily a scaling issue. Especially when you're just starting out and no one is looking at your damn app anyway. If it's well designed and cleanly built you'll have plenty of time to factor for scale when the time comes (if it comes).

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#70

Post by seaknoll »

bad_interivewee wrote: post #52
seaknoll wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practice algorithms and read about software design in your spare time. Apply to tons of companies, be prepared to be rejected from almost all of them, and to be asked questions that you have no intelligent answer to. Remember what they asked you, learn the problems you got wrong, and repeat. It may be brutal and embarrassing at times but if you keep at it you will eventually get a job. The only thing I can say about…

the leetcode/algo question stuff is mentioned here on HN alot but I've never gotten to the point where a test was actually offered to me. will start practicing though and hopefully an opportunity pops up.

In that case, you might want to have a friend/acquaintance with a job like what you want to review your resume and give you feedback on that and a first round-style interview. If you don’t know anyone who can, read over resumes on linkedin, and pay close attention to the language used, and to the extent that it’s relevant to your work try to mirror it. Try to be direct and confident about what you know/don’t know during the interview, and try to at least learn how to talk about technologies that touch what you’re more expert in.
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