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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?

#71
Front end scales marvelously. Distribution is easy and cheap. Learn whatever front end framework you like best and learn to make a fat client that does most to all of the heavy lifting in the client.

Scales wonderfully.

Scaling backend data structures is a difficulty itself and potentially different for every problem.

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

#72
I think Ruby on Rails might be a great framework for incrementally learning the complex parts of a serious web app. I would recommend you check out DHH’s recent tour of the framework’s seventh version, and if you like it, check ou the Rails for Beginners video series by GoRails on YouTube, or Michel Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial book.

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

#73
Hey I am also a coder and designer. My strong suggestion; actively seek the ‘seam’ where art/design and code meet.

You’ll have more success (and fun) doing things where you can leverage your creative skill alongside your code learnings.

One source of deep admiration for many Ruby programmers was the artist/coder “Why the Lucky Stiff”. They created digital works of art that were a serious of small coding projects most of them fun, a couple highly useful.

The seminal book “Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby” (http://poignant.guide) is still a beautiful read. Pair it with the website Try Ruby (https://try.ruby-lang.org) and you can plug in the examples from the poignant guide as you read along.

I’d recommend learning Hotwire and Rails 7 and then making small Rails apps to create small artistically interesting sites.

Ruby and Rails is highly attractive to people who value asthetics and beauty, and helps you integrate your creative impulses with how you code. Most languages don’t account for or attempt to address beauty in how you code. It’s by no means necessary but has been delightful for me finding a language and community that often highly values deep inner creativity along side coding principals.

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

#74
post #64
post #46

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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…

And it's usually not the frontend/backend developer deploying the app, but a dedicated person in charge of deploying / maintaining the infrastructure.

But it helps to have an idea on how they work.

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

#75

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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.

If you're not getting calls, it's your resume that is bad. That either means the format, or the content. Seems to me the only change to the content that you can make is working on and advertising well written open source personal projects that your interviewers can see, or contributing to large open source projects.

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

#76
post #56

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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…

Having something that stands out on the resume will go a long way for you. A nice looking GitHub profile with some pinned repos with activity and a nice readme is what I would recommend. You can also find an existing project and contribute to it. What's your GitHub username? I can follow you

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

#78

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how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

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

Ha! I copy-pasted your response from last weeks thread above. What a great response. Ima try it in the new year myself. Already incorporated llc. Building my static site this week and off to the leet races I go.

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

#79
I started reading the following a couple of nights back. Might give you some help if you haven't already seen it:

The Passionate Programmer (2nd edition) Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler https://pragprog.com/titles/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer...

You can check it out before buying at either of the following:

https://www.pdfdrive.com/search?q=chad+fowler&pagecount=&pub... OR https://u1lib.org/s/chad%20fowler

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