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Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

zyring.com

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Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#11

Post by exratione »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #2

I find the focus on building portfolios frustrating. Mostly what I've seen it accomplish is people writing dumb scripts that don't do anything particularly useful or basic web apps that would never be useful for anything beyond the toy case the author came up with. That's not to knock building small programs like these to develop skills or become familiar with a new library, but it's hardly an adequate way of showing…

There are a lot of useful things you can do at a small scale. Take setup examples; those are useful for other people and useful for you in the future as they preserve something that you had to spend time figuring out. Near all infrastructure and software is very poorly documented when it comes to examples and setup documentation, and you could build an entire and very useful portfolio based on that alone given the work that you'd be doing over the course of a few years of consulting.

My GitHub account contains a mix of (a) small pieces of functional software used in niches that are poorly supported, such as non-delivery report processing in Drupal, (b) dumb things that were amusing enough to write, such as a self-propagating bash script, and (c) functional examples for software that lacks good functional examples, such as the use of Guice in DropWizard.

This sort of thing seems more than good enough to demonstrate that you know what you're doing.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#12

Post by firasd »

gfreeman wrote: post #8

Hmm... there doesn't seem to be anything there http://i.imgur.com/2a9kUiu.png I like the idea and aim of the site but was it really necessary to make it completely unviewable without JavaScript? What ever happened to progressive enhancement?

Related: I signed up but saw all the web projects are dependent on Angular or React. I understand that these technologies are good to be familiar with for making a portfolio these days but they're not for me; not what I want to spend my time on.

I did join the waiting list for their yet-to-launch iOS projects though.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#13

Post by hoboon »

I've noticed people will look at it if you really have their attention, say an employer who is inclined to give you a job.

Having a site talk about requirements is useful. A lot of the times I don't know about features or needs in a system until someone told me.

20-30 minutes talking with an engineer and whiteboarding a solution to a site helped me along immensely towards a solution that had more meat on it.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#14

Post by zooso »

bshimmin wrote: post #9

The landing page really needs to do a much better job of explaining what this does and who it's for, preferably with some visual examples of whatever it is that it does viewable without a requirement for signing up. Right now, I basically have no idea what this is - is it something like Dribbble but for programming? Or is it more like oDesk? Who comes up with the applications? Who does the code reviews? Et cetera. Ne…

Good point. Thanks for the feedback. You really don't need to sign up to experience what projects we offer but some stuff requires sign up as you said. We will make sure that we remove the ambiguities and work on our copywriting.

As for your questions :

1- Experts in the field working with us have come up with Applications. We are working with some companies so that they can put sponsored applications on our website that they would love to see on a candidates resume. In addition, if anyone has an idea for a project they can submit it on the project page and we will work with them to refine it and put it there.

2- The community does the code reviews. As you said this is unclear right now on the landing page. Basically, if there is a person who have done the project before you with a good score, they will review the code. Reviewing someone's code is also part of your portfolio so you get a score for doing it.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#16

Post by pacala »

zooso wrote: post #7
pacala wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be much more impressed by one small, interesting project than a bunch of large, overengineered ones. ;)

We are still trying to figure out the right size of projects and who it benefits the most. Obviously, We have heard arguments for the both sides. Would really appreciate if I could get your input on it too. If you are interested in talking for few minutes at anytime. Email me at : alif@zyring.com

An example of project that impresses me to no end: The Monte Carlo Revolution in Go, http://remi.coulom.free.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search. Took a simple well-known technique, applied it to a simple, well known, but notoriously difficult problem, and got better results than much more "sophisticated" attempts prior. You can code that in a couple of weeks.

The art of matching a problem with a solution with minimal effort is much much more valuable that spouting out thousands upon thousands lines of shoddy code with poor understanding of the fundamentals.

It's ironic how history rhymes. The "enterprise rockstar"(1) programmer of today is very close to the stakhanovite of yesteryear, building his reputation on an army of people making his code actually work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Stakhanov#Record_dispute...

(1) I use "enterprise rockstar" here in a technical narrow sense of someone that spits out a ton of code that kind of works, but to actually operate requires vast amounts of support effort. Force diluters. There are true rockstars out there, but they usually specialize in being force multipliers.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#17

Post by bshimmin »

zooso wrote: post #14
bshimmin wrote: post #9

The landing page really needs to do a much better job of explaining what this does and who it's for, preferably with some visual examples of whatever it is that it does viewable without a requirement for signing up. Right now, I basically have no idea what this is - is it something like Dribbble but for programming? Or is it more like oDesk? Who comes up with the applications? Who does the code reviews? Et cetera. Ne…

Good point. Thanks for the feedback. You really don't need to sign up to experience what projects we offer but some stuff requires sign up as you said. We will make sure that we remove the ambiguities and work on our copywriting. As for your questions : 1- Experts in the field working with us have come up with Applications. We are working with some companies so that they can put sponsored applications on our website…

Thanks. There's probably a lesson here: if two paragraphs of text in a comment on HN does a better job of explaining what your web site does than its own landing page does, maybe your landing page needs a bit of a re-think.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#18

Post by zooso »

firasd wrote: post #12
gfreeman wrote: post #8

Hmm... there doesn't seem to be anything there http://i.imgur.com/2a9kUiu.png I like the idea and aim of the site but was it really necessary to make it completely unviewable without JavaScript? What ever happened to progressive enhancement?

Related: I signed up but saw all the web projects are dependent on Angular or React. I understand that these technologies are good to be familiar with for making a portfolio these days but they're not for me; not what I want to spend my time on. I did join the waiting list for their yet-to-launch iOS projects though.

Perfect. We would love to talk to you about what you would find useful for you on the iOS projects. We have a bunch of projects for iOS but are in the process of refining them. I would be super happy if you emailed me at alif@zyring.com

BTW, the person who is defining the iOS projects is one of the devs on Microsoft Office for iOS and Mac (which ironically is the most complex app for ios).

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#19

Post by zooso »

bshimmin wrote: post #17
zooso wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. Thanks for the feedback. You really don't need to sign up to experience what projects we offer but some stuff requires sign up as you said. We will make sure that we remove the ambiguities and work on our copywriting. As for your questions : 1- Experts in the field working with us have come up with Applications. We are working with some companies so that they can put sponsored applications on our website…

Thanks. There's probably a lesson here: if two paragraphs of text in a comment on HN does a better job of explaining what your web site does than its own landing page does, maybe your landing page needs a bit of a re-think.

lesson learned :)

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#20

Post by benaiah »

zooso wrote: post #10
gfreeman wrote: post #8

Hmm... there doesn't seem to be anything there http://i.imgur.com/2a9kUiu.png I like the idea and aim of the site but was it really necessary to make it completely unviewable without JavaScript? What ever happened to progressive enhancement?

Thanks for feedback. Apologies. Most of the stuff we do requires a bit of javascript. We are going to definitely add something to our backlog so that people with disabled JS can use it.

Seriously, don't worry about this. Worry about problems that more than a miniscule fraction of people actually have. Catering to the 0.0001% of people who disable half their browser and then complain that the web stops working is a waste of time (and I like browsing in w3m as much as anyone).
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