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Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

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Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#21

Post by franciscop »

My first freelancing job (previous jobs were internships) came from this project getting to the HN front page: https://umbrellajs.com/

It basically skyrocketed from there to what you can see in https://francisco.io/resume/ , with basically all experiences afterwards building on top of that (either directly, by reference or just as credentials for the next ones). People (including Google) also seem to love https://picnicss.com/ and I normally use it for showing my front-end skills.

Something I found surprising is that I got a really high quality contacts from my public projects. I would say about 50% of the job offers I get through my developer persona are high quality which I consider (even if many don't work in the end) vs what I used to get through Linkedin or even Facebook (both closed now) which were exactly 100% low quality/SPAM.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#23

Post by andanotherthing »

sabarasaba wrote: post #6

Back in 2012-2013 I was learning about javascript and nodejs was the new kid in town. I started learning about express and mongodb and within a few weeks I manage to create a scraper for torrentz.eu to index a bunch of movie torrents and fetch their metadata from imdb/omdb and trailers from youtube. I built a pretty UI and publish the website in the chrome store as an app. It quickly began to grow and was averaging a…

That's a great story! How long after you started learning JS did you start making the movie app?

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#24

Post by kowdermeister »

First real job was granted not on portfolio (no GitHub in 2006) but based on pure sympathy and luck. It was a job board project.

I had done a few website before, but nothing significant.

I think it does not matter what's in your portfolio as long as you've released a few things and did everything to make to them look good. Not necessarily design but presentation, documentation, testing and function.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#25

Post by mrlyc »

In 1984, I wrote a BBS for the Commodore Vic-20 which had up to 63 public and private rooms (message areas), private email and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. The topics covered everything from general chitchat to string theory. The board was very popular with each user spending an average of 70 minutes on it.

One of my users said "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic-20 can program!" and hired me to write code for MSI portable data terminals. That same guy now wants me to work with him at Google.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#26

Post by soneca »

Started learning to code 9 months ago, ~2 months ago landed my first job as junior web frontend developer.

I did a code challenge as application, so I believe this was the most important code. But this is my portfolio page (untouched since I got the job): http://rodrigo-pontes.glitch.me

I believe the most important project in it was this To Do app because it shows I can ship things that work:

http://www.dediddo.com/ https://github.com/deltasoneca/Dediddo-to-do-list

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#28

Post by the-dude »

neverminder wrote: post #8

I got my first job in a company that was desperate, because their only other developer was leaving in days. Got my second job under similar circumstances. And a third one. I did well at all of those companies and left on my own accord. I should also mention that none of those companies were even on a map as far as serious software development is concerned. Reality is that companies that are not desperate will be pick…

> forever looking and never really giving anyone a chance

Or they have some bad attrition.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#29

Post by perlgeek »

I made my name known in the Perl community through answering questions on perlmonks.org, IRC and a few mailing lists.

Somebody drove me home when I attended a local event, and a few years later, that person hired me (and is now my direct supervisor).

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught developers, what repo helped land your first job?

#30

Post by ryan21030 »

I got a job working at boohoo and I think this repo did a lot for me - http://github.com/DrRoach/Dynamicimage.

It showed I could create a proper project which follows best practices like CI ect. It also helped that it was pretty relevant to the type of business and something that they themselves could potentially find useful.

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