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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

#21

Post by zooso »

pacala wrote: post #16
zooso wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 matchin…

Thanks. I agree."The art of matching a problem with a solution with minimal effort" will be the core of software engineering The rest will someday be automated or delegated. (just like any other engineering field matured to that)

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#22

Post by zooso »

exratione wrote: post #11
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 wo…

Interesting.

"Functional examples for software that lacks good functional examples" sounds super valuable for a portfolio also they create tangible value for people who need them. Your dropwizard example at https://github.com/exratione/scala-dropwizard-guice-example is a perfect example.

Thank you for your feedback.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#24

Post by iandanforth »

As someone who is hiring right now for a front-end position I really really hope this takes off. Far too many people have no realistic or publicly available code. Even for the back-end positions we're hiring for it would be awesome to see a custom implementation of something like to-do app.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#25

Post by gfreeman »

benaiah wrote: post #20
zooso wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I agree it's probably not worth spending much time on for most sites but I just get annoyed when the page is completely blank. It takes very little effort to stick a tag on the landing page that contains a few paragraphs explaining what the site does and what services it offers. That at least gives me some information that I can use to decide whether or not I want to trust the site by allowing script execution.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#27

Post by zooso »

clyfe wrote: post #26

Work for free and don't get paid, because, hey! You'll get tons of experience and build your portfolio. Now on a crowd-source scale! Sucker!

We don't charge anyone for doing the projects and all the code that a person does is owned by themselves (we dont even host your code or know where it is). Anyone that works on Zyring can do whatever they want with their code.

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#28

Post by zooso »

iandanforth wrote: post #24

As someone who is hiring right now for a front-end position I really really hope this takes off. Far too many people have no realistic or publicly available code. Even for the back-end positions we're hiring for it would be awesome to see a custom implementation of something like to-do app.

perfect. We would love to talk with you more to see what you will see as valuable on the resume of a candidate. I will be really happy if you could spare a few moments anytime you are free. My email is alif@zyring.com

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#29

Post by woah »

clyfe wrote: post #26

Work for free and don't get paid, because, hey! You'll get tons of experience and build your portfolio. Now on a crowd-source scale! Sucker!

I'm guessing you are someone who does not enjoy programming? Did your parents pressure you to take it up to have a well paying job?

Re: Build your portfolio by working on interesting projects

#30

Post by memonkey »

zooso wrote: post #5
emerongi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you written something like that? I think programmers should have a right to a personal life as well. My mother has never had to "build a portfolio" outside of her job ever. Whatever she had accomplished in her professional career shows how skilful she is. Yet you're probably lazy if you don't go home and start churning out code, am I right?

Co-founder here. I am completely agreeing with you and I am one of the people who hates the culture you mentioned. We created this website for people who are new to programming or people changing careers. People who have not taken a university path (taken online courses, self taught) but find it difficult to get a job because they don't have anything on their resume. They find it intimidating to contribute to open so…

I am one of those self-taught no degree developers currently building my own portfolio. It definitely is intimidating to contribute to open source projects not to mention learning the projects/technology to be able to contribute. But as for my own projects, it's increasingly discouraging to find out my ideas have been done inside and out. I think the only thing keeping people like me going is the passion of figuring out HOW to do it.

But then there are things like data structures and algorithms which are backboney but wholly unnecessary unless you want to work at Google. So, that's another thing. Because I can build a bunch of projects but what if I don't have the data structs/algo? Or what are the projects I can accomplish that implement those things?

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