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I wanna work at Instagram

iwannaworkatinstagram.com

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Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#201
I hate to be the debbie downer here. I love her ambition and ability to market herself, but when you are attempting to sell yourself as a visual & UX designer shouldn't your design be original?

Both this page and her portfolio are blatant "adaptations" of inspectelement's html5 single page portfolio design http://inspectelement.com/html5portfolio/

The top bar, color choices, structure, font, her "logo" for her portfolio, the contact me portion... all of that comes straight from the template

edit: added "contact" part

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#202
post #111

To write an effective resume you need to keep the audience in mind. The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built? Answers to questions such as "What are your skills?", "What is your philosophy?", and "What is your passion?" mostly just get in the way and waste the reader's time. A flashy appeal for a job like this one might get the attention of Instagram, b…

Agreed. My take was that this reads like it was written for all of HN, not the one-to-five people who will be doing the actual hiring.

Isn't that the strategy? How can it reach the 1-5 hiring people if the masses at HN don't upvote?

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#203
post #40

Don't want to sound rude, but the lens ("I made this") has pretty bad type work. Kerning is off, the curve is not right ( http://i.imgur.com/tpDqv.png ). The drop shadow is also strange. Overall, there's not enough attention to detail.

I’m disappointed by her use of straight apostrophes (') in contractions and straight quotes ("") around quotations. Using typographic apostrophes, typographic quotation marks, and em dashes in the right places makes all the difference, especially in headlines. Nowadays, web designers have so many typographic tools to work with, like @font-face and lettering.js, but basic punctuation and formatting don’t get enough lo…

As a technically lay person who does care about this, what are some tools that I can use to write web copy with typographically correct apostrophes and quotes (or convert it afterwards)? Am I supposed to use the html code or special key combination every time?

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#204

Wow. Reading the negativity in some of these comments makes me want to think twice about sharing something I've made with HN. That's a bad thing. It's not perfect. It's not the first time anyone's ever had this idea. Maybe you wouldn't hire her. Who cares? Not everyone's running for best-most-perfect-idea-in-the-universe-ever. She made a thing. Good on her.

Agreed. As a newbie in the HN community hoping to share some of my work soon, this is really disappointing. There's a difference between being constructively critical and judging. I would welcome more of the former.

Don't let it stop you. Understand going in that there will be noise in the feedback, and to sort through it to extract the valuable feedback. Its not personal, because the judgmental don't really know you.

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#205
post #111

To write an effective resume you need to keep the audience in mind. The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built? Answers to questions such as "What are your skills?", "What is your philosophy?", and "What is your passion?" mostly just get in the way and waste the reader's time. A flashy appeal for a job like this one might get the attention of Instagram, b…

The hiring manager will base about 95% of the decision on the answer to one question: What have you built? I think this is approximately as true as "Customers make purchasing decisions approximately 95% based on product quality and 5% on those trivial details like marketing." By all means, build stuff. But after having achieved some level of building stuff, the returns are far greater in attractively marketing the st…

You might want to re-read my comment. Nowhere did I say that marketing doesn't matter. Nowhere did I say that you should just build more stuff and not write a resume to market yourself.

On the contrary, my comment began "To write an effective resume..." Translation: the rest of the comment is going to be advice to my fellow HNers about how to market themselves. I'm not sure how you interpreted "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light" as "just create another project on github".

My point is that this particular resume answers all the wrong questions. All the questions I don't really care about when I'm making a hiring decision. Only at the end does she say "So... What're ya waiting for!?" and link to her portfolio. And her portfolio isn't nearly as well done as all the fluff sections ("I'm vehement about creating kick-ass interactions" and "I never wear high heels"). This is a mistake. The most prominent and polished part of her resume should showcase her actual work. She should answer the question "What have you built?" right away and in impressive fashion. Note that the question isn't "Have you built stuff?"; it's "What have you built?" So, the fact that Stuff Got Built, as you say, isn't very important. I don't care that "clearly, she can build stuff." I care to see what she's built. So, show it to me. In other words "showcase your actual work well and present it in the most impressive possible light."

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m disappointed by her use of straight apostrophes (') in contractions and straight quotes ("") around quotations. Using typographic apostrophes, typographic quotation marks, and em dashes in the right places makes all the difference, especially in headlines. Nowadays, web designers have so many typographic tools to work with, like @font-face and lettering.js, but basic punctuation and formatting don’t get enough lo…

As a technically lay person who does care about this, what are some tools that I can use to write web copy with typographically correct apostrophes and quotes (or convert it afterwards)? Am I supposed to use the html code or special key combination every time?

If you're on the Mac:

    “ = Alt-[
    ” = Alt-Shift-[
    « = Alt-\
    » = Alt-Shift-\
    ‘ = Alt-]
    ’ = Alt-Shift-]
    — = Alt--
For other operating systems there are typographic layouts, such as http://ilyabirman.ru/english/typography-layout/

There are libraries that can do the conversion, such as SmartyPants: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/

In HTML, it's pretty easy to remember a few typographic characters that you'll need, see http://www.degraeve.com/reference/specialcharacters.php

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#207
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a technically lay person who does care about this, what are some tools that I can use to write web copy with typographically correct apostrophes and quotes (or convert it afterwards)? Am I supposed to use the html code or special key combination every time?

If you're on the Mac: “ = Alt-[ ” = Alt-Shift-[ « = Alt-\ » = Alt-Shift-\ ‘ = Alt-] ’ = Alt-Shift-] — = Alt-- For other operating systems there are typographic layouts, such as http://ilyabirman.ru/english/typography-layout/ There are libraries that can do the conversion, such as SmartyPants: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ In HTML, it's pretty easy to remember a few typographic characters that you'll…

Thanks for those suggestions. So, then, do you (or others) actually use those key combinations instead of ' and " while writing/typing? That seems like a fairly heavy re-working of a very low level muscle-memory process that would take me a long time to habit-change.

I don't use any of the software that Smartypants supports, but I just started playing with Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ yesterday, and it has a --smart flag, so that's probably what I'll go with.

As I also recently started trying to learn vim (it's hard), I might try this: http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2005/10/smart_quotes_and_... too.

In case anyone else is in a similar position.

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#208
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on the Mac: “ = Alt-[ ” = Alt-Shift-[ « = Alt-\ » = Alt-Shift-\ ‘ = Alt-] ’ = Alt-Shift-] — = Alt-- For other operating systems there are typographic layouts, such as http://ilyabirman.ru/english/typography-layout/ There are libraries that can do the conversion, such as SmartyPants: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/ In HTML, it's pretty easy to remember a few typographic characters that you'll…

Thanks for those suggestions. So, then, do you (or others) actually use those key combinations instead of ' and " while writing/typing? That seems like a fairly heavy re-working of a very low level muscle-memory process that would take me a long time to habit-change. I don't use any of the software that Smartypants supports, but I just started playing with Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ yesterday, and it ha…

For my blogs, etc. I just process everything via Textile/SmartyPants/similar.

For other writing, I don't bother to insert proper quote marks, but usually use a proper dash.

BTW, Mac OS X since 10.6 can automatically replace quotes in any Cocoa textview, but I have it turned off.

The problem with "smart typography" is that is must be language-aware: quotes used in «Russian» are different from “English” and „German“ and »other« »styles»: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English_usage_of_quotation_...

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh ... that would be spammy. And I gave up trying to work in quant finance. Instead I'm returning to what I know: entrepreneurship.

I've been interviewing technology interns at a finance company and every single one has said "I'm very quantitative and want to learn more about high frequency trading." I haven't been able to figure out what they mean by that. I think they just heard that's where the money is.

Seems to characterize that labour market. Lots of math, stats & CS people have heard that they can turn brains into $ through the magical zero-sum game of the markets. Thank ederman.

Re: I wanna work at Instagram

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m disappointed by her use of straight apostrophes (') in contractions and straight quotes ("") around quotations. Using typographic apostrophes, typographic quotation marks, and em dashes in the right places makes all the difference, especially in headlines. Nowadays, web designers have so many typographic tools to work with, like @font-face and lettering.js, but basic punctuation and formatting don’t get enough lo…

As a technically lay person who does care about this, what are some tools that I can use to write web copy with typographically correct apostrophes and quotes (or convert it afterwards)? Am I supposed to use the html code or special key combination every time?

  As a technically lay person who does care about this, 
  what are some tools that I can use to write web copy 
  with typographically correct apostrophes and quotes
I use Textpattern CMS, which has built-in support for Textile (they were built by the same developer.) Textile converts marked-up text input to valid, well-formed XHTML and also inserts character entity references for apostrophes, opening and closing single and double quotation marks, ellipses and em dashes.

http://textpattern.com/

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