First week of November plans

#productivity #webdev #welcome #discuss

What I'm working on

I've enjoyed the idea of cloning things as projects to put on your portfolio. Some advantages of cloning an existing site are you don't have to think about the UI too much, you have ideas of what functionality to include, and there might be other clone projects you can reference. With that being said, I've been working on a medium clone, something like Conduit.
For this project, I'm planning to use the MERN stack with redux and typescript.
I've already built out a lot of the auth for the web app, so I'm excited to build the core functionality for the medium clone. I'll be updating my progress through blog posts.

Experience job hunting

My experience with the job hunt hasn't been the best, but I'm determined to find out what my problem is. My current issue right now has been that I haven't been getting many interviews. I think this could be because of my portfolio, it might not be strong enough. I'm hoping that using typescript to build the medium clone will put me on some people's radar.

Thank You for reading! Let me know what you're working on, what worked and what didn't work for you during the job hunt, or your experience learning/using typescript.

Top comments (2)

Chad Adams • Nov 3 '20 • Edited

Best of luck. I’m currently doing something very similar too. I’m creating a YNAB (You Need A Budget) clone. Not because I want to put it on my resume but because I want to create a much cheaper alternative to YNAB or EveryDollar. I personally don’t see the point in cloning a site for the sake of putting it on your resume. To me it’s more impressive to showoff a complete product where you’re making money.

When I was looking for a job I did the following things...

Made a Linkedin account
Got a professional picture (Don’t forget to smile, show people you’re friendly)
You can try reaching out to recruiters on LinkedIn however I never had any luck with them. So what I did was I reached out to companys I would like to work for. If they had job openings listed on their website I would apply if they don’t I would email them and ask.
Whenever I would apply for jobs and if I haven’t heard anything back within a week I would email the company or give them a call and ask if they had the chance to review my job application. Wanted to show I was very interested.
Polished up my resume (had several people look at it, get some feedback)
Made a personal website / portfolio website (Which is open source)
Got a professional email e.g me@chadalen.com instead of chadalen923@gmail.com
Went through my GitHub only show repos I think are worth showing. (Though I haven’t done any open source projects in years)

That at least got me infront of the employer.

Joseph Louie • Nov 3 '20

I think it's fun cloning things, especially if you're trying to learn a new technology or seeing if you can implement a certain feature. I would agree that it is so much more impressive if you have a product that people use and pay for.

Thank You for the tips! I definitely should email companies back after not hearing from them in awhile. I'll try to do more of points 3 and 4.

DEV Community

First week of November plans

What I'm working on

Experience job hunting

Top comments (2)

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