For those who were able to land their first tech job, what projects did you build to get noticed by recruiters? Was it your personal portfolio? An App? A cool product?
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Top comments (7)
I would recommend doing a side project that's in the area of either the topic you want to work in, or using a similar technology. I think that you will gain more from building the project, than having it for display. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have a portfolio, but by doing that you will gain some experience, and be able to show that in interviews.
Remember that people are not necessarily looking at what you have done in the past, so much as what you will be able to bring to their organisation and team. By saying that you learned the skills to build something you enjoy shows enthusiasm and a positive attitude.
Yeah I totally agree. But coming up with a good side project will be the hard part. Especially if you're trying to stand out.
I think that you should also focus on building overall presentation of yourself. Good CV, personal website that is clean and readible, tidy github repo, clear and concise information about yourself in all of these places.
Like mentioned by @ant_f_dev it doesn't have to be about showing your project to anybody. It's more about what you learn.
When coming up with an idea for a project, what works for me is when it's something that I actually need. Specific tool for a thing that me/someone I know currently struggle with. Maybe it's an automation of some daunting task? Perhaps your cousin is struggling with correctly measuring her progress in training for marathon? Simple problems, with the latter being easily solvable in one excel spreadsheet, but hey here's a project idea.
Good luck!
Thank you for your input!
I'm definitely going to keep building projects because that is how I learn things better. Hopefully along the way I get an idea on how to build something useful.
Some excellent points. I started out building some basic tools that I needed. At the time, I wanted to build Windows apps and learned WPF in the process. My first job wanted Silverlight (yes - it was a long time ago). As luck would have it, Silverlight was almost a subset of WPF, so there was an element of transferability of knowledge - I had some grasp of Silverlight even though I hadn't learned it directly.
The topic itself was a quite common one: A shopping App. But the circumstances were what recruiters got interested in me.
First, I worked on the project in a group of 4 developers across Europe (1 from UK, me from Austria, 1 from Nigeria, 1 from Uganda). The project was set up in sprints (so it was very agile based) and had to be finished in 8 weeks. One issue per week, doing pair programming, sprint reviews and such.
In addition, it was not only frontend but Firebase implemented, and it was kind of a "smart" app, which calculated when you should buy certain products again (after 1 week, 2 weeks, etc)
Sounds pretty cool.