Ask HN: What makes a project on an entry-level dev's resume stand out?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23944325

by weakfish • 6 years ago

6 23 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a Poli Sci major getting a minor in CS (long story) and am curious what I can do project-wise to make them stand out from the crowd of simple CRUD to-do lists.

I'm currently working on a web app [0] to track my running data, but it has a long way to go and is frankly fairly useless at the moment.

[0] https://github.com/John123Allison/RunJS

jjgreen• 6 years ago

Tests :-)

mcgrathpm11• 6 years ago

users, showing you learned from user feedback to iterate on the project

andrewstuart4• 6 years ago

The most powerful thing you can do is to fix 100 bugs on an extremely well known open source project, and put that on your resume, with links to all the github issues/commits.

weakfish4• 6 years ago

What would you suggest for finding a project that is sufficiently complex to matter, but not too large for a student to contribute to?

parkaboy2• 6 years ago

Not "extremely well known," but our startup has released open source developer SDKs (currently Android and Arduino) and example apps for our consumer hardware device (haptic wristband). It's just been me and a colleague working on these in our spare cycles.

https://github.com/neosensory

We'll take any help we can get with contributing to any of the projects posted up there.

andrewstuart4• 6 years ago

What programming technologies are you fascinated by, really interested in and love?

Answer that and then I'll suggest projects.

s1t5• 6 years ago

Pick a project that you already use yourself. You'll have a lot more context and will be much less likely to just give up at the first problem you run across.

SwiftyBug• 6 years ago

You should check out projects made for Deno[1]. It's a new promising. It's like Node, but it runs TypeScript natively. One thing that will dictate the success of this project is if the community can migrate Node's ecosystem into Deno. There's plenty of projects being built for Deno.

[1] https://deno.land/

hackermailman• 6 years ago

Check code triage site

Pick one where someone actually reviews PRs and there isn't hundreds of them sitting open from months ago

econnors• 6 years ago

create something – like you have – but ship it to production. opening a project and seeing setup instructions like you have makes it seem like one of those other crud apps, nobody will take the time to do it.

"Check out this thing I made - runwithjohnjs.com" will have a much greater effect.

For bonus points, write about how you built it (just use dev.to).

A cool project will get you in the door, then you just have to perform well on the interview (for which many prep materials exist online).

weakfish4• 6 years ago

Cool! I appreciate the feedback. I actually do have a Heroku hosted production environment setup with CI/CD, but it's in maintenance mode until I feel comfortable showing it off.

runT1ME• 6 years ago

While personal projects are good, even more impressive is contributing features and/or bug fixes to larger open source projects.

It's sometimes much more challenging to dive into an existing project, learn their frameworks/style/design, and work with existing contributors.

However it's also much closer to what happens on a real development team. Whereas a project with a single author can show coding skill, working in a large open source project shows collaboration, communication, and soft skills as well.

It is a huge gold star on a resume in my opinion.

mettamage• 6 years ago

How do you get the ball rolling on that and are there any good open source projects to start on?

detaro• 6 years ago

I'd suggest going by what you use. At least for me, the initial motivation worked way better when fixing a bug on or improving something I regularly use. That can range from some random browser extension to tooling of a programming language you use. Sending PRs to one-person projects can be a bit hit-and-miss if they are active, but on the other hand they're often happy about any contribution they get that shows someone else cares about their thing. On the other hand, large projects are more likely to have a community where someone might help a first-time contributor through the steps.

jppope• 6 years ago

Go do REAL client work/ side work. You're half-brother's cousin's neighbor desperately needs a site/ app / script / etc, and you should build it for them. Contrived projects that lack the messiness of the real world tell you virtually nothing about an applicant.

emerged• 6 years ago

I would go for a candidate who came up with an idea, designed the solution, got some other people involved, and executed on it well. Solo projects are good but to really sell your value it helps to show you can work well with others.

maps7• 6 years ago

I think exposure and knowledge of the technologies that my team uses is the most important.

Our dev environment set up, coding standards, testing standards, release process etc will all be taught when joining the team.

I haven't seen it before but if you were able to say I fixed these bugs on this project (that had the same stack as my teams') then it would be something that stands out - I should take my own advice!

Ask HN: What makes a project on an entry-level dev's resume stand out?

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