Job search mega post

Posted on by btunbutr

An amazing and free path to learn web development:

Learning web development today

How to get your first job:

My job search tips

Preparing for the technical interview:

https://bryanttunbutr.wordpress.com/tag/data-structures/

https://bryanttunbutr.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/memorize-with-understanding/

Review schedule for long term benefits

https://bryanttunbutr.wordpress.com/2022/01/17/coding-interview-patterns/

Coding Interview Patterns

Posted on by btunbutr

Here are some resources on coding interview patterns:

Gathering software requirements

Posted on by btunbutr

Questions I typically ask

  1. What is your current process?
  2. What are the pain points in the current process?
  3. How would you define an MVP (Minimum Viable Product)? What are the bare minimum of features of an MVP?
  4. What would be on your wishlist for a product?
  • Creating a shared document where the other person can read and write my notes can also be helpful 

Learning web development today

Posted on by btunbutr

If I were starting my coding journey today and I wanted a job as a professional, here are the steps I would take:

  1. Learn from The Odin Project. Build the projects to build a great portfolio and apply for jobs during the full stack portion of the course. This should be enough to land a job.
  2. Keep upgrading skills by using Full Stack Open. This course is awesome because of the exercises including refactoring, building, adding technologies, debugging, etc.
  3. Optional: Learn from App Academy Open. The object oriented programming projects, the data structures and algorithms, React course, and computer science sections will definitely get someone ready for a company with a very high tier of interviewing.

My job search tips

Posted on by btunbutr

I wrote these tips earlier: https://bryanttunbutr.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/how-to-apply-for-your-first-junior-developer-job/ and https://bryanttunbutr.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/how-to-build-an-amazing-resume-for-career-changers/

Here are some additional tips I have:

  • Set your LinkedIn profile to open to new jobs and make this visible to everyone including recruiters
  • Make your LinkedIn headline be something like Software Engineer Actively Seeking Opportunity 
  • Connect with technical recruiters every day. Reach the maximum every day. You must have at least 500 total connections. Add recruiters that have a headline of “We’re hiring.”
  • Have your resume look nice with enough white space. Avoid typos, too many fonts, strange indentations and spacing. Have multiple people check and proofread. Make your hyperlinks blue to stand out.
  • List technologies you used. If you completed a boot camp then list the technologies in the syllabus. Of course be prepared to answer questions and talk about the technologies as well as your role in the project
  • Use live links. Recruiters are often non-technical so the live link demonstrates your coding ability. Make sure it looks good on mobile. Invest the money to not have the 30 second load time on Heroku.
  • Have a section called “Programming Experience” in your resume.
  • Always have an answer to, “What are you building now? What are you learning now?”
  • Be proud and talk about any freelance work you have done for family and/or friends
  • You can and should answer with “I don’t know.” However if you are asked about something similar you can answer that you have similar experience, i.e. “Do you have experience with the ASP.NET MVC framework?” “No but I do with Ruby on Rails which uses the MVC design pattern.”
  • Remember that technology is important but the most important thing is solving a business problem. When describing a project try to think in terms of the business results/use cases, i.e. 1. increased profits, 2. decreased expenses, 3. improved user experience. If this is not possible, explain how your work can help business users i.e. “Created charts and graphs which makes data reports easy to understand and access.”