MeltingIce Blog

I’ve had a lot of thinking time lately. I was on vacation for a week, and now that I’m back to work, life is flying by even faster than before. I figured this would be a good opportunity to take a breather and look at where I’ve come from, what I’m doing now, and what the future holds. However, instead of making this a fully self-indulgent rambling post of uninteresting facts, I figured I would shift the focus and instead lend some advice. If you are an aspiring developer currently stuck in that anxious and uncertain void of jobless purgatory, I hope my words here will at least create a spark of inspiration or act as a simple guideline to your career path.

I like things that are concise and to the point, so that’s how it’s going to be from here on.

• Hack on some side projects in your spare time, and host them at GitHub. If anything, this is the most important thing you can do. At least 80% of the emails I get from recruiters start with, “I saw your [X] project on Github, and…”
• Get involved in social media. It doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) straight up marketing. Just talk with fellow developers. Build a reputation. Don’t write off Twitter because you “don’t get the point of it”. Leverage it and build connections.
• The open-source community is the absolute best place to build professional connections. LinkedIn is a start, but is less than the bare minimum. Contribute to some open-source projects, even if you didn’t start them yourself. It’s rewarding, and is something you can brag about to companies/friends.
• It’s boring, and can be a pain, but build a portfolio website. It should be short, concise, and pretty. This is the least important of all the points, but is always nice to see from an employer standpoint.
• Don’t write a book for your résumé, as that’s the quickest way to be ridiculed. The most important thing is your passion, your work, your willingness to learn, and your teamwork abilities.

This is what I’ve done over the past few years, and it’s worked amazingly for me. I’ve received offers out of the blue from companies like: Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Mozilla, and so on. I’ve also become friends with some amazing developers whom I talk with on a weekly basis. I could not be more thankful for their willingness to collaborate, and their shared passion.

I hope this post helps at least one person out there. Don’t sell yourself short, and show some passion. It pays off.

Clarifications:

First, most of the offers I have received were offers to interview. Some straight up asked me if I was interested in full-time employment, while others asked me if we could chat sometime about opportunities. Rarely will a company come straight out and say, “we want to hire you for X salary starting tomorrow.”

Secondly, when I said “don’t write a book”, I meant that figuratively. Writing a book on a programming language or design concepts would be very impressive and a huge bonus.