Build a portfolio. Impress employers.

Author: kevinbrowne (Page 1 of 2)

Linked Lists with C Summer 2024 Giveaway

As a special summer giveaway, you can take our Linked Lists with C course on Udemy free for a limited time by entering in your e-mail address below.

Offer expires on July 1sy, so sign-up soon!

Linked Lists with C Christmas Giveaway

We’re giving away free access to our Linked Lists with C course on Udemy! Sign-up between now and December 31st at 11:59pm using the link below to receive a promo code.

Linked Lists with C Summer Giveaway

As a special summer giveaway, you can take our Linked Lists with C course on Udemy free for a limited time by entering in your e-mail address below.

Offer expires on June 17th 2023, so sign-up soon!

Linked Lists with C Giveaway

I’ll be having a baby this month and might not be able to make as many regular videos on YouTube. So just in case, and to give people something to watch, for a limited time you can get our Linked Lists with C Udemy course free.

How To Organize Awesome Meetup Events FREE Giveaway

We’re giving away free access to our How To Organize Awesome Meetup Events course on Udemy for the next 5 days!

Christmas Giveaway: Free Linked Lists with C Udemy Course

We’re giving away free access to our Linked Lists with C course on Udemy! Sign-up using the link below to receive the promo code between now and January 1st.

Setting the Stage for Successful Events talk for Meetup Live

This week I was invited by Meetup staff to give a talk at Meetup Live, a series of online events launched during the pandemic and focused on topics like community building and meetup best practices. I gave a talk on Setting the Stage for Successful Events which was a (very) condensed version of our How To Organize Awesome Meetup Events course.

Before some career changes and becoming a father, I spent a lot of time organizing events for the tech and startup community in my region… altogether it was over a hundred events with thousands of unique attendees. For years I had always wanted to create a course or eBook covering best practices for organizing meetups and building community, it felt great to finally get it done. I’m a strong advocate of using community organizing as a way to build up your own skill set, you learn so much organizing events and other activities.

I was very honoured that the actual meetup.com folks themselves decided to invite me out to give this talk… my new life does not allow for very much event organizing anymore, but it kind of felt like a nice “bookend” of sorts to my old “career” organizing events.

Check out the talk below!

Ditch the dial

Creating a great developer portfolio website to showcase your work is an excellent idea. It allows potential employers and clients to get a sense of your skill set and previous work in an easy-to-digest format.

I often see developer portfolios that list skills with some sort of visualization like the above, or perhaps in the form of a dial with a percentage. Ultimately this is a subjective design decision…. but personally… I wouldn’t use these sorts of visualizations.

The problem is that they often don’t convey enough information to make them useful. Often times all they are conveying is the developer’s subjective assessment of their own capabilities relative to one another. Nobody is really “100% skilled” at JavaScript or “full bar skilled” at Java. What’s often the case is the developer is signalling their relative confidence with each technology. Developers often suffer from imposter syndrome and may even be selling themselves short!

My suggestion is to focus more on portfolio projects than anything else, listing the skills utilized in each project beneath the project.

But if you are going to use a visualization, my suggestion is to try to ground it in something less subjective, like perhaps years of experience or projects completed. So that way each bar or dial’s “progress level” represents relative years of experience or number of projects completed. This way the information conveyed is less subjective and less tied to your own self-assessment, and grounded in something more tangible.

7 steps to tackling big projects

One of the more intimidating things with building a portfolio of work is just finding the time!

Practising small coding questions on websites like codingbat.com can be an excellent way to learn.

But the larger projects that will become the centrepiece of your portfolio can’t be completed in an hour, or often even in an afternoon.

In order to tackle larger projects more successfully I strongly suggest the following:

#1 Pick a project that means something to you. If you make the 100th generic restaurant website… that’s perfectly good. But does that really motivate you? Pick something that you’re excited to work on, whether it’s something for a charity or maybe a personal hobby. It will keep you engaged and interested.

#2 Break down the project into small pieces. As small as you are able to!

#3 Assign an order to completing each piece. What pieces do you need to work on first?

#4 Set aside scheduled time to work on the project. It could just be an hour a day, or it could be an afternoon a week.

#5 Track your progress. Track your progress by checking off each piece you complete.

#6 Find support. Let others who will encourage you know about your progress. Find a group of peers online and/or offline in a similar situation and support one another. By letting others know about your project you are creating a form of accountability.

#7 Don’t give up. Every single person who ever completed a large project felt lost or confused at some point, or felt like giving up. Just keep at it, you will finish it!

And finally… when you’re all done, don’t forget to reward yourself somehow!

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