I’m here looking for some good advices, since I keep applying for all the possible junior positions in London that I can find on the job boards since a month and a half, more or less and I still haven’t been able to land not even one interview.
I’m currently working full time in a restaurant, so for example it is almost impossible to do some networking, meetups like the freecodecamp here are on Saturday and there’s no chance for me to be out of work on that day of the week.
I do have a portfolio at this address, actually it would be much appreciated to have some feedback from you! www.marcocaramaschi.com
I would like to share my cv as well, in case you want to give me a hand and just leave me your thoughts on it,it would be precious!
In my experience a month and a half isn’t that long when it comes to job hunting. Keep working at it. If you browse around in the Getting a Developer Job, you’ll find a bunch of posts where people (including myself) talk about their experiences and advice for landing a developer job.
Keep looking and keep up the faith. You’re bound to land an interview someday.
I just have a few minor comments (hope you don’t mind) but overall it’s really very good.
On your YelpCamp for example, if the photos/thumbnails are of varying sizes, your boxes come out looking uneven in height. A quick fix will be to do this
.thumbnail img{
max-height: 150px; // add this
}
.thumbnail{
min-height: 20em; // add this
}
On EnergyFood, add some padding so the logo and the “Signup” doesn’t touch the edge of the browser.
iWeatherApp – looks really great.
– I say, just keep on adding more portfolio projects… to increase your skills and show potential employers your full range of skills.
You need more projects. YelpCamp has to go, it’s a code-along project from an online course with almost 200000 students. Every recruiter probably saw hundreds of those at this point. Your other sites need some polish all around.
Portfolio:
scroll down button should not be touching the very bottom of your hero header
scroll down button is not aligned horizontally, very visible on mobile
portfolio images are extremely pixelated, I can see your browser bar with 10+ tabs in one of them
“copyright Marco Caramaschi” on portfolio sub-pages hugs the left edge of the screen, needs padding to match homepage
Energy Food:
Navbar badly needs padding
Typography looks like it wasn’t given any attention, I get Arial and the same font weight on the whole site
All headings after “GET FOOD FAST — NOT FAST FOOD” are not center aligned
extremely low quality images in the gallery section
even less padding on mobile, “Hello, we’re Energy Food” paragraph hugs the edges, “I’m hungry” and “Show more” squish together on a small screen, gallery is still 4 columns even though that’s tiny on mobile
pricing cards have no vertical margin whatsoever on mobile and blend hard
iWeather (best one of the bunch):
phone image still says “Dave Gamache”, looks kinda bad
first image (upper halves of two phones) looks bad on mobile, I’d just replace it below 768px width
no vertical margin on registration form on mobile
Not trying to be harsh but I believe this is the level of scrutiny recruiters give to your projects, if you have enough non-tutorial projects to convince them to look that deep.
I think you should be able to code in vanilla, as I noticed you used jQuery which is fine but that does not guarantee you will pick up different languages quickly. In order to convince them of your quality you should build couple of things in pure JS. Add Codepen, show me your skills of how to get things done. Are you able to build things in vanilla CSS? Familiar with NodeJS or any other back-end stuff. It is not only building things, you must be able to explain your choices of using some frameworks. What are the pros or cons, why are you using them.
Thank you so much for the insights!I will improve them as you suggested!The only project which was with a tutorial was actually YelpCamp,I added it instead of this one: http://www.marcocaramaschi.com/Trackster/index.html
because I wanted to put a project were I was doing some API request and YelpCamp looked way more juicy than this once completed. But at the end you’re right, I will take it off…Or maybe I could refactor it into something else,like clubs or cinemas,what do you think?
Well, anyway thank you for the precious suggestions!
Hi Marco!
I’m in the same situation as you right now - OK. Not exactly, I live in the UK as well, but I’m still in the middle of that Udemy bootcamp!
Anyway, I asked the same question a few weeks ago about job opportunities in London, the requirements, the must-have skills, etc. From the feedback I had, React seems to be the hottest thing right now there. Indeed.co.uk seems to suggest that React is one most demanded front-end libraries too. So give it a go! Try to build some stuff with React, it will pay sooner than later!
Personally, I’m planning to dive deep in React, build 2-3 web apps, and start applying by the end of January. You’ll be employed by then, I hope!
On the face of it they look very good in places, but I agree in that there should be easy access to some GitHub repos, so recruiters/developers can then take a deeper look at the code etc.
As an aside, how do you insert an image and show it on all the different devices as you have throughout the site?
After reading your portfolio introduction i noticed a few things.
“I’m looking for an opportunity to work for a company where I can use my HTML CSS and JavaScript skills to improve the overall performance.” How does that benefit any company? essentially what you are implying is you want to work at a company so that YOU can build up your own skills. What value are you offering to the company itself? Try and tailor your introduction so you can clearly explain the value you can bring to the company so that they can justify hiring you.
I will extend from what @Modestas said: apart from HTML, CSS, Javascript; what else do you know related to web development?
You should list EVERY single skill you have that related to web development. You know both JS and jQuery? Put both of them in. Do you know webpack, gulp, scss, bootstrap, git,…? Put them in. Those are things recruiters want to see: buzz words.
And the big main image is not necessary. Go straight to the point: showing what you know.
