Hello, everyone.
I wasn’t sure whether I should post this in the project feedback section or the applying to jobs section but I chose this section.
To the fellow-learners, I have included a link to a full-stack project that I made from the sorta seeds of a FCC curriculum project. If that’s unclear, what I mean is that I took the “Exercise Tracker” project from the APIs and Microservices Projects and combined it with React to make what seems to be a more presentable project to include in a portfolio. When I first completed the project I thought that it was cool to be able to complete the task but it seemed somehow unpresentable. So in case you’re wondering how to package some of the stuff you’ve been learning on FCC, I hope that my project can serve to inspire you somehow.
To the more experienced people, despite typing what I just typed to the fellow-learners, I feel like my project is like a “toy”. It reminds me of hearing my own voice recorded when I was a little kid and being shocked that I sounded like a tiny mouse. What I mean is that I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on and wrestling with this project (and 2 others that are nearly complete) and yet it seems sorta frivolous and detached from the “real world”. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the act of working on projects like this but do you think that my time would be better spent working on things like landing pages for real businesses to include in my portfolio? Having said all that, I have a couple of questions.
One theory that I have for my lukewarm response to my project is that I haven’t developed an aesthetic sense yet and thus my dissatisfaction. Would you suggest that I spend more time on doing design stuff before plunging into more technical stuff (e.g. I’m excited to work with the Web Audio API and experimenting with hardware) if my goal is to try to get a developer job?
As I choose the next projects to add to my portfolio, I can either explore my interests and see what I can do with the aforementioned Web Audio API or build some sites for a couple business owners that I know. Do you think it would be a wiser choice to include in my portfolio “real world” projects for businesses (seemingly less fun) or projects that result from my true curiosity but threaten to appear toy-like?
If you want to get a developer job,
you have to proof / show, that you are a professional person, who can solve problems & know what you are talking about.
The easiest way is giving workshops & talks, having a YT/Twitch channel and going to meetups. These are the “foot in the door” moments, so even non-techies know, that you are actually walking the walk.
Most of the time no one cares about your Github anymore. That’s stuff for a technical interview, but not to get a first interview. “Hey, I’m a developer, because I can copy code of Wes Bos, Traversy Media & others’ tutorials, I am such a pro!”
An e-commerce site is probably one of the best projects you can have in your portfolio because you can impress both programmers and non technical people (HR). Programmers know that an e-commerce site takes quite a bit amount of logic and a lot of work to put it together while non programmers are very familiar with e-commerce sites and by having one in your portfolio you are telling them that you are ready to build real life projects.
Whatever project you decide to do for your portfolio, make sure it feels like something real, something that people might use, also make sure it is well designed (if you are not a designer just copy a design from the internet).
Remember, to get an interview most likely you will have to deal with HR first, and these people don’t care about your code, they care about what they see. If what they see doesn’t make sense to them or doesn’t look professional design-wise, it’s just going to be hard to even land an interview.
I’m definitely going to research e-commerce info today. To narrow my search a bit/make my ingredient gathering more efficient, would/could the project look something like the following(?):
user can browse through items.
if user chooses an item, the item gets stored in db.
user can continue to choose items.
user can view db items/shopping cart before committing to purchase.
include a button from a service such as Shopify to allow user to purchase item(s).
If this is even an acceptable way of going about it, then it seems that the meat of the work is in coding the database interaction (aside from design stuff)? Or in other words, the “shopping cart” logic is the code that you refer to in your response as being most impressive?