What does a fresh hired, noob coder's repo look like?

Career Advice
1

If you just got hired, send me a link to your GitHub repo. I kinda want to see what mine needs to look like for someone to take it seriously.

I haven’t put any of the fcc projects I’ve done on there because I feel they aren’t complex enough to impress anyone. They are just a couple of lines long and don’t do anything special.

I’m working on the frameworks projects to put up, but my repo is still mostly empty. I had about 10 projects in mine but I deleted them after I kept getting told I’m not experienced enough.

2

It depends. Contrary to popular belief, a GitHub profile is not a resume. I’ve been a professional developer for 5 years and I don’t have any projects on GitHub. Build cool stuff. Be able ready to talk about your cool stuff to an interviewer. Be ready to talk about what you liked best about it, why you made the choices you did, and what challenges you over came.

1 Like
3

If you go to the curriculum page, and go down to the “coding interview prep” click on that, and click on take home projects. Lots of good stuff like the recipe box. Of course the app is just one part, you want to style that and make it look amazing is the other half.

4

I’m not sure I follow your logic. It wasn’t enough so you thought less would be better?

But as pointed out, just keep building stuff and putting it up. Build a portfolio page and put live versions there. I’m not a big fan of hosting it on github pages - you should be able to set up a web site and get a domain name.

I do think a git hub presence is good, to hold your code. Maybe not all employers care if you can do git, but many of them do. Twice I’ve had interviewers pull up my github profile and go through it with me. YMMV.

5

Trying to build up your GitHub repo for the sake of job applications is the wrong way to go about things.

In general, the first thing that you should be doing is building up your knowledgebase and skills. Are you looking to go front-end, back-end, or full-stack? Focus on one of those and learn, study, & practice. You should code as often as you can, but not all the code you write should necessarily go on your GitHub repo (leave really basic exercises and “Hello World” templates on your local computer).

Keep in mind that before most recruiters or hiring managers even bother to check out your GitHub profile, they’re way more likely to review your resume and LinkedIn profile first. If either of those don’t pass muster, they’re not going to bother looking at your GitHub. So work on those first, before trying to build up your GitHub repo.

Also, something else you should keep in mind that having an active GitHub repo doesn’t mean you’ll get extra consideration for any jobs. If you’re trying to build it up for more job consideration, that’s a totally backwards approach. There are lots of developers in the world who are extremely active on GitHub—you’ll never beat them for starters, and chances are pretty good that someone with more active GitHub history will apply for the same job as you, so that really won’t help you. Focus instead on building just one really cool project if you’re going to take the GitHub approach.

Also, remember that putting up your own projects on GitHub is just one way to show activity. You can also collaborate on a project with someone else you know, or contribute to an open source project. That will help you learn Git better too, as you’ll have to use branches and pull requests.

Seeing as you haven’t posted any code on FCC, or a link to a portfolio site, I have no way of guessing what you currently know. But if you’re looking to get job-ready, you absolutely need to have solid knowledge of HTML, CSS (and one of the preprocessors like Sass, along with one of the methodologies like BEM or SMACSS), and client-side JavaScript (both ES5 and ES6) at a minimum. One of the front-end frameworks would be highly recommended too (Angular, React, or Vue). If you don’t have this solid grounding yet, that’s what you should be focusing your time on first. All of that will give you the knowledge to build something really cool.

1 Like
6

Not to diminish any of the great advice here, but since you asked, here is my github and here is my portfolio. I’m not holding these up as the best examples, just that they’re mine. (And I’m always open to constructive criticism.)

My status is that I finished the all the FCC certs (legacy, pre beta) and am actively searching for work. I just had a nice freelance React Native job on Upwork, and am currently working on example projects for two prospective employers.

But again, YMMV. Different locations have different needs, and different people have better skills at selling themselves. But since you asked…

I should also point out that some people put links to their stuff in the FCC profiles so you might find some other links to check out there.

7

It was a completely emotional decission based on disappointment and frustration

@astv99 that makes sense. my HTML/CSS is decent. I’ve been using those since 2014. Js finally clicked for me earlier this year. I’m focusing on node.js and react right now and I’m still kinda wonky with MySQL and MongoDB.

All that most recruiters I’ve come across care about is years of experience so I can’t really use them right now. I’ve been trying to think of things to stuff my GitHub repo with but you’re probably right about that approach being ass backward.

I never noticed the take-home projects but I’ll start working on those. What do you think i should focus on first though: take-home projects or building 1 interesting thing?

8

In ideal world, I will say go for one interesting thing. Everyone has one dream project, try to start build your dream project. That dream project will be your quality work. But it will take time and you want a job as soon as possible. So go for take home projects.

Take home projects at freeCodeCamp are good, but some are not that difficult. Here you will be creating in quantity but not in quality. You can modify that projects into a quality work.

Like an example, Tic Tac Toe game. It is a simple game so quantity work. But when you want to design your portfolio website on Tic Tac Toe game, then it becomes a quality work. By doing this, both quality and quantity work is done. And can show it to others.

9

No HR specialist or Applicant Tracking System is going to look at your GitHub repo and understand your capabilities. Get past that big hurdle first. Also, keep in mind that there are projects from your past employers that you are not allowed to post on your GitHub repo. GitHub is not the best indication of what you’re capable of.