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I'm curious what you guys think about my education and if it'd be enough for a job in programming. I recently taught myself enough html, css, bootstrap, JavaScript, and jQuery, to come up with a portfolio page completely from scratch: https://www.travisbumgarner.com. It's mostly done but my computer died as I was finishing up so it'll be another few weeks before I can add a few more things and can call it compete. Additionally, I've got a degree in mechanical engineering so I've had experience with Matlab, basic computer science topics, self taught a bit of python, made some stuff with arduino/wiring, and other odds and ends with html. I've got a bunch of free time over the next three months and I'm going to continue to delve into these topics and might try pursuing a job if I have enough experience. huhu fucked around with this message at 12:24 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 05:40
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I programmed on Windows, invited a friend to pay on a Mac, and the whole game was screwed up. I know I know, compatibility on all browsers and such, but working within Khan Academy's setup, I'm not sure where to even begin to fix the issue. Also, it was only my second real attempt at making something in JavaScript. ... I need to work on how I present my work.
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Apr 25, 2015 12:23
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Skuto posted:To his defense, it's not working on Mac. Given that it seems to work in Firefox and Chrome, I presume the problem is with Safari, and modern versions of that only run on Macs. I'm not sure how web devs deal with this, to be honest. All the ones I know have Macs, if you can call that a solution :P I've only been at this for about two months now. I did do the whole website from scratch if that counts for anything. Also, once I get my new computer I'll actually have what I believe to be a worthwhile project... I'll return once I've got some more to show.
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Apr 25, 2015 19:55
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Thanks for all the suggestions. When I mentioned not being finished, I wanted to structure the CSS properly, make sure it was fully responsive, fix the menu on the phone, add descriptions to the images, etc. I went from zero to that website, including creating content, the images, the CSS, in just a few weeks. I was mainly inspired by job applications for mech engineering positions that request a portfolio and I did not want to buy a template. I also do have Github but I managed to register a domain with Amazon and it appears I cannot transfer it for a bit so I am going to keep using Github to keep stuff updated and then upload new copies to Amazon until I can transfer the domain name. (Unless I misunderstood everything and I can actually transfer everything right away to Github) For dynamic driven stuff, would that be like using JavaScript on this page, for example? Then maybe AJAX, PHP, or Ruby on Rails? I am currently looking for the next things to learn and I plan to go a bit deeper into HTML, CSS, and JS but want to expand a bit more. huhu fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Apr 25, 2015 |
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Apr 25, 2015 20:40
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ExcessBLarg! posted:4. Find an open source project in your area of interest and make some contributions to it. Either bug fixes, or small feature enhancements, documentation, etc. There's lots of stuff that can be done here on pretty much any project. As part of "make some contributions" you'll inevitably learn about revision control, how to interact with a team, how to stage a change to be accepted by the project maintainers, etc. Keep track of your contributions (links to commits, pull requests, issues/bug reports) so that you can list them on your resume. Edit: Also as a follow up to my previous request about what you guys thought of my experience, I did apply to a well established start up and did pass their first round interview for a computer programmer with a mechanical engineering background so maybe I do know more than I think... huhu fucked around with this message at 05:15 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 05:11
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From the OP, I'm thinking this is the right thread for this question, I looked in SAL and didn't see a comp sci thread. I'm thinking of going back to school for a masters in computer science. I already have a BS in mechanical engineering and have taken two introductory coding courses. What could I expect in terms of prereqs for a masters degree? I've also already been doing personal study for three months now and getting my hands on as much as I can with Lynda.com, MIT Open Course Ware, Codecademy, Khan Academy, and reading documentation/articles/etc. Random side question, is this the wrong plan of action? Is there something better I could be doing to make the career change?
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May 25, 2015 23:14
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Skandranon posted:What is it you want to do? Do you want to work as a software developer? Or do academic computer science research? sarehu posted:This tweet is true:
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May 26, 2015 23:17
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For anyone that is self taught and got a job, care to share (or pm me) your resume?
huhu fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 03:25
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Is there a category that the languages Java, C++, and Python fall into? I've been looking at jobs and these three keep popping up together. Is there any reason why JavaScript wouldn't fall in there? I've dedicated myself to learning JS first and then moving on to Python since I played around with it before and enjoyed it.
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May 29, 2015 18:28
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Would anyone care to give my website a 2 minute view(as if you were hiring) or a longer view to see if there are any issues? http://www.travisbumgarner.com/ Also, my resume, thoughts? https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B01niieJYRjKN0h3XzRXQnIzZDA/view?usp=sharing There might be some formatting issues, mainly the content at this point, I just created it from scratch and grabbed stuff from my old resume.
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May 30, 2015 21:42
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Sorry I should have phrased that question differently. I just put in a ton of work building the website, custom child theme, templates for pages and posts, accordion on the education page, project sort on the engineering portfolio page, etc. I'm more focused on the quality of the actual website... HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as it relates to web design stuff. My next focus is to continue with MIT's OCW course and Eloquent JavaScript to improve my JavaScript abilities, which I know are far from good.Skandranon posted:Some of the things there are really REALLY basic. FizzBuzz should not be the culmination of your abilities, that is a filter for the bare minimum of what's worth talking to. Edit: Maybe it's better to throw all my solutions on Github and link to it so it's not so easy to find...since they're unpolished kind of stuff. Or maybe just don't show them at all? huhu fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 31, 2015 |
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May 31, 2015 00:14
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Skandranon posted:The problem is there is nothing to prove you didn't copy the answers from some other site  Do people do that? ... Obviously the answer is yes, but ugh. quote:Either way, at best, they provide no benefit, and at worst, could hurt your chances to even get an interview. quote:Also, if you want to get into more web design things, start looking into things like Typescript, AngularJS, React, LESS, etc. Having even the basics in some of those will put you ahead of a lot of candidates. I got my current job entirely by having experience with AngularJS.
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May 31, 2015 03:33
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quote:At the stage where they are looking at your website, it's all about getting an interview. Deciding who to interview is not a comprehensive evaluation, it's a filtering process. You look for reasons not to interview people, so you can focus on just a few. Since the answers can be copied, and they aren't exactly complex problems, at best it's a "he knows some JS". But if there are bugs or problems with the code you posted, it's an easy disqualification, and you don't even get the benefit of shaky nerves to blame. quote:Depends, but not really. Re-inventing the wheel is not a good practice in actual development, so if you try, and do a bad job, you lose points. You have to really succeed there for it to be to your benefit. When you are actually working as a developer, especially in the web, you'll be using a lot of libraries, not writing things from scratch. quote:If you want something that will show you have something of value, learn AngularJS & React, and write your basic resume-ish site (without examples) in both. Have the entire code available on github, for both sites. Then they can see that you built a basic, top to bottom site, of your own (has your picture and poo poo in it) in two modern, in two sought after technologies. Don't try anything fancy, just make sure they work, and follow good practices for what you are making. quote:I completely understand this impulse, but as far as I can tell it doesn't work. Or, at least, it's not the most optimal path towards creating the most optimal programmer that can be created out of an individual for a very large subset of those who have the impulse to learn this way. Alrighty. Thanks for all your input thus far. Pretty burnt out from website updates, reading the JS textbook, and doing practice problems. I'll work on reducing the content of my site tomorrow.
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May 31, 2015 04:55
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The Dreamer posted:This might just be me being nit picky but why isn't the page content centered at desktop screen sizes? It might just be me but I hate seeing websites where the page content isn't centered especially when the site is responsive like yours is.
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Jun 1, 2015 00:43
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Tavistock posted:Hey, does this look good to send to prospective employers? I feel like it needs work as far as the content goes, any suggestions: Screen shorter than 520px causes left side nav text to collapse on itself. Screens shorter than 630px cause top nav to go over image and is then unreadable. I'd suggest adding target="_blank" to your links. Any reason you chose that picture? Your eyes appear to be closed and you've cropped two peoples' heads in half, also it's quite pixelated. I'd suggest working on the mobile display a bit: - your email and GitHub are off center - your menu system looks a bit weird - there's so much empty space (specifically in the about me section) - I'd suggest making the header image responsive - the whole gradient thing falls apart and is confusing in single column view Your blog could use some work. It's a bit of a mind gently caress to look at. Otherwise, it looks pretty good.
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Jun 5, 2015 02:57
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quote:Hey huhu,
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Jul 15, 2015 21:24
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I'm slowly making my way through this thread right now but just wanted to get this question out there as I'm reading. I'm self taught in front end web development (HTML, CSS, JS), have experience with WordPress, and have built 4 websites now. My formal education is in mechanical engineering. I had a phone interview Friday with a head hunter and I'm going in tomorrow for an in person interview in Boston. Any general/specific suggestions?
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Jan 11, 2016 02:16
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KernelSlanders posted:Make them love you and don't discuss salary. Think I did decently well besides they asked me during the phone interview and then in person again what my salary expectations are. They said since I don't have a degree, I'll be competing with Bootcamp and college grads. and the range will probably be 50-60k for whatever job they can find me. Since I know the starting average is closer to $70k would I be an idiot for taking such a low paying job? I feel like they wouldn't have brought me in if they didn't think they could find me a job so I'm not sure if there's truth in the statement about having to accept a lower amount or if something shady is going on.
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Jan 11, 2016 19:28
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Cheston posted:If you can actually do competent JavaScript in a major front-end framework, I wouldn't go below 70k in Boston. SEP? Is that a company? If yes, then no. I was pretty straight with them saying I'm also applying for mechanical engineering jobs for which I do have a degree and experience and if I'm looking at a 70k offer from a MechE firm and a 60k offer from some web design firm, I'm probably going with the MechE position. I'd love to do web design and I'll keep trying to apply but it seems like I'll probably end up in a MechE job.
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Jan 12, 2016 05:25
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My career thus far has been mechanical engineering undergrad, with two internships, then Peace Corps as a civil engineer and now I've been job searching for almost 8 months. Seems that Peace Corps kind of screwed me over and left me in the dust in terms of mech eng. Anyways, I started learning web design for fun about a year and a half ago and a few weeks ago decided to really put an effort into looking for web design jobs. Had like 5 head hunters after me in a week and 4 interviews. Just got an offer and I'm really ready to peace out from this lovely job search. The offer is for $22/hour temp to hire after 3 months. The company is very reputable and one of my very good friends has worked there for 5 years. I'm drafting up an email now to negotiate and I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts. I'm thinking either way, it'd be good experience and they'll either hire me after 3 months or I'll have lots more skills and can return to the temp job I have now. (they'll have me back at any time).
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Aug 12, 2016 00:10
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I've taken a temp to hire job at a web development firm. I started as front end with basic WordPress/CSS stuff but have quickly moved on to more interesting stuff like Django and Business Intelligence tools (front end graphs and charts with data from databases, json files, etc). I'm enjoying my work but there's no promise of full time. I've started looking again at jobs and realize JS/HTML/CSS/WordPress is exactly what I don't want to do. Besides Django and Business Intelligence, I also have experience with Python and Arduino(c++). Any suggestions for fields that would be interesting to check out that wouldn't be a complete pivot from what i know now?
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Nov 3, 2016 22:35
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lemonslol posted:One more thing: I'm in charge of tracking my own hours. Should I track 2 hours for every 1 hour while I am still figuring stuff out? I can't imagine that I should track 5 hours for something it may take someone else 1 hour to do. Adding to all the other comments... This mentality is a very slippery slope. Before you know it, you'll working Christmas Eve at 10pm. Stick up for yourself, this should never happen and if it does start job searching immediately.
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Dec 14, 2016 23:30
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I've been on the job search for over a year now. Probably ~350 jobs at this point. I kind of screwed myself because my resume I think reads that I can't decide on anything because it starts with an undergrad degree and two internships in mechanical engineering, two years with Peace Corps as a civil engineer, and over the last year and a half I've started studying web dev and programming. I got a job in August as a web developer but it was temp to hire and it was all government contract work and nobody wants to spend money on contracts right now with the changes in government so I was laid off. Now I'm back to the job search and the majority of the people contacting me are head hunters for contract work. A friend got me a job at his company and I've been working there while I job search so there isn't such an urgency but I'd like to start my career already. Should I attempt to hold out for full time work or continue to build my resume with great pay from contract work? I'm thinking my temp web dev job might legitimize my abilities a little bit? For what it's worth I'm in Boston.
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Jan 19, 2017 21:29
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I've been contacted by five different head hunters at this point for the exact same position. Why is this happening?
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Jan 25, 2017 17:55
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Would love any comments on this resume and why it's terrible (or not). removed. huhu fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 6, 2017 05:39
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I got referred for a position at a rather respectable company and just finished their coding exercise. It was an awesome challenge which was a good example of the kind of work I'd be doing and I managed to complete it in the given time, even though they suggested 1-2 hours and it took me 2 hours and 50 minutes. The overall goal was to get some data, modify and analyze it, and posts it back. Since I'm self taught, I've never really had a need to work with get/post before and I think that shows in my code. I have a chance to clean up my code, add comments, etc. and then I can submit it again. Should I elaborate on my lack of understanding and that's why my code is sloppy or just let the code speak for me? Thanks so much for your feedback. I'll have some questions later but wanted to get to this issue first.
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Feb 7, 2017 15:45
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dantheman650 posted:Nope. Regular old startups. Perhaps a blessing in disguise that you dodged a terrible startup that can't look more than a few weeks into the future, is going with the lowest bidder for the job, or something else equally dumb. However, I had an established company offer me a position, refuse to negotiate, take the offer away, then make a better offer. Looking back, I'm realizing that company definitely didn't know what the future held for them.
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Feb 8, 2017 00:19
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Has anyone ever worked at a company maintaining a single website? I come from a background on working on multiple websites at once so I'm not sure if I'll like it.
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Feb 22, 2017 15:51
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rt4 posted:How big is the site? Is it more of a "web application" or just a glorified brochure? It's basically a glorified web brochure. The nav on the main page points to about 100 pages so my guess is it's decently large. There are some more dynamic things like a forum but that isn't part of the job description. CPColin posted:I worked at Experts Exchange for ten years AMA. Aside from a few experiments, it was just the one site. Ha, there seems to be a lot more going on there than with the website in terms of diversity of tasks than what I'd be working on.
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Feb 22, 2017 16:22
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huhu posted:Has anyone ever worked at a company maintaining a single website? I come from a background on working on multiple websites at once so I'm not sure if I'll like it. So it sounds like the answer is no? My recruiter asked them what their thoughts were and they said in the interview I sounded like I might get bored with the position. Oops.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:26
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Has anyone done a combo video chat/coding interview before? Any suggestions?
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Feb 28, 2017 03:22
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A bit of a rant below, would really really love some feedback. I've been job searching for over a year now for a web development position. I come from a self taught background but do have a degree in mechanical engineering. I have completed about 10 websites at this point, freelanced and held a contract position, written several coding projects in my free time (stuff with Raspberry Pi, Python scripts for automation, a web scraper, etc.) which are all on my portfolio website or Github portfolio. In the past, my biggest problem was that it looked like I didn't have any interest in a specific thing and might jump as soon as I found some other interesting career to pursue. I have since rewritten my resume and and Linkedin from scratch, purely focusing on web development (except for a completely separate resume for software development positions because I am somewhat experienced in that.) I am getting a ton of hits, actually the first week I had to stop taking calls because I was getting so many interview requests. Now is the point where I'm starting to get rejected from all the positions I've interviewed for and there seems to be a somewhat steady trend of, and this is a direct quote from my most recent rejection, "Ultimately, we are looking for more depth of skill in both coding and product development experience. That said, I want to encourage you to stick with it and stay in touch. Certainly, your personality and attitude are very good and would fit in well here. I am hoping you will stay in touch and, as you develop your skills, we can pursue a role again at some point. " This isn't some automated thing because I have ~20 emails back and forth with this recruiter. I came right out of the Peace Corps to this job search and I've had a temp job for over a year. I'm broke as gently caress and don't think I'd be able to pursue some sort of coding school or something to obtain this mythical experience I don't seem to have even though I've been working so hard at this. What am I doing wrong?
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Mar 2, 2017 16:52
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I hate headhunters. Except the one cool lady who contacted me and we had a lovely chat and she has helped me out a ton. I wish I saved the one voicemail I got that was so bad. My speech to text function for my voicemails thought the guy was speaking Spanish.  
huhu fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 20:13
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For a final round interview I have to do a 45 minute presentation on a project of my choice. I'm just finishing up a project for my makerspace, consisting of one part Raspberry Pi python script and another part Flask website which I was planning on talking about. My discussion points are a technical overview of each part, challenges faced, tools used, and next steps. Anything else I should be considering?
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Mar 12, 2017 17:03
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Ornithology posted:Anyone have suggestions of a resource where I can help get some project ideas? I wanna put my programming skills into practice but I lack creativity and can't think of many ideas for projects. Would be great if the idea has some kind of money making potential even if it's minimal. I'm thinking about possibly making a marketing/review website which I saw a thread about in BFC but not sure if that's worth the time or if it will really help improve my technical chops. Maybe a website where I offer services to create automation technology? Not sure if there would be much demand for that. I'm mostly into Java/C# and would prefer web or mobile projects. You could try looking at where programming intersects other interests/chores. A few examples - I made a tool to help me track Spanish words I see in the Spanish books I read, notification for when a website I visit updates because they have no subscription option, and a raspberry pi security system for a makerspace I'm a member of.
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Mar 14, 2017 23:12
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fantastic in plastic posted:Two years as an "intern" sounds insane. I bet you'd have a larger struggle at first with the entry level position with the learning curve but you'd get up to speed and two years later be moving into a higher level position. Or you could be moving from your internship to an entry level position in two years.
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Mar 18, 2017 14:10
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Kibbles n Shits posted:I wanna know this too. There's nothing I could realistically make that would assist in what I normally do, but I need some resume fodder. I've seen stuff like the Martyr2 project list but stuff like Tetris clones and pig latin generators don't feel like something that would open doors, but maybe I'm wrong. I was thinking of making a web service that logs the user's local weather conditions and generates reports and analytics. Pretty basic dull stuff but at least it looks closer to something I might work on in the real world as a CRUD monkey or whatever. Do you have no hobbies or interests? If you do but are struggling for ideas, mention a few you're most interested in and I'll tell you projects you could work on.
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Mar 19, 2017 19:22
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Thermopyle posted:I'm idly considering looking around for a job just to keep my options open (ever since I started making money as a developer I've been a freelancer or transitioned into the position inside a company I already worked at. This means I have never interviewed/job-searched as a dev). I would say clean it up. It's hard for a person taking a quick look to tell what you did. I went through and removed a bunch of repos, merged a few other small ones, and wrote two sentence descriptions for each of them. Also, you can pin your 6 favorite projects on your main profile page.
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Mar 20, 2017 15:56
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VostokProgram posted:This is exactly the kind of help I was looking for, thank you both. I've made the easy changes and put in a link to my Github, looks like I need to spend a lot of time adding details to my current job. Should I add stuff like Git, SVN, and IDEs to my skills section? Git and SVN definitely yes, IDEs probably not. I'd be glad to review after you make updates - don't want to repeat what the other two guys said.
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Mar 21, 2017 13:06
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Outside of people who work in frameworks like Angular and React - what do you do in your day to day that requires JavaScript? For myself, it's only really been to add plugins for specific functionality like lazy loading or light boxes. For the most part I haven't had a request for more than that. Sometimes I want to add something and just build it myself. However, in interviews, it feels like I should be saying I do more... but the demand has to do more has never really been there so I'm a little confused.
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Mar 23, 2017 04:22
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