Get your first developer job

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello everyone happy Monday to you all yes an unusual live stream day for us we usually do it on Wednesdays but very happy to be joined today by Hussein who has been a professional developer for over 10 years currently working at Shopify also a boot camp mentor and as you can probably guess from that very passionate about helping people get into Tech so what we're going to do today is have a bit of a q a session with Hussein Who as a hiring manager has interviewed hundreds of developers and recently participated in a grueling 100 plus hours of technical interviews himself so pretty perfectly placed to provide us with details about how to get hired we're going to be talking series resumes LinkedIn profiles portfolios and projects finding jobs to apply for all interview prep types of interviews networking and follow-up and assessing your job offers when you do get them plus some people have already taken me up on the offer of leaving some questions in the chat because the whole reason we do these things live is so you have a chance to ask the things you want to know but before we do anything I would like to extend a huge warm welcome to Hussein thank you for joining us thank you for having me Leanne I appreciate it and happy to help yeah looking forward to hearing all your advice on how people can get high but would you like to start by telling us a bit about your background and what interests you in helping people to break into Tech yeah so a lot of it is uh because of my background I struggled a lot to get to where I am today my traditional I went through like a traditional uh like software engineering but electrical engineering program in University what happened was that I thought there would be no programming courses but the university has like a joint program between computer and electrical so I was forced to take them didn't do very well had to kind of rethink what and how to learn programming because it was very different than like math or physics which I was good at coming into University so I had to really learn it and then make sure that you know my motivation was not to fail school and eventually what happened was in my third year I realized that the internships came out between our third and fourth year we get to do like a year and a bit of internship and out of all the engineerings combined like a mechanical civil electrical everything computer engineering jobs had like 70 or 80 percent of the available internships so I thought to myself okay well I need to focus on a computer then and that's kind of how uh I went through the interview process somehow luckily got a job at IBM I say luckily because I interviewed for a few positions eventually what happened was somebody accepted and got selected for the position I got but they went for something better somewhere else so they're like oh you know who's saying second best let's get him one and I said yeah I'll take it Whatever It Is so um then when I graduated I kind of still struggled to kind of grasp what development and and a lot of it is because you know IBM wasn't very like web development focused it was like we were building an IDE similar to like vs code IVM has its own version that they were promoting so um basically I struggled a lot even when I first kind of joined a startup uh I wasn't the best I was on like a performance Improvement plan that I had to get out of and I really had to push and struggle and to like I really lacked like mentorship like a lot of like nobody really show me the clear path forward like I didn't know how it looked like I was just living day to day surviving trying to understand just enough not to get fired so uh getting out of like Panic anxiety mode you know many years later uh you know having a career that you know is fairly successful and you know um been out of 10 years now I I kind of realized like some people need the help I have the years of experience let's start providing some help for people because what seems basic to you like extremely basic after many years is not to most people that are starting out so a lot of it just ends up being answering basic questions so um that's where I got into boot camp internship I got into a few other Junior development kind of uh opportunities uh hang around Twitter started my own kind of stuff here Built My Own course about stuff that can help beginners and yeah that's how I started off so I know it's a bit long but I thought the context is important yeah thank you for sharing that and that's really well part of what you said resonated with me about having difficulties in your first job or internship which brings me nicely onto this question from anupam who says recently started as a junior Dev but I'm not able to complete the work in time and the work as always 40 of stuff which I don't know how to solve that struggling a lot now this stream is really about how to find that first job but I think we should touch on this question because a lot of people I think assume you get the first Deb job and that's it you've broken into Tech woohoo and I know for me it didn't work out like that and sounds like you've heard your struggles as is anupam do you have any advice for anyone who's in a situation where they're finding things a bit difficult when they have got that first job or internship yeah this is um this is a very good question and I mentioned this on the podcast before with Alex that there's like three phases uh first phase is learning which everybody's doing at scrimba and then second phase you look for the job which is just as hard as the first phase some people don't realize that and then the third phase is you get that job and now you have to keep it because you know you're terrified you're in a new kind of environment it's nothing it's almost nothing like the learning phase where you know you have that Foundation but now you're in the Working World you know and and I call it software meets people meets business now you're building in a business you have software uh there's clients there you're working in a team there's politics there's everything there's there's a million not a million but there's a lot of variables into getting your software done and this is where the difficulty comes from and that's why what's mentioned there 40 stuff which I don't know that's the art that's the what I spend years trying to perfect and that comes from in a big problem in the industry about us meeting our deadlines and understanding the amount of work that we have so when I get a feature uh when I first first starting out it's about doing that feature trying to understand as much as possible and getting it done now when I get the feature and I'm trying to understand um before I even start coding is what is this feature about why is it important to the business how does it fit into the current system who knows the most about it why do we need to do it what is the best way to approach it do I need to discuss it with people there's a lot of questions that are essentially the first step before you start running a line of code that 40 which you don't know you have to decrease that as much as possible before you start that is really something that takes a lot of time to figure out you know for so for me I ask questions I always ask as many questions as possible because that 40 percent can double the time triple the time quadruple the time you don't know you don't want to find that out the later you find that out the more not catastrophic it could be but the more difficult it is to get things out on time and that's why I find things get delayed because of unknowns so when I tell you an estimate about something if you tell me to make a button with some text I clearly know what that button involves but what if you tell me make a bunny who's saying that call of that when it's clicked it Updates this kind of record but okay now we're updating something now we're hitting the database do I know how to hit the database is there an API I need to adjust is the you know is there a caching mechanism is it going to slow things down what's the infrastructure like what are the results and side effects of this update right how do you want it to look like in the UI so you see like you just asked me to do one extra thing which is to update something but I had to ask all these questions that are relevant because if the API doesn't exist then you have to create the API if it's just an adjustment on the API that's easy now you know it's the infrastructure can it hold it is the database record available all this stuff adds more and more work so that 40 starts to become more known and now now more tangible you can break it down more when people say break things down this is how you break things down you try to make unknowns into knowns you do that by asking questions I hope that's clear very helpful yeah and by identifying what it is you don't know well firstly that does two things you know what you need to find out because not knowing what you don't know is going to take a lot longer than at least having an idea of what you're researching and it's going to identify what you do already know which is going to make you feel better and also allow you to make a head start on the things that you don't have a problem with or you're not roadblocked with so at least when your manager or whatever comes around and says so what have you been up to you can say oh I've done this this and this I've just got some questions on this rather than being this blind panic of not knowing what to do so yeah very nice advice thank you the last thing I'll mention about Dalian is don't worry about not completing stuff on time as much uh I haven't seen a develop I have met very few developers I can complete things on time uh within kind of like uh working hours so does it like across many organizations it is a struggle because of those things yeah absolutely you mentioned your podcast um when she did with my colleague Alex recently here it is if you would like to listen find out a bit more about what Alex and Hussein discussed here's the link coming into the chat so yeah I hope you had to check that out after this stream interesting workers says what he's saying said is exactly what I'm currently experiencing good I'm a civil engineering student and the same thing is happening to me it's like I started with programming so it seems like could be quite a common thing when people get into another type of engineering and think oh computers is where it's at so best of luck to you rockets on your journey and going back to some questions from the chat now being asked about as front-end developers how much should we know about data structures algorithms and Big O notation any thoughts on that either from a hiring manager point of view or from the technical interviews you've done recently yeah a great question I think that for front-end developers it really is two things that you got to keep in mind are you doing interviews or are you on the job there's two different answers for that question one problem with the industry and it's a problem of we are still trying to figure out and we're getting better at it as a whole about how to interview developers it's not easy um you know because of that what you do on the job could be very different than what you get asked in an interview right and it depends on organizations like uh I work at Shopify we do not ask like kind of like Google type questions right I feel like they're more geared towards uh things that are more practical that you would you know do right so and a lot of other organizations I think have followed that and um I think that particularly in front-end interviews I found that even big companies like I interviewed at Uber as well they avoided data structures and algorithms whereas if you said you're a back-end developer they would ask you those questions so I was very rarely asked those questions but I did apply to both front-end and back-end I consider myself full stack there even though front end is more a specialty for me so in an interview process you could potentially expect it I'm seeing it less and less from the interview perspective it doesn't hurt to prepare however I'll tell you from the 100 hours of interviews I did I probably spent 80 of my time preparing data structures and most of my interviews didn't address data structures and when they did I didn't do very well at them because I I you know I had a few weeks to study for it but the ones that asked me more practical questions like build something and react um I found that very easy because like I already do that day to day I've been doing it for many years so react specifically seven years so very easy for me to come and do that and to think through problems so you know it's kind of like I found that it wasn't as useful but if I did apply to very big tech companies like Google Amazon uh and those kind of type I could expect that we'll be asked those questions the problem is they have a lot of candidates and they can afford to filter out a lot of people by making you study I remember the Facebook panel That was supposed to prepare you for the interview for the tech screen uh they came out and said a lot of Facebook Engineers that they spent months prepping like weekends and nights like they said months and I thought that was you know kind of you know kind of overwhelming like you know I just have to spend all this time that maybe I might get a job at meta and maybe I can be a part of those layoffs that were recent so it's kind of like is it worth the reward for some people it is I mean you do get paid a lot of money and if you've had stayed there for a few years on your resume it is it you could certainly say it's worth it for me not really uh so I will still try them just because I feel like you know I'll give it another try but you got to think about you know if it's worth it or not for you in the real world when you're working I find myself not using data structures and algorithms at all not even big notation so it's good to know these kind of things uh and a lot of that stuff has happened happening in the background like for example I think I gave an example even in the podcast about database indexing when you index a database what does that mean uh you can either if if you have a billion rows in your database and you go through each row one way one to find something that's inefficient so an index is kind of like an index of a book where it tells you in advance where you might find something you know maybe a range like 50 page 50 to 2 to 55 instead of going through all the way page one two three four five until you find that page so with that kind of thing there's a big annotation behind it but as a developer a lot of times the tools take care of it for you so it's good to know and you're probably using it somehow but I mean do I have to think about it in a way in an interview where everything I'm doing I'm like what is the Big O notation of this thing generally not you just avoid certain things like you know there's certain practices you avoid uh for me for example nested for Loops I try to avoid them like hauling a for Loop within a for Loop within a for Loop like that can be very bad although sometimes if you're if you're looping through 10 things it's not that bad if you're looking through 100 things it's not that bad what you don't want to do for example is Loop through a lot of things and do like a double for Loop and inside the second for Loop you make a side effect like a database call or a network call so that can be where you come into problems so those are just basically like I don't need to know the details of Big O notation for that but I just know that if I have to go through and look through things and every single time I hit a loop I have to wait five like maybe up to five seconds or two seconds I know things are going to get out of hand so what I'm trying to say is that it's useful to know them but what ends up happening is you end up following best practices that are based on them but you don't need to know the exact details like you don't need to think well now it's n log n right well now I need to use a breadth first search depth first search no you know you'd be like well now I need to use elasticsearch which is a tool that allows me to make my search faster I don't need to know the the insides and outs of it unless maybe you do get into that eventually so in 10 years I haven't had to really go into that much detail into those things to be honest but sometimes I have and I'll just read up on it when I what I have to but it doesn't come up day to day good to know I hope that answers your question guy named EJ and good luck with looking for a job yeah speaking of applying for jobs Leo has a question on the topic of when to start doing it should a 17 year old apply already for web dev jobs or gain more experience and knowledge before trying to find that first tech job interesting yeah I think this is a question that comes up a lot and I think generally this the the recommendation I see you and I agree with is that you should definitely apply you know when you uh you know have a certain project that you can showcase so a project there's a lot of ways you can build a pro I mean you could say something like a simple kind of to-do list that you follow a tutorial online it could be it could be a project right but the thing is is it good enough of a project to kind of attract potential employers so what do I mean by this when I'm first kind of when I'm applying for jobs right now I'm a senior developer I'll just be like hey look at my resume look at my years of experience call me about it and interview me give me your hardest questions and let's see if I pass that's basically my Approach interviews aren't a problem for me when you're first starting out interviews are going to be a problem for you because you don't have experience so what's the next best thing to show a potential employer it has to be something like you can say it's my school some people care about that a lot of people don't or you can be like here are the projects I've built so you can show them one or two projects that you can have highlighted in your resume or you can send it to them directly in your portfolio or just the links to them on GitHub and you say this is my project and this project some people think it has to be some people who think like something simple is good enough or something really complex is good enough um meaning that like people think like oh I have to build something similar to Twitter exactly to be even considered or some people are like well tic-tac-toe Games should be good enough I think somewhere in the middle um is definitely what you're looking for if you can have a project that could potentially just show you understand the fundamentals meaning what so let's take an example of something a student of mine in a bootcamp recently did so he has a friend who's a basketball coach and he wants people to sign up for an event every week where he coaches people so he wants to know in advance how many people signed up or how many people can sign up and they have a limit like 15. and then he wants to collect payment before so he needs to kind of have a page to show this event show how many people are on the page how many people how you know have applied to be there make sure they paid and so that they can show up at a certain time show them on a map where it is maybe send a reminder this is a project that he built so what he's displaying here is you need to log in there needs to be some kind of dashboard for the person to post the event there needs to be some kind of way to accept payment usually use stripe so that that is a very good project it could be you know I have another student who's working on something a little simpler so what they're doing is there's a website you log in you search for recipes you hit an API this API gives you back sorry you put in the ingredients you get back a list of recipes they display these recipes and you have the ability to save to save them and favorite them right very you know kind of that's it so simple enough but what does it show you know how to do a login logout system uh you can show them some UI you have you're using an API a third-party API uh your ability to save things on the database using favorites so and you've deployed it somewhere for example um there you know they had it on Heroku but I guess now they're moving it because the free tier is almost over but it's showcasing a few rounds of skills that is a project that can anyone can do when you learn development if you have a project like this I could say that you can start applying right so think about something that you could if you're only a front-end developer sure maybe you can avoid the back end parts and focus on something more front-end but I like to see like a full stack project um even if they just know the basics about back end a little bit about front end I just want to see that you know the fundamentals and a project like that shows me it so you're never going to be ready to apply but you can make a project that's good enough to apply and that's what I recommend lovely totally um I had a question along the lines of the type of project which can help your portfolio to stand out you mentioned some there that your boot camp students are making the basketball sign up and they're quite customized which personally I think is a good thing compared to the tic-tac-toes and the Twitter clones of this world would you agree with that and say yeah you should make something a little bit unique or is it safer to go with the more well-known portfolio projects I think that you know you need to have something and the project I described take a lot of time and you need to think about them for a while I would say if you are like if you're desperate for projects I don't think having a Twitter clone or something like that is necessarily bad I think it's just a good way to kind of like follow a tutorial have it built don't say it's from a tutorial say you did it yourself um you know you don't need to be as happy those if they do ask you you know tell them what was from a tutorial but you don't need to advertise it is my point so you have the tour clone and it's something there that you could definitely say like you know you did build it um even you know even following a tutorial step by step still involves some kind of process of learning because the tutorials don't cover everything so I would say there is a lot of learning from that and uh even if I saw a Twitter clone and I would interview you I would still ask a lot of questions to make sure that you understood that you understand what you actually built and that's what I'll base your performance on right so it does but it does give me something at least to go on so if you have nothing definitely the Clones are not a bad idea right and there's a lot of tutorials that can help you get started with those but the unique projects they're a little more complex because you need to think about them so how do you think about these I would say the number one thing that you should think about is how can you solve a problem in your own life you know so I'll give you an example of something I built so like it's kind of like uh mostly done but I just did it because I was bored in the pandemic there's a grocery store downstairs in my building they have a receipt which shows a survey code just a bunch of letters so if you complete the survey you have a chance to win a thousand dollars in free groceries I want to complete the survey it was acne I had to type this thing in letter by letter there was like 20 characters so annoying and then the survey was like 400 questions it seemed like like just like come on come on so I thought myself I can make an app I want to learn react native let me just make an app where I take a picture use Google's free OCR you know like character recognition um to extract the survey number take this uh you know take look at their API for the survey submit fake answers just randomize answers for all the questions so you know take a picture take that code send it as part of the request done so it took me a few hours but I managed to get it done um like I don't really use that app or anything like that but look at how it solved the problem in my own life right even if it was like not a real problem but it was interesting now instead of spending you know you know five minutes or ten minutes to put in that survey I can do it in seconds even though you could argue it took me 20 hours to build this thing but now I could give it to my friends I can give it to my friends and family they could apply and then this app can be built upon I could they have like a three person limit per month so I can build that uh I can build like you know different profiles so I can submit it under different names for example but there's a long way I could go with it I learned some react native development I learned about Google uh you know uh character recognition but you see like this thing kind of just came to me and maybe it's different for beginners because you might not think about this as much or you might not think about how software how your problems translate into software or you might sometimes over commit you think you could do something so crazy or so like involved and you might not be able to pass it what I recommend is choosing like a small kind of problem right think think about what you might be able to solve in the smallest amount of code or features as possible okay I you know I could give another example I don't want to take up too much time but I think that was a clear example of uh like an app that could solve a problem in your life that's the best thing if you can showcase that to somebody like the person who built the basketball app he's going to have real users people are going to actually use this and they're going to complain and he's going to have to solve those problems when I see that on a resume it's like I want this person because they have practical experience right so if you can get people to use this app other than you then now you're getting into real software development because apps are used by people people break them and you have to learn how to build resilient apps when you're building it just for yourself nothing's you know like only you can break it or somebody your family member so uh that's kind of like my comment on that and those are the two different things that you could do I like that bring a problem that you have is going to make it much easier to talk about the app in an interview because it's like yeah I made this thing and it made my life so much easier so yeah hope that helps you with some code portfolio inspiration codery Adele is wondering what makes a software developer ready to apply for his or her first developer job is it a good portfolio certificates good GitHub profile maybe something else now I did hear you mention a little bit earlier he's saying that you're never going to be ready and I think that's the sentiment that a lot of people can relate to that you aren't necessarily going to reach this point where you're like right yes totally ready but how can you know when you've got at least the basics down to make a decent application I would say what should inform you is your portfolio project if you can build something similar to what I mentioned and then there's a free bootcamp I can call the hundred devs uh that's very popular on on Twitter uh I think they call it the 100 Hour project so spending 100 hours building something like this uh that could I think be your portfolio project if you have something like this I think you're ready I've seen people who who were just a few months out of their bootcamp and get a job right so they didn't have the certificate but they had like a starter project they made connections and and they invested in like meeting a lot of developers every week like through Twitter or whatever so they made some connections they had like a simple project they got interviews through those connections and then they got jobs before they complete everything and then I know people who completed their boot camp it's been six months it's been a year and they still haven't gotten a job right so uh you know they are ready to apply their portfolio project is there but they don't know how to like promote it properly they don't have it deployed the GitHub uh the GitHub doesn't look as good right like the readme is like very simple like it doesn't you know there's a bit of uh I guess for lack of a Showmanship to show right like about your project like have it on GitHub how you show yourself on GitHub um your LinkedIn profile all those things come together to kind of show that you know I have a solid project I am a software developer come see this the certificates can be good but how are you going to stand out when there's all these other people that are completed boot camps just like you right and uh but so I think the project is what's going to make you stand out again you'll never be ready you'll just have to at some point say my project is good enough I'm going to start applying with it you know and uh in the comment on Readiness I like to tell people I I I'm not very political but I'll be like I know you know Donald Trump became a president of the United States was this man probably perfect for the job some people always say yes I like to think no very underqualified but he got the job so you're just applying for a software job just go for it you know they're never going to be prepared you know what I mean so if he got that job you can get that job apparently just go for it what's to live by that brilliant Darion has a question about fronten versus back end I know he's saying you mentioned you've applied for both sides of things and full staff Darren's finding it difficult to grasp Java in college do you think it would be worthwhile to learn front-end development see if that works out instead I think that you should spend more time trying to grasp the Java in college now that you're like actually like you're in the process of learning it I think it's a good idea to keep on that path for the front end I think it's more of an interest because the difference between the back and the front end is that in the front end you get to see the thing appear in front of you and that's why they teach kind of front and in the beginning I think a good thing is like to see the results of what you're doing when I first started off in University I was doing like C plus plus and it's just kind of like I didn't understand what was going on it's like there's this terminal thing and it's showing me weird errors and even when it works it just says yeah it works and just like okay like I didn't really see anything come up on a screen and it was like less motivating so front end can be very motivating in that sense and it could be that like connector because of the back end like a lot of times when I did back end in the beginning of my career um I would work so hard on it and when it comes to dental these things people are not that impressed but when the person comes in the front end and builds it and shows the cool UI that maybe doesn't have as hard logic sometimes people like wow amazing look at that look at what they built but I was like I built all the back end behind it and it was so complicated but nobody sees that the other developers though they understood but not the non-developers so that's kind of sometimes in the front end what you get to see even though the front ends can get very very complicated uh to be honest but uh you know it's something to explore I think on the side in addition to doubling down still an understanding Java very well because Java is going nowhere a lot of jobs use Java if you have the opportunity and you're already in school for it keep going with it keep use it use it to build your projects like if you're building a project for example you could use Java with spring which is a framework like uh similar to you know python has flask or Django Ruby has rails and I think Sinatra PHP has laravel and I think uh some other ones so this is an example of a framework spring with Java so you can use that to build your back end and on the front end you can learn at the same time and whatever you want HTML CSS JavaScript or react view whatever you know and then you can combine it into a project and that way you can learn more practically so it's going to be harder but as you struggle with this project and as you you know try to save something in a database and it takes you days that's how you're going to learn it and you're going to grasp the concepts uh you know because you have to just like with the react native project I set up with my phone in the grocery app I didn't know a lot of what I needed to do but I just had to because like the PA I knew the end result and I just like had to figure out what I did on the way to get there if I just said I'm learning react native it's a little harder to motivate myself that way I'm just like okay I'm gonna do a tutorial right so and that's another thing that I do that I did mention is like before I did that I took a tutorial on udemy I found the shortest course the shortest course like three hours that built a project so I went through step by step follow that project in the least amount of time possible so it still took me like six hours to do that three hour thing and then I was like more uh ready as opposed to say like if I did Java I'd be like okay well let me take a 50 hour intro to Java course like I'm first of all I'm not gonna do that second of all is going to be probably boring and at the end I might not even have a project so that's why I look at project-based learning as a better way to do this and that could be the reason why you're not grasping it as much is maybe you're that you're not building something as practical or something that you care about speaking of project-based learning that's how we teach on scrimber yeah it's as if we planned that little plug but we actually didn't uh yes we have our front-end developer career path and we like to build things uh teach things exactly as Hussein just recommend it through projects because it makes it more interesting and it sticks in your mind better but I like this idea of um getting the basics down via a project-based tutorial and then going on to build your own project because that is going to take your learning onto the even higher level so yeah great advice there Natalie wants to talk resumes also known as CBS there's a hiring manager you presumably have seen quite a few of these how can we make lcv or resume stand out and what are the essential components of a good tech resume I think that um yeah it's a good question I got you know I definitely you know have talked about this a lot because it's it's a very important point so one thing that I've seen like when we had a senior posting not on Shopify when we're at a startup I would get like I there weren't like Recruiters in the beginning like internal Recruiters in the company to help me go through the resumes uh so what would happen is we'd post like a senior position we got like five people apply and you're like okay when you post a junior position we've got like 300 people apply so how am I supposed to look through as a human 300 resumes if it took me five minutes to go through every single one I'm not even gonna do my job because I'm still a manager I'm not just hiring like I'm hiring I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm committing to a project I'm improving the developers in my company I'm hiring for other positions I can't look through 300 it's impossible like I don't know what anybody says maybe when we had a recruiter they were they they would help because that was more part of their job so I had to look at things that stood out more so I'd kind of just kind of way through the resumes and could just kind of see what stood out to me more and kind of like have the top resumes that stood out maybe in those first hundred because it's just too much to go through all of those and I wish I could have and maybe people missed out the opportunity but that's the reality maybe in a startup world and that's why a lot of big companies have like automatic screens uh that like online they do it for you and you never know if you if they look through every resume or not I just don't understand how if you get 5000 resumes a human can look through those so my point is how do you stand out the people that stood out the most to me in those situations was somehow they found me on LinkedIn they went on LinkedIn they found me somehow saw my title for that company and messaged me being like hey who's hey who's saying I applied to the company um hope you can take a look at my resume here's a project I've built some people somehow found my email my work email I don't know how they did that but what got me thinking first of all I noticed the more I thought about them more they were in my head more I was impressed a little bit and the second thing was like like this person is resourceful they found my email I don't know how they did it they probably use the service somehow they figured it out but um you know they're so resourceful what if what I hire them they're that resourceful as well like when I give them things that they don't know they're going to use that same motivation that same way of being resourceful to figure out what answers to their problems so though that's one way of standing out so that's another thing that you can do especially when applying to smaller companies like under 500 people I would say uh they're they're not as rigorous in their HR process and even if they are you can still kind of try to find a person on LinkedIn when you connect with them you can add a note and this note gives you 300 characters because you can't just send anyone a message you have to get like sorry like LinkedIn premium but you can do that you can add a note you have 300 characters you have 300 characters to sell yourself you know talk about who you are very quickly post a link to your project now you're in their mind they're thinking about you maybe they're talking about you like oh did you see what this developer did he's you know here you know here they they send me a question uh or they sent me like their portfolio like now now like oh let's look this person up on LinkedIn you know that's pretty cool that they did that or like oh like that's weird that they did that but they're thinking about you you know now you're in there so uh that's a way to stand out I think that that really um people have done done for me personally because senior developers you gotta pry them off from their job that they already have Junior developers is a lot of competition what kind of thing can you say in this connecting message sort of like a generic hello or yeah yeah how do you introduce yourself you know yeah good question I mean 300 characters is not a lot of space and something that I I tell people that you can do is so who you are say a brief like a brief like two second Pitch about who you are like if you were to say like hey um like I can think of some people like I'm a teacher transitioning into the software industry I'm a carpenter trans like these are students I have like I'm a music teacher who is transitioned to the software industry I've done a lot of learning by myself or through courses and I've built this project um or I've I'm a student who is learning or a software developer who's transitioning from this to this um I saw your posting and I'm interested in applying to this position here's a link to my project I've built I hope you can consider me now I don't know if that'll fit in 300 sometimes again you know depending on your link as well maybe you might want to shorten it using like bitly or something like that because that link could take up a lot of space it could be your portfolio if you have it I'm not a big portfolios aren't that big of a deal for me I would use a template even um because what matters is the quality of the projects not the the how nice the portfolio looks but yeah that those are some things that I would consider in that message saying just Hi how are you or please let's connect that's not good enough right like when people message me on Twitter I never respond to somebody who just says hi because I'm just like like you're making me work you know I go hey how are you what's going on like just tell me what you want in the beginning right and that's the easiest way for me to answer your question right and I guess some people just don't know that they're shy but I I don't have all the time in the world to come to you and say that so think about a hiring manager they don't have all the time in the world to be like oh they message me let's go and message them back just be succinct and tell them what you offer what your offer you're interested in this is who I am this is what I'm interested in and this is what I built that's my value that I can bring to your organization because you got to think about what can you do for them and that's the most important thing that people think about when they consider you for a position what do you bring to the table I think that's so important as well because in face-to-face interaction particularly with people you don't know you wouldn't just walk up to and say hi my name's Leanne and here's my portfolio and I've solved this problem with my latest project because they think you're a little bit off the wall but when it comes to online interactions especially via LinkedIn and things that is the most efficient and actually in a way friendliest thing to do because as you said it's not making them work it's just saying hello here's my value check it out have a nice day so yes bear that in mind when you send that message I hope that helps um yeah on the topic of standing out speaking of standing out valtiri says on the topic of building projects I like to think that making a unique sometimes silly but deeply personal project is a way to make yourself stand out and also tell something about you and your personality what's your take on this I like this as an idea would it work from a hiring manager's perspective yeah definitely like say we're in the finance industry and you build something that you just really care about stocks like you're a big stocks nerd and you build something and to help you um analyze things from five different stock networks and they come in like obviously you see what I don't know what I'm talking about but as an example you would do that and to the person in the finance industry they'd be like oh cool like maybe it's even the wrong way to solve it but I just think it's cool that you did that and you tried to solve your own problem in that space that the company is in so sometimes they line up which could be pretty cool right like for example you're applying an ocean and maybe you've built your own to-do list in a particular way that integrates in the way that you want like you still have a to-do list but you've built this integrates with some calendars that you have and maybe send you notifications in a particular way so you've taken something in that particular industry and you've made it your own to fit your own kind of way of doing it so I do think it says a lot there there is this funny anecdote about a uh you know it's only online we don't know if it's true but this like very funny developer who automated a lot of the stuff that he was doing at his company um so one thing that he would do is if he didn't log in by a certain time on his computer he had an automatic sender of emails that would just give a send a message to his boss with like a list of excuses and it would pick one uh if he didn't log out by five it would do the same for his wife he would just pick a list of excuses be like I'm going to be late hun you know because of this some guy broke used to break the database a lot and needed his help and used to message him saying sorry blah blah blah he had an automated message if this person ever messaged them it would send the same thing and he had a script to fix the database the last thing that he did was the coffee machine he sshed into it and it would make him coffee by a certain time uh every day and you just have the cup and it would just automatically when he logged in he would know that he logged in and then start making the coffee so what I mean about that it tells me a lot about this person's personality I think it's kind of funny but also maybe he's a bit of those like kind of programmers that are kind of like iron but but anyways it just I think it speaks to that a little bit and just a bit of a funny story that I thought I could share apparently hi Jennifer wiring up your smart house to your computer lovely let's talk mentors because Dave Collison is here asking who'd like to be my mentor wait and drops Family Garden says mentors are valuable to your success can you tell us a bit about how you can approach finding a mentor what a mentor actually is and how to best use your time with a mentor yeah there's a lot of conflicting things here like for me personally what I want to Mentor I want to make sure that I offer something in return that's just kind of how my thinking is because I consider everybody's time valuable so for example I have a personal coach uh that I just pay a bunch of money to make sure I do things on time this is a random guy that yells at me every week so he's mentoring me in that sense other people know like we're mentors internally in the company you know it's part of their job to help me out every couple of weeks uh in terms of like regular mentorship like I you know I get paid by springboard to Mentor people every week but I also have for example once a week I have a free kind of coffee chat on ADP list and I'll share the link here [Music] um adpl is a nice site where essentially it was it was born out of uh people in the beginning of the pandemic losing their jobs and somebody in the ux design kind of space made a website so people can meet each other and uh kind of offer mentorship for free so uh I offer like half an hour a week from that and you can see here I have a bunch of reviews and stuff like that like I just do once a week and that's my time commitment and what I'm available for there are a lot of people on the site just offering their mentorship and you don't know how much time they can give you but this is something that you never know maybe some people have more time than others and they're willing to help you out so that's one example of getting a mentor now you can get even more kind of like if you if you can't pay some money for example there is something like Mentor cruise.com which is more like weekly check-ins and and that's something that like you know if you have the budget for it that's another like level that you can do um but ADP list is a good way to start especially I know when you don't have a job as a beginner money can be tight get it um but uh you know you it'll take you it'll be a bit longer to find some structure what paying money does is like it allows you to find some structure quicker so those are the two options that you have for mentorship I know a lot of people ask me can I be your Mentor um well that's a lot of time commitment right so what I tell people is like I can't take anybody right now but if you have any questions message me and I'll answer when I have time that's my ability and my commitment right that I can offer because I do have a full-time job I do do the part-time mentoring I have a family you know I have things I want to do so that's my commitment but other people it might be different and that's what I like about this list about ADP list is you could go through and book sessions with people for free and there's not a limit and maybe you can find someone and if you are more desperate and you need someone right now Mentor Crews can offer that as well perfect I hadn't heard of these two resources before so I'm sure they'll be very useful for people looking for a mentor glad to hear about those couple of questions on the topic of Which languages to learn and the first one is from Nabil is Ruby slash Ruby on well rails not Wales um worth learning nowadays or should I go for another language well the guy Shopify we're a big rails shop like we do a lot of rails um there's a lot of big companies that that do Ruby unreal so definitely is worth learning um but one thing like if you want the answer to this question just do a simple search about jobs and then see how many come up for and then see like what comes up for them is it mostly python is it mostly Java is it c-sharp is it rails I think that you can't go wrong if you're learning Django with python you can go wrong if you're running Ruby on Rails you can't go wrong if you're learning Java spring uh you know and you can't go wrong if you're learning asp.net with c-sharp there's just so many jobs available for those and and rails is definitely worth learning the thing is with rails maybe there's not as many jobs but the ones who have decided to build in Ruby on Rails they can't get off it because it's too complicated to get off and switch languages for like say example Shopify so shopify's doubled down hired a lot of rails contributors who are big in the industry and and they're improving we're improving rails and Shopify as an organization all right so that way we can push things forward for ourselves and for others right so I don't think they're switching from rails anytime soon I don't know it doesn't seem like it I don't think other companies are so if there are less opportunities sometimes it's still good because when you get those opportunities you're highly sought after as opposed to say like I know react very well but a lot of people know reacted very well so I have to prove that I know react better than all of them maybe I don't have to as much in rails yeah that's a great point if there are fewer job openings for a technology when you do get into it you've got less competition it's worth bearing that in mind Demetrius wants to know which programming languages I should give attention to to get hired as a junior he just gave us a little list can you run through that list one more time in case Demetrius or anyone else missed it in terms of pure languages right uh you can look at JavaScript HTML in CSS to build stuff on the front end like that will be enough on the front end uh and whether you learn Frameworks it's up to you the most popular one is react you don't need to know it but knowing it will definitely be helpful because a lot of people use react um now now coming to the back end you know learning python is not a bad idea now if you have a framework to back it up like at springboard we teach python with flask which is also popular I just don't think it's as good as Django for like a bigger project but knowing python could be very good for you as well you can go wrong with knowing python uh I got a lot of kind of like messages about like back end and Python and things like that although it differs and things are changing like I never used to get a lot of messages about goaling uh but now I get a lot more messages on goaling because people are using it a lot more right so those are some languages that you know uh that you could know I mean you could never go wrong with Native languages in terms of mobile so if you want to learn mobile like become a highly paid iOS Developer learning like Swift UI um could be very valuable as well because like that's what you have to build iOS apps in if they're native so as opposed to say react native or flutter which are different kind of platforms but I have a friend who it's very sought after because he knows the oldest language in iOS which is objective c not but a lot of companies that have built using Objective C their apps are really old and hard to change so he comes in collects you know rakes in the cache because he's just been doing it long enough and they need him so General languages JavaScript HTML CSS if you have to learn a framework learn react back in Python with flask or Django is good enough pick one flask is easier just make sure you know how to change a database entry so you might need an orm uh Django already has a way to change a database and uh flask it doesn't so you have to use an additional tool like SQL Alchemy for example so I know I'm listing them pretty fast but uh just python JavaScript CSS HTML if you take it are good enough yes and this will be recorded so you can watch it back later if you want to recheck the lisp yes we talked earlier about um someone who was finding the back end harder to grasp than the front end but we also have someone who is experiencing the opposite or maybe they just haven't got to the back end tour away from the front and things first and that is Geo asking are there jobs available if you're proficient in HTML and CSS and design interesting we don't know much about JavaScript basically developing jobs mostly focused on design what do you reckon of this he's saying I don't have as much experience with this but I did see it a lot in the kind of beginning of my career where um a designer was expected to know HTML and CSS and they would actually give us the HTML and CSS and we would use it to build in like add our own JavaScript to manage all the events in JavaScript so uh definitely is possible although like bigger companies these days you have like a front-end developer Who would know HTML JavaScript in CSS and then the designer or the ux designer which is more proficient in design uh user experience and and they would use tools like figma for example and other tools to kind of like build the raw designs so that's more common nowadays but still on a smaller company I could still see them still being available um I think that if you don't know much JavaScript you just have to learn a bit more just to have the basics enough to be able to when somebody clicks on something that clicks on a button you can do something right so JavaScript is really hard to master same with CSS to be honest but you don't need to know much to say that you know enough JavaScript to be a front-end developer in my opinion because you're going to learn a lot of it on the job right and it took me a while to understand JavaScript now I love it and I'm very like obsessed like like nerd JavaScript definitely here but it took me a long time I don't know what was going on I couldn't tell the difference between like basic things but it just took time for it to click like a few years lovely a couple of questions here on how you might be viewed by hiring managers if you haven't taken a traditional routes into Tech so we have Ailey TOA saying I'm a College Dropout have no proper work experience and a self-taught encoder and Mohammed is asking does ageism exist in the tech industry and if so any advice on how to work around it what would you suggest to these two people um regarding I think the the first one um let me see here yeah your negatively experienced you know if you were a College Dropout and stuff like that it depends on the company that you're hiring for some companies are snobby and they'll insist on the University degree um a lot of big companies are starting to change their way um or have or never cared about that like I can tell you like Shopify hires boot camp grads um for their like they get you in through the internship program when it's available again they'll get the initial program and they'll try to get you from internship to full time that way and I don't they don't really care about your your uh your degree just depends on how you did on that initial question and to get you in the interview process so a lot of that is changing but some companies yeah they'll still be like no we need the degree you know I think that's changing it's not as much as it used to be like 10 years ago like people were very serious about the degree it's not as much like that anymore if you can come in with a decent project a lot of stuff learned people are getting jobs every single day every single day and they're doing it through uh having their project and making connections you know using something like ADP list going on Twitter and asking different senior Developers for coffee chats eventually you'll make a connection and you'll get an interview from that um and it'll be better than any kind of uh you know degree that you had like I was lucky enough that I had a good degree and then I went to IBM uh so that was good for me and my resume but if I had more connections I would probably have gone a way better job out of school but I just didn't understand that yet I was like I hate to do this whole networking thing it sounds boring but it's definitely something that I I do a lot now and I think it'll benefit you in the and all it takes is like just booking sessions with people every week focus on talking to one or two people and it will do better than any degree that you have that that you can ever get would that also help if there is an issue with ageism maybe there isn't what's your take on that Muhammad's question it's hard for me to tell in terms of this thing like I you know I've only seen anecdotal evidence and people have told me yes like if they believe that because of their age they weren't getting as many opportunities uh so I don't know like I'm not an expert on that but uh you know if a company you feel like is giving you any signs of that I don't think it's worth even applying to those jobs um I think generally um people don't care about this like I was at a startup and we had like one of my colleagues he was older doing the same job and we didn't care about his age we just cared about like he passed the interview and that's what we do for everyone and they passed the interview and they weren't like it seemed like a mean person or anything like that like a very nice seemed very nice to work with them and he worked there for like almost four years so um it didn't matter in that regard but people do complain about this and I worry about that eventually myself in the industry so um I I don't really have I guess the I don't really really have like an informed take on this unfortunately but I have heard people say that they've experienced this unfortunately uh ways around it I'm I can't say I'm the expert but if you feel this in any company you're applying for you know it's probably a sign already that you don't want to work for them uh I know you're desperate when you're looking for your first job but if it's going to be a nightmare for you you're going to have a boss that mistreats you it's not worth it um I I don't think at least because I I went through some some psychological suffering in that case and I guess it got me to where I am but at the time you know like I used to be in the military and uh when I remember my boot camp that I did with the military I remember it fondly now but trust me when I was there doing it I do not remember like I know that it was it was basically hell so don't put your thoughts on through that if yes brilliant well we have reached the end of the hour Leo really wants to know what projects his home built to get into Shopify he's ain't mentioned a project a little bit earlier so you can watch the recording and find out about it it solved one of his life problems I'll tell you that much if you would like to hear more from his name Alex did a podcast episode with him a few months ago last month yeah so you can check that out oh a quick hello to uncomfortable chair who's back again [Laughter] um exciting news it's nearly time for Jarvis Christmas yes our um annual JavaScript Advent calendar festive event um you can drop your email right in here if you want to get an email when we go live yes and once again here's that list ADP list where you can find some coding mental exceptions well thank you ever so much for coming Hussein it's been a wonderful hour filled with genuinely useful advice which I'm sure will help many many people so yeah it's great to have you here thank you for having me Leanne thank you so much everyone for your time and attention and I really hope that I was able to serve you and and answer as many questions as you can you know feel free to reach out to me of your DMs on on Twitter and Linkedin I'm not sure if that's shared or anything like that but I think on the podcast there's a few of those links um happy to answer questions in our time EDP list if you can book a session go ahead and book a session if you find one available and uh yeah happy to help you in any way possible perfect thanks very much see you next time everyone