Q&A With Harold (a tech recruiter)
Resumes
- List your job roles, duration, and key responsibilities.
- put skills at the top
- volunteering and meetups are good to put on there too.
- put a link to portfolio on the resume
- He says people hire you for your enthusiasm as a recent grad…
- Leave references off so you have control over if they get contacted. “Referees available upon request” (I’ve heard similar too.)
- don’t bother with the expertise ratings - it’s subjective anyway.
Targeting
- Go to Meetups.
- Chat to people doing the job you want, at companies you want to work at - via LinkedIn or plain email. No need to result in an interview, just talking. He says it’s actually OK to followup (nicely).
- Contribute to open source
Contact
- Find out the name of the hiring manager. Research them on LinkedIn or something.
- Use full name if finance or similar, their first name is OK if a casual startup or such.
Expectations
- There are many roles in software development beyond coding.
Interviews
- Don’t be afraid of the interviewers
- Be honest - no point in doing crap you don’t even like…
- Talk out your thinking in technical interviews.
- Do research on the company, standard really
- Ask questions that are important to you so that you know if you want to work there even.
Code/Project Management Stuff
Various Project Management or Coding organisation stuff I’ve found that I thought might be useful to record.
Zenhub - Agile Github Issue Tracking
Google Sheets Templates - A blog by Hubspot
Illustrator free alternatives - HubSpot’s list of free Illustrator Alternatives
Decision trees Another article by Hubspot, this time on making decisions.
Sources:
INFS3202 Student Demos, Hubspot Newsletter
Practice Coding and Computer Science
Try your hand at software engineering problems with Google, maybe work there? (https://code.google.com/codejam/kickstart/) [Code Jam Kickstart]
Coding Game - Learn programming techniques in a gamified way.
Brilliant - Learn Math and Science
Algorithm visualisers by some academic
Plural Sight - Video based tutorials by industry professions
Immersive Math Interactive Math Textbook
Knowledge and Experience
How to Not Waste Time at Another Pointless Conference
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know
Collection of resources about CS
Books
Imposter’s Handbook. - Book about CS topics by a self-taught developer with mixed reviews on Goodreads. A sequel coming out.
Podcasts
- Command Line Heroes
- Code Newbie Podcast
- Base.cs Computer Science Podcast
- .Net Rocks
- Developer Tea - Soft skills
- Security Now
- Full Stack Radio
Coders I find or interesting coding blogs to keep an eye on.
Blogs and Resources
O’Reilly has some good newsletters
@steveschoger he’s a UX dude that runs screencasts
There’s a fiddle for that! an incomplete list of sandboxes for various languages
30 Days of JS/HTML/CSS snippets
Some other version control app that using Git underneath