DEV Community: jason humphrey

What’s one thing you’re doing for your mental health?

jason humphrey — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 11:01:42 +0000

Question to any software engineer in the job market right now:

What’s one thing you’re doing for your mental health?

Comment below and let’s start a conversation.

We need to speak about this publicly until everyone feels that it’s normal, safe, and healthy to talk about mental health.

5 of the Biggest Developer Portfolio Mistakes

jason humphrey — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 03:35:56 +0000

When you’re not around, your portfolio is what sells you.

I see the same common mistakes time and time again, and it’s so frustrating to see uncapitalized potential.

Your portfolio says a lot about who you are as a developer. If you’re falling prey to any of the mistakes below, prepare to be ignored in your job search.

To help, I want to share what employers hate when looking at portfolio sites and how to avoid these pitfalls.

GitHub

Consistently contribute

If you are claiming to be a great developer, you need to show the work. Contribute meaningfully on a consistent basis.

Be relevant

If you’re posting issues to different open source repositories, prove that it’s relevant and makes sense. Ensure you’re adding valuable content.

Have proper links

Double and triple check your links. They need to work. And, don’t worry about being fancy with bitly links - keep it functional and simple.

Ensure your code works

If you link, for example, to your project hosted on Heroku, make sure it’s working. Your link, your code - everything needs to work the first time. If it doesn’t, you’ve just lost your audience.

Personal Site

Contact information easily found

Your contact information should be 0 to 1 click away. Don’t make your audience hunt.

Give context

Sell your audience about what you’re showing them. Why should they care?

Specifically for projects, how did you build this project, and what was the outcome? What did you do in your project that stands out? Do you have working demo links? Give context to sell your audience.

Projects

Level of code

Woo, I have a working project!

Yes, you may have a working project, but how’s your code within that project?

People have been turned down before for a job because of the state of their code - don’t let this happen to you.

Go back to your old projects, give them another look through to refactor and make improvements. Give your projects a solid build to show your audience that you care about your code.

Remember, your code speaks for you when you’re not around.

Project completion

People start projects all the time but don’t get around to completing them.

For example, I see people add authentication to their projects and yet it’s not working in the demo. So that’s not authentication.

Ensure you’ve completed your projects with all the functionality you intended.

Ideal Job
Know your market. Your resume and portfolio should be screaming this - what you’re using, what you want to be using, should match your ideal job.

Don’t wait until you get the job. Start now. Show them you’re doing the things you claim to want.

Prove You Don’t Need Crutches
Downloaded your theme? Crutch.

Buy the template site? Crutch.

Only using Bootstrap? Crutch.

Only use Lodash? Crutch.

This isn’t to say never use the above - but it’s important to show you can and do write your own custom code.

What Now?
Fix these five things and your portfolio will have a better chance to catch the attention of your audience and do so successfully.

If you want help with this, check out Coding Career Fastlane or comment down below. We’d love to hear where you’re at!

See our accompanying video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ9UHOOMPms

Coding Bootcamp Tips: 5 Places Spending Time Will Drive Results

jason humphrey — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 03:32:20 +0000

Do you want to know where you should be allocating your time while you’re in a bootcamp?

I’m happy to share with you that spending time in the following five places will drive results.

Let’s dig in.

The 5 Result Drivers

Ask Questions

The first place you need to make sure you’re spending time is asking for help. This can manifest in a lot of different ways.

You can ask your questions on StackOverflow.

You can ask your mentor or instructor for help with a problem.

You can ask your cohort and peers for help. Not only does this help them, but it will help you learn from what they might know.

Bootcamp Content

Spend your time in the bootcamp content. Whether video or text-based, make sure you are learning what’s required.

It can be so easy to go down the rabbit hole and got lost in other content. Try to stick to what you need to learn for your bootcamp and bookmark the rest for later consumption.

Projects

Take that knowledge you have learned from the content and build something with it. It’s always a good idea to work on projects that can be in your portfolio.

Review

This always gets overlooked.

If possible, dedicate time before you go to bed to review what you learned that day and to prepare for tomorrow.

Prepare on the weekends and review what you learned last week in preparation for what’s to come.

Teach

You don’t truly know something until you explain it. This step is critical but doesn’t work without the others in place.

Improvements
There’s a process for everyone to learn coding, and it starts with you allotting time in these five buckets.

When you focus on the areas above, you’re going to see drastic changes in the results of what you’re outputting.

Here are a few of the improvements you will see.

Increased productivity.
Increased quality and quantity of learning.
Reinforcement of your understanding.
Better awareness of what’s going on.
They can have the greatest impact on how you spend your time. Where you spend your time is where you’ll see results.

At times, some of these buckets may seem easy or obvious. But when you group them together, it becomes a truly effective and results-driven process.

I encourage you to start today!

Have questions? Want to share how your own tips? reach out to us at Coding Career Fastlan

As always, thanks for being here.

To see our accompanying video, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvffcpvFE1k