DEV Community: Stas Klymenko

Node.js Roadmap for Beginners

Stas Klymenko — Sun, 20 Feb 2022 18:14:12 +0000

JavaScript is a great programming language. These days it’s probably the easiest way to become a Full-stack developer. No wonder that many people are trying to taste Node.js right after JavaScript fundamentals.

But where should one start? 🤔

In this article I will try to draw a decent roadmap for the first steps in learning Node.js with the best resources I marked after learning it by myself.

I will assume you already have a solid understanding of JavaScript so I will not include it below.

1. First steps

Before you jump right into some courses or tutorials it’s always good to understand some basic things and prerequisites. It’s always good to read some info about the technology you want to learn and how it works in general.

In most of the cases and especially for the learning purposes you will definitely build REST APIs. That’s why I think you should learn just a bit about it before writing some code.

For some people it may sound weird but there are two things you need to understand.

JavaScript in browsers and JavaScript in Node.js are working differently

Node.js is using a C library called libuv to implement the Event Loop. I think every developer should also know about it and have a basic understanding about this difference to avoid some mistakes in future.

You need to change the way you write JavaScript

While client-side JavaScript don't have that much asynchronous code, in Node.js you will use it all the time.

Async JavaScript in Node.js

2. Fundamentals

Most courses and tutorials immediately start with building a simple server with Express. It’s not a big deal as you can run such a server with only 3 lines of code.

But what you should really care about is not how to create a CRUD server but how to work with Node.js. That’s why you need to learn some Node.js fundamentals before jumping to your first server. Official documentation is very nice so I recommend using it.

Node.js Guides

But if you're a visual person like me and you prefer to learn via videos, I recommend watching Mosh Hamedani Node.js tutorial for beginners:

Node.js tutorial for beginners

3. Time to practice

There was a lot of theory before but I think it’s super important to build a strong and correct foundation before moving to active coding. This will help you to avoid some common mistakes in advance and write better code.
I’ve passed a bunch of tutorials and here is the list of the most valuable in terms of the content quality and detailed explanations:

4. Advanced topics

The first three chapters should teach you how to work with Node.js and build any kind of apps. But it’s not the end of the journey. There’s a lot more to learn in terms of Node.js and backend in general. So I will give you a couple of hints and directions you will definitely need to check and learn deeper.

Error handling

This is actually the topic from the fundamentals section but I just wanted to make an additional focus on it. Handling errors is important for the serve. If you will have some errors on the frontend side, in most of the cases the app will still be running (framework’s errors is another story). But Node.js server will crash. That’s why it’s very important to work with errors in the proper way.

Node.js threads

I highly recommend learning more about how Node.js is working with threads. Especially to understand the difference between Worker threads, Cluster and Child process and their use cases.

Not so single-threaded Node.js

Node.js speed and optimization

You should always care about your app speed and performance. If you have some troubles or you just want to optimize your server I recommend you to check the video below and do your own research.

Take your server to ludicrous speed

Security

Just make your app secure.

Different topics

If you really want to improve your Node.js skills I would also recommend you to follow the Node.js YouTube channel and watch some conferences like NodeConf when they are active.

I hope this roadmap will me the Node.js learning path more clear for you. Wish you good luck in this journey!

Follow me on 🐦 Twitter if you want to see more useful content like this.

5 Things you should do before starting your new project

Stas Klymenko — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 08:56:37 +0000

Some time ago I had an opportunity to watch how a couple of devs were doing their pet-projects. Both of them made same mistakes. Moreover I did these mistakes too for a while. They are not critical but may cost you a ton of time.

The goal of this article is to help you save your time.
Let's see what I have for you.

Project goal

First of all you should clearly understand the real goal of your project. Ask yourself several questions:

Why am I doing this project?
What is the idea of the project?
Who will see this project?
Is it necessary to do it now?
What is the priority of the project compared to others?

These questions are necessary to understand if you really have this project in your mind and if you need to do it right now. If you can easily answer these questions - proceed to the next step.

Project name and logo

If you will start building something bigger than a To Do app, you will probably start thinking about the name for your app and, of course, it's logo. Sometimes this process can take hours if not days.
And it's a big problem because you're spending a lot of time for nothing. It's always hard to find a good name and in most cases it came itself.
Don't waste your time. Skip this step.
What will you choose?

An app without a name.
A name without an app. It's obvious. Let's move forward.

Project colors

Designers understand this step clearly but many developers not.
You need to create a color palette before starting your project.

There are many rules in design but you can take the most important parts from it. Start with a few main colors:

The background
Main color
Contrast (secondary) color This will be enough for a start but I prefer to add more colors like:
lighter and darker version of main and contrast colors
proper colors for "disabled", "warning", "attention", "confirmation" things
etc

Skipping this step has a few problems:

You will need to go web to copy the colors you like and insert to your project every time or look for this colors through all of your code.
You may forgot about colors you already used before. So you will copy another shades of the same colors and you app will look not that good in the end.

Project structure

This is probably one of the biggest problems you may face. Having an idea for a project, many devs immediately open code editor and starting coding.
And it's super wrong.

Think about your project globally.

What functions it will have?
How many pages you need for it?
What will be the layouе and the design of these pages?

Currently I'm using Miro (mindmap app) to create the overall project structure. When the structure is ready I use Figma to visualize the pages or windows I will need.

Now you have everything to start. Right? No.

Project tasks

It looks like you already have a plan after all previous steps but it's just an illusion. You have all the parts but the instruction is missing. You need to create it. Just like in LEGO.

Task managers are perfect for it. I use ClickUp but you can take any other. Divide everything into small tasks and categorize them with priorities.

Many devs are jumping from task to task when they don't have a strict plan. And the goal of this step is to make everything clear.

Try to make at least one project with this approach and you will definitely see its benefits.

Good luck!

How to become more visible in Twitter with Tweetastic

Stas Klymenko — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 07:55:29 +0000

Everyone around is talking about social presence and how it's important for developers. It's really important and Twitter is a great platform for communication, advertisement, promotion. Especially if you're developer like me. Let's check some of the cool things about Twitter:

It has one of the biggest developers communities.
You can find friend, colleagues, influencers, mentors, teachers and many other great people.
People around will be glad to help you if you have some troubles with your code.
Being an active twitter person you can receive some interesting cooperation offers: advertisement, participation in projects or events, interviews and much more.

The more people you have around, the more interactions you have - the more great opportunities you will have.

This is the part where Tweetastic can be your best friend.

What is Tweetastic

Tweetastic is a tool that helps you with content and analytics. It's a powerful app that can be a great addition to the standard analytics panel from Twitter that can't actually show some of important numbers.

Tweetastic will also help you to manage all the content you want to post in easy way with a great interface and additional functions.

If you're interested in consistent growth in Twitter, I'll show you how to do it using Tweetatic. Let's dive a bit deeper.

Metrics

While Twitter Analytics has some stats about your profile, Tweetastic grants you even more useful information.

Followers, Tweets, Impressions and Profile clicks charts.

Tweets and Followers charts that helps you to understand the connection between these two factors.

The next section is my favourite. You can check a few important stats - you should pay attention to them if you want to have some consistent growth:

Amount of new followers for the last week.
Your main stats compared to the previous week.
Your average number of likes an retweets per tweet.

All of these stats can help you to understand if you're staying in the same line of growth or something is wrong. You can check if your content is still good or average stats showring that you need to work on it harder.

Schedule

Tweets scheduling is the most important feature for me as I can't be online all the time but usually I have some content to share or just want to communicate with my followers. It will also help you to stay consistent as Twitter really love it. It's actually one of the advice from Twitter's business page.

It this section you have everything you need for it. Comfortable editor for tweets with emoji, images and even specific templates. Moreover you can create threads if you have a lot of content to share.

All scheduled tweets will be shown in great google-like calendar. This tool will help you to understand visually where do you have some gaps for another tweets or your random posts. You will also see how consistent your content will be posted for your followers.

Twinesis

There's a unique tool called Twinesis in this app. It has some limits but still can be very useful for you. It allows you yo check the most liked or the most retweeted tweets of any twitter account.

If you're working on your regular presense in Twitter and if you want to post content consistent - you will probably need some motivation and inspiration. Checking the best tweets of people in your interest circles will help you to catch the idea, rework it, add some value and use it for your own tweets.

I've seen a lot of stolen tweets from my friends influencers and want to warn you from direct stealing. It's not a good idea because you will create a negative impression about yourself instead of positive (which is the main goal of this article). And you'll be able to lost all of the benefits I wrote in the beginning.

Is it working in real life?

Even assuming I wasn't active lately, I've tried to make a few tests of this app and check the results.

I've used Tweetastic one working week with 1 pause from Jan 25 till Jan 29. The pause was at Jan 27.
Each time I've used Tweetastic I had 2-3 times more impressions. I also had 5 times more communications with people. All the other stats also had the same growth including new followers.

Tweetastic has a free plan so any of you can start using it, consistently fire your online presense, find more awesome people and receive interesting offers from companies or your colleagues.

5 things you should fix in your portfolio

Stas Klymenko — Tue, 03 Nov 2020 12:21:10 +0000

For the last 2 years I've seen hundreds of portfolios. Some of them were great, some of them are okay. But more than a half of personal pages are pretty bad and will probably fail to grant you an interview.

This article is a short list of mistakes you should fix if you want to attract HRs and Recruiters attention.

Remember this:

HRs and Recruiters are the first people who will see your portfolio. They have some programming knowledge but usually only the very basic things. You will not impress them with the code but you can impress them with the image.

Your portfolio should look clean and pretty. Not for you but for HRs and Recruiters. It's very important.

1. Color theme and layout

The first things I see when I visit someones portfolio are the layout of the page and its colors.

Many people think that dark theme with acid green text is cool. But it's not. Any acid colors and mixes are the greetings from 2000-2010. It's not relevant for modern design.
If you're Front-end developer - your application may be rejected right on this stage.

Junior developers like to add lot of blocks to their page duplicating some non-important info, adding animations, scrolls, auto-typing text, etc. Just to show they know how to do this.
But as a result - you will get heavy page with lot of unnecessary staff that totally destroy the focus of HR person.

Conclusions

Never use acid colors without valuable reason. Pay attention to calm or pastel colors. I can recommend you to use color generators like Coolors, Colorhunt or Colormind .
Remove all unnecessary info. Ask yourself - why HR will need to know this info about you. If you can't give the answer immediately - delete this element.
Make sure your page is well structured. Everything must be on it's usual flow, not hiding in the corners or appearing once in 5-10 seconds with unnecessary animations.

2. Broken elements and responsive design

You may be surprised but about 20% of portfolios I've seen have some broken elements: blocks on the page, links, animations, forms, etc.

If you are sharing your portfolio with HR you must be sure it will work 100% correctly. On any device. All your example websites and scripts must work. Don't forget to update old links, especially if you changed something on your hosting or paths in your social medias.

About 30% of portfolios from juniors are not responsive or have troubles with adaptation to different screens. It's not a good thing if you want to get a job as a Front-end dev but your website isn't working correctly.

Conclusions

Check if all your social medias links are working.
Check if all your projects are working. I recommend to use hostings like Hostman to store your apps.
Make sure your website is responsive. It's a must-have today.

3. Go away from popular projects

I think about 90% of all portfolios I saw include projects like these:

ToDo list
A clock or a timer
Flipcard game
Calculator
Weather app

Literally everyone is doing such projects. They are not impressive and not interesting. But if you want to be hired - you SHOULD be interesting. So you have 2 options:

You can still take the idea of this ordinary project but you should create a modern, good looking app and add some new features to this idea. Add filters and bookmarks to your ToDo list. Insert alarm clock, timer, time zones, etc to your clock. Create achievements list, high scores, different levels, etc for your Flipcard game. Develop the idea and create something unique. Not just changing a few styles watching some tutorial.
The better way is to create something uncommon. Something totally unique. You can use websites like Ideas AI or App Idea Generator. If you think the idea is hard - just simplify it.

As a result - HRs will see that you can build different things, not just the projects offered by YouTube teachers.

A few more important things to check

4. A button to download your resume

Make sure HRs will have an option to download your PDF resume. For many companies PDF resume is a must-have for consideration. Having a button on your website will make this process much faster and easier.

5. Why you?

A regular recruiter or HR may check several dozens of portfolios in a day. There can be dozen of other candidates with similar skills. Ask yourself, why HR will chose you, not the other person? It's just a simple question you can be asked during first short interview. Make sure you have an answer.

Hope this article will help you on your journey and will help to get a job in future!

HTML Semantic tags - why you should use it

Stas Klymenko — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 08:21:50 +0000

As you know, HTML is not a programming language. HTML is a tool to create a structure of the page. We are using different HTML tags to tell the browser how we can separate content and how do we want to build the page.

Many developers used to use only

tag for all elements on the page. If you worked with someone's code probably you noticed some pages built like:

<div class="header">
    <div class="nav">
<div>
<div class="main">
    <div class="article">
</div>
<div class="footer">
    <div class="nav">
</div>

Such pages are meaningless because tags like

or are not semantic. They can't tell anything and serving only for you.

HTML 5 Update

HTML 5 brought us a bunch of semantic tags:

<article>
<aside>
<details>
<figcaption>
<figure>
<footer>
<header>
<main>
<mark>
<nav>
<section>
<summary>
<time>

Just look at them. More than a half are currently using on every page. Each tag has specific meaning and works not only for you, but also for others. For example, these tags can say search engine bots or screen readers what exact info is in this part of the page.

Find a secret and get a gift from me

I've created a very simple page using HTML 5 semantic and deployed on Hostman for free. You can check the code structure of the page and find a secret I left for you:
articles.hostman.site

Good luck!

Why Semantic Tags Are So Important?

You can build two pages:

One - with divs only
Second - including semantic tags

Show these pages to your friend. Will he/she notice any difference? No. So you may both ways are the same and you can use any. Well yes, but no.

Users can see only the result of the rendered code. And the render will be the same. But Google, Bing, Yandex or any other search engine bot is blind. They are not looking on a render because they are looking directly on your code.

When you're using only divs - your whole page will have one priority because bots can't understand meanings by classes or id.
But when you're using semantic elements, bots can understand where is your header with navigation, where is your footer and where is your main content with sections and articles.

With semantic tags you can write instructions for bots of how to prioritise the page content.

It's not a secret that search engines are moving pages with semantic HTML higher than similar pages without semantic.
Martin Splitt (Developer Relations at Google) and Fabrice Canel (Principal Program Manager at Bing) confirmed it.
Basically, with this small thing you can guarantee your clients that their pages will work much better than many others whose pages are still built will divs only approach.

Here is a sample of the page with correct HTML semantic structure:

*Made by Kalicube.pro *

Aside of a technical part semantic HTML is a gift for developers. Using semantic tags your code will be much cleaner and understandable. It's always faster to print

<footer>

instead of

<div class="footer">

I hope you will find this info useful.
SEO may not be a big deal for you personally it's a big deal for business. When even 1 step higher in search results may bring you new clients - you will obviously want to have it. And this simple approach may give you much more.

Good luck with your projects!

Beginner Developer Roadmap

Stas Klymenko — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 18:41:21 +0000

Answering questions on Twitter and reading different threads I saw that a lot of developers are lost in this huge area. I haven't seen any kind of guide for beginners that will cover all the staff they will need in their journey. So I've decided to create my own.

I want to be a developer
Community
Technology tree
IDE
Hosting
Mentors
Learning Sources
Practice
Social Presence

1. I Want To Be A Developer

Look at this image. It's just one of many similar messages I'm regularly receiving on Twitter. A stunning amount of people want to become developers but they don't know what to do. It's not a school, not a university or even a job. You're here on your own.

Starting with nothing can be scary, hard, uncomfortable. But it's very important to find the right way in this forest.

This article is your starting point as a developer.

2. Community

Doing any activity together with someone is always better than doing alone. I know it from my own experience. Doing sports, playing games, watching series. It's always more entertaining to do it with friends. Same with coding.

Coding alone is hard. Coding alone is boring. Coding alone is demotivating.
Become a part of the community!

So what are the benefits of the coding community

You can share your progress while learning
You can ask questions and ask for a help
You can find new friends
You can find new, hot and unique content
You can form a team to build a project
You can find mentors
You can find a job or the job can find you

How to become a part of the community

Here are some steps I recommend for beginners:

Platform	Description
Twitter	Twitter is one of the biggest developers communities so far. Easy to start, easy to grow, lots of content. People are ready to help, promote your tweets, talk about different topics, etc.
LinkedIn	You may like it or not, but LinkedIn is a must have for every developer. It's still one of the most powerful platforms to find a job and learn the history of a person. If you want to have a job in future - start building your presence in LinkedIn.
Instagram	Wait, what? Yes, it's not a mistake. Instagram is a huge social network. There are lot of people from coding community but many of them are shy to show themselves or build their communities. Still in doubts? Just ask Kyle Prinsloo (@study_web_dev) if it worth it.
Google Meetups	For most of beginners development is something 'online'. But there are lot of opportunities to meet people in real life. Just look at Google Meetups all over the world. Find one in your city and communicate with developers in real world. No meetups in your area? Build your own! Ask my friend Danny Thompson (@DThompsonDev) if you have any questions about creating your own meetup group. He know all the answers.

Great. Now you are a part of the development community. You have friends to speak with, you can ask questions when you have problems. Let's go to the next step.

3. Technology Tree

This step is one of the most important as it has the biggest influence on all of your future career. At this step you need to understand what do you want to do and what technologies you will use.

A lot of people who want to switch their job into development may be surprised to understand that there are dozens of programming languages and they are connected to some specific fields of development (I will not cover universality of some languages here).

First of all - you need to choose what do you want to do in future. There are many ways and niches in development and they all have preferred languages and technologies.

I don't recommend you to look only on my list. Please, learn several sources with recommendations and explanations before making your choice.

1. Web-development - this area covers websites and web apps development. If you want to build blogs, portfolios, landing pages, eCommerce platforms, etc - this is your choice. There are many sub-areas here:

Front-end - client-side development. Basic requirements are HTML, CSS, JavaScript. After learning the basics you will need to learn more technologies to make apps better and the process much easier. Some examples of tech you will learn further are CSS preprocessors (Sass, Less), CSS frameworks (Bootstrap, TailwindCSS), JavaScript libraries (moment.js, charts.js), JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular), etc.

Awesome Roadmap for Fron-end Developers

Back-end - server-side development. You will need to learn one of many back-end languages/technologies like Node.js, PHP, Python, etc and their frameworks.

Awesome Roadmap for Back-end Developers

Also for those who want to learn Web-Development I highly recommend to check Brad Traversy's (@traversymedia) video:

2. Mobile - this area is for developers who want to create different apps for mobile platforms:

iOS - Swift
Android - Java, Kotlin, C#, etc.

Awesome Roadmap for Android Developers

3. GameDev - everything related to game development including web apps will require to learn different languages including mentioned above.

Awesome Roadmap for Game Development and GameDev QA

4. Desktop software

5. Data, ML, AI, Neural networks

6. IoT

7. Robotics

8. And so on

4. IDE

IDE (Integrated Development Environment) or code editors are the environments where you are actually coding. Before following choices of some authors or influencers (even me) I recommend you to check at least several of them and choose the best for you. IDEs are not a question about code quality rather the question about the comfort while coding.

IDE	My recommendation
VSCode	★★★★★
Sublime Text 3	★★★★☆
Atom	★★★★☆
Brackets	★★★★☆
Notepad++	★★☆☆☆

There are also some IDE designed for specific language like PhpStorm or PyCharm but I'm not covering them here.

5. Hosting

With all previous steps you have everything to build some simple apps. Let's talk about sources where you can deploy your apps and share them with other people from your community.

There are hundreds of hosting providers. All of them have their own tools, benefits, prices, etc. But for beginners I recommend to use free-for-use hostings with different options to upgrade their plans.

Hosting	Description
Hostman	One of my new and awesome discoveries with huge potential and growth level. Free for static websites or apps, tasty prices for teams and back-end apps. Also separate plans for Docker and Databases.
Netlify	Great hosting provider that helped me to store several of my apps. But the paid services are higher and with less options.
Heroku	Personally for me it's almost equal to Netlify. One more great hosting where you can store your apps for free.
Vercel	Haven't used Vercel for my own purposes but many of my friends are using it regularly. Also has a free plan for your own projects.

6. Mentors

At this step you already have everything to code and communicate with other developers. What's next?

The next step is to find a mentor who will correct your learning journey, help you to overcome the mistakes and tough situations. Many people think that mentors are only the influencers with thousands of followers.

No, it's not working like this. There is a tiny chance such people will have time even for 1 person, not saying about tens of hundreds. You will need to find a person from your close community with higher experience who have time to answer your questions and help you to grow. If you're beginner, even other juniors or middle developers can give you a lot of useful advice.
This approach will save you a lot of time comparing with writing DMs for all influencers you know.

Automate your code quality without mentors

Recently I've met with people from Codacy team. They are offering a platform that will check your code and find different types of issues. Like a real mentor. And it's free for single accounts.

Foe example Codacy found 173 issues I can improve or fix on one of my projects.

7. Learning Sources

I want to be honest. I see these lists of useful tools, platforms, videos, articles, etc every day. Biggest part of them are repeating also almost every day. When you will grow inside developers community you will also stuck in Learnin Sources Hell.

Currently I'm working on fixing this issue for all the developers.
Follow me on Twitter, Hashnode or Dev.to if you want to be one of the first people who will have the Developer Pandora's Box.

Until there is no good option for this, I recommend you to create your own list of sources and fill it with new platforms or projects. Categorise them into several columns to have clean and useful cheat sheet for your own purpose. This is the step I ignored for a long time and I regret a lot I haven't done it before.

I can't left you without a pack of awesome sources for learning. It's not just a random list. These sources I've used by myself after checking hundreds of other. And I can honestly said that these sources helped me to learn coding.

Source	Description
Traversy Media	This is the best programming channel on YouTube without any doubts.
The Net Ninja	High quality YouTube courses and videos with detailed explanations
FreeCodeCamp	One of the best platforms to learn programming. It's free to learn with free certificates. Awesome content quality and community.
Florin Pop	Florin is building great projects on YouTube and making live streams. You can learn a lot from his videos.
Scrimba	This platform is similar to Udemy, Coursera and others but it has much better interface and interaction with learners and the quality of the courses is much higher.

I will not put here a lot of sources because I want you to focus just on several of them. Nobody will open 20-40-60 sources - only a few first of them. That's why I'm giving you the best.

8. Practice

There is a term called a "Tutorial Hell". It's a situation when you spent most of the time only learning new materials and not actually coding.

The problem is that any tutorial from any author covering only one specific topic or one specific issue. That's why when you're starting building your own app you will face a huge amount of errors.

If you learn something - try to implement it right after finishing the video or the article or even while you're watching/reading it. You don't need to hurry. Take as much time as you need. You need to understand how the technology is working, not just to copy it.

Real world apps will require you to use short, clean and smart code. You can learn it while solving different challenges. It will help you to find great solutions easily when you will build the app. Here are some of the platform you can use for it:

9. Social Presence

When you are already set all your environment for learning and coding it's time to think about your personality growth.

Having a strong social profiles you have much more options in development community:

You can receive invitations for different events
You can receive some products for free to promote it
You can participate it great projects or betas
You can earn more money with ads and your own contents

And it's just a tip of the iceberg.
If you want to learn more about building your online presence, especially in Twitter, follow Catalin Pit (@catalinmpit https://twitter.com/catalinmpit) and Danny Thompson (@DThompsonDev).

I hope this little roadmap will help you find your way in the development area.
You can do it!

5 easy ways to get your first commercial experience

Stas Klymenko — Fri, 29 May 2020 19:13:22 +0000

When you are reading requirements inside job openings, usually you can see that companies are asking for some amount of commercial experience in development in general or with specific technology. Have you ever thought what that means and what they actually want from a candidate?

Commercial Experience vs Your Own Pet-projects

The main difference between them is in the way you are building projects.
First of all, while you are working with your pet-projects, you are working alone. You can make pauses any time you want, you can write the code like you want, you can ignore comments, etc. And everything will be fine as nobody will probably know about its building process.

From the other side, when you are working in the company, with the team or even on any freelance platform for someone - you need to fix all of that. You need to remember about deadlines, you need to cooperate with the team, leave some notes and comments, etc.

It's just a rough explanation but I hope you get the point. Companies want to hire developers that can start working. They don't want to waste time on teaching you how to work in team and how to write code properly. That's why they are asking for a commercial experience.

How can you get your first commercial experience?

1. Your friends

This is the most simple way to get experience that you can call as a commercial. We all have friends with different interests. Ask your friends, maybe someone want to get a website. You can offer this service as free or with much lower price than the average on the market.

Making a website for your friends you will get:

1 additional work in your portfolio
One new line in your resume with commercial experience
1 additional recommendation Isn't that cool for 1-2 days of work?

2. Any local business

You can check your local area to find any kind of companies, private business, clubs, stores or anything else. Just check if they have a website. Even nowadays many of them havent a page or its pretty old and need to be refreshed. At this step you can offer the same as for your friends - to create a website for free or with much loser price than the average on the market.
And in the result you will also get all 3 bonuses mentioned above.

3. Freelance

Freelance platforms are offering a lot of opportunities but most of them are pretty hard for people with only basic knowledge. But sometimes people need just some minor edits and you can grab this task. Also, don't forget you can create your own profile to offer your services.

Recently I've watched Dev Ed's video about his 3 orders on Fiverr. He just bought 3 websites for $5 and showed the result. As you can see, the level of all 3 works is pretty low. So if you can already create something better with good quality - feel free to use the platform to get your commercial experience. This can also help you to expand your portfolio, and maybe some people will also be able to give recommendations upon a request.

4. Collaborations

Another option is to create a website in collaboration with other developers. There are many trainee and junior devs that will be glad to create something together. Making something with other people isn't the same as your own project. As I said before, you will pay much more attention to what you're doing. So we can roughly said that this experience is more valuable for companies.
I strongly recommend to find people for collaborations via #100DaysOfCode or #CodeNewbie hashtags.

5. Partnership with companies

This way may be not that easy as previous but it may open much more opportunities in future. There are lot of IT companies offering to create websites for business or any other purposes. Maybe it's even one of those you want to apply.

Actually, you can try to reach their HR department and ask if they want to collaborate with you. Just one example of partnership. You can provide them alternative website designes or features for free. They compare it to what they made for the clients and even took some of your ideas. Yes, it's not the ideal experience but if you will show the company that you can create great things, there are many chances that they will hire you or give a very good recommendation.

You can choose only one solution or even try them all together. But as there are opportunities to get some commercial experience before applying - I highly recommend to use them.

Hope this info was useful for you and will help you in future.

How To Write A Resume: Part 1 - The Structure

Stas Klymenko — Fri, 01 May 2020 12:52:17 +0000

How To Write A Resume: Part 1 - The Structure

First of all, let me introduce myself for people that saw me for the first time.
My name is Stas, currently I’m a recruiter that want to switch career into development. While learning coding I’m trying to help people to get a job. For trainee and juniors, for middle and senior specialist. Literally for everyone who need my help and for free.

I’m also running a list of job openings for developers as a part of my help to the community: List of openings

With this article I want to start my series of posts about building or editing your resume.

Who will need to read this series of articles

I’m receiving a lot of messages in Twitter from people that need some review of their resume. Just to be sure that they are ready to apply for a job. I’ve spent about 15-20 min for checking all the information and writing the answer.

This series of articles will help me to give answers faster and help more people.
So answering the title question - this series will be helpful for everyone who is currently looking for a job or want to change working place in future. Also, some of my tips can help you improve your resume even if you already have a good place.

Where to start

I saw a lot of resumes with mix of sections that were put just randomly. Probably, such resume may be cute for you. But it’s a hell for HR’s and Recruiters.

Being developers you must know that correct structure is very important in code. Same with Resume. So first of all you need to know what structure to use.
Types of resume structure

It’s common to define 3 types of resume structure:

Chronological
Functional
Combination

I don’t want to give long and detailed explanations of each to save your time. Just a short description to understand what type is better to choose in your particular case.

Chronological

Chronological resume is the most common and popular option. In this type of resume you are filling ‘Experience’ section with your previous jobs in reverse order, starting from the most recent. This is a good choice if you have at least 3-4 previous jobs to fill the list and employers are really like such resumes.

Functional

While Chronological resume focused on work history, Functional is focused on your skills and actual experience. You need to be careful with this one as it’s more specific and require filling all the information specially for some job opening or specific position.

The main area of resume must be filled with your skills description and sometimes it even haven’t work history section. But if you have some to add - put it below ‘Skills’ or ‘Professional experience’ section. Usually this type of resume is very good if you are switching career or have some gaps in employment history.

Combination

Combination type is a simple mix of two previous types. It helps to focus HR’s attention on your skills but also provides your work history showing stable and regular employment. Usually this type is better for developers of middle+ level.

Required and optional sections

After choosing the type of your resume you need to create the template, using specific sections. There are required and optional sections you can use in your resume:

Contact info (REQUIRED)
Objective / Short description
Education (REQUIRED)
Additional education
Work history / Professional experience (REQUIRED)
Skills
Achievements / Notable things
Recommendations

Contact info (REQUIRED)

We can also name this section as ‘header’ of your resume. The section usually include:

Your first and last names
E-mail
Phone number
Location
Social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc)

Only name and E-mail are required. Other information is optional, but it’s always better if you add it.

Sometimes I see additional information like ‘married’ or ‘have 2 kids’, etc. It’s not important and I’m not recommend you to add it. HR will ask you about it if it’s required by the company, but usually not.

Objective / Short description (OPTIONAL)

This section is optional and allows you to write a short summary about yourself. Usually 2-3 sentences. If you don’t know what to add here, better is skip the section.

I don’t recommend you to write some kind of your story here, describe your hobbies, etc. Short summary or nothing.

Education (REQUIRED)

This section is only for mid-higher education. But don’t write about your school here. Description of education must include:

Educational institution
Specialization, degree and dates
In some cases you can include publications or achievements

If you have more than one place of main education, add them in reverse order starting from the most recent.

Additional education (OPTIONAL)

In this section you can add information about courses for learning languages or coding. Also, you can specify some online courses, books, big conferences or even progress in some platforms like Hackerrank or LeetCode.

This section is mostly using by trainee and junior developers. Usually they haven’t much experience or good projects with bunch of technologies so they need to show that they already learned them and ready to use. This section may be also a good addition if you haven’t much info to specify in the resume.

But please, add only notable sources.

Work history / Professional experience (REQUIRED)

One of the most important sections of your resume. Be sure, HRs and Recruiters pay a lot of attention to your last and previous jobs.

All the history must be in reverse order starting from the most recent. Each job should have:

Name of the company
Your position
Dates of employment

Let’s call all of it a job title. Under this title you should describe your main and most valuable to mention tasks or achievements. Don’t write too much, 3 items will be enough. As you are developers, you can also specify stack of technologies you used.

If you have a very big employment history, don’t include all 10-20 places. Add only most valuable or related to the job you are applying.

Skills (OPTIONAL but REQUIRED in functional resume)

Checking resumes I saw thousands of ways to write skills. Lot of people don’t care how this section is looking and who will check it later. So they just put all skills they know into one sentence.

The best way to represent your skills is to divide everything into smaller parts. For example:

Front-end: JavaScript, jQuery, React;
Back-end: Python, Django, Flask;
Other: GIT, Bootstrap, Slack, etc.

Use any kind of categories, but make it just a bit better to view and check.
In this section you need to specify only skills related to the job you are applying.

Achievements / Notable things (OPTIONAL)

This section may be your advantage among other candidates with similar experience if you have something to include. For example, you can add your own publications, information about top places in some competitions, participation in big challenges or notable contributions.

Recommendations (OPTIONAL)

Sure, this section is optional but in my opinion if you have 2-3 recommendations from previous jobs or other sources, it means that other people were satisfied working with you. And this is a big plus for a new employer.

Additionally to all said above, I’m not recommend to add ‘my interests’ section. You can tell about it during the interview but it’s just a useless waste of space in resume.
Also, don’t add one more page with some links and descriptions as your portfolio. That’s a bad idea. Make this list on your own website, GitHub or just send a few links for the most valuable projects you made.

This article is my personal view. Some other HRs or Recruiters may not be agree with something.

I hope this article will help you with building your own resume. Follow me here or on twitter for further updates and other content.

Thank you!

How to become more visible for Recruiters

Stas Klymenko — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 08:00:49 +0000

My tweet received pretty much questions from different developers. It takes a lot of time to give the answers for everyone. That's why I decided to make a post here with some of the general tips.

Let's dive right into the tips step by step.

If you are searching for a job, be sure your LinkedIn profile is updated and the most important sections are filled.

Recruiters use Boolean search to find developers in LinkedIn. That's why it's very important to fill all the gaps with proper information. Here are several tips:

Use your description section below the name to show you are searching for a job. The most common phrases are "open for new opportunities" or "looking for a job".
Go to Settings and Privacy -> Job seeking preferences -> Let Recruiters know you're open to opportunities. This option is OFF by default. Turn it ON and you will also upgrade your visibility for recruiters.
Fill your About section. Add some information about you and what is more important - add your stack and technologies you are using or used before.
Update your Skills section and add technologies you are using.
Add all the main Courses and Online Courses you have passed (Only main and valuable). This will add some points to your experience and knowledge of the field.
Add Certificates if you have any related to IT branch. It may not be important on the tech interview, but will be useful to pass the HR/Recruiter interview.
Fill Languages section. Sometimes it's very important for the employer and this one little section can totally change the Recruiter's vision.

All of this tips will highly increase your visibility when recruiters will use Boolean search in LinkedIn to find a developer.

Twitter

A lot of people trying to find their first job on twitter. Yes, it's possible, but usually not works for junior developers.
But there are several things you can do to increase your hiring chances if the Recruiter will find you:

Change your bio description and add information about searching for a job (like in LinkedIn).
Try to be active. If the recruiter will find your profile, it's important to show that you are still in game. So please, don't forget about your twitter profile and at least made some tweets periodically.

GitHub

Nowadays recruiters have additional tools to make search easier. There are several tools for searching through GitHub profiles. Don't hesitate to add the same 'open for new opportunities' info to your bio, your current level and stack.

Also, try to be active in your own repository. It's not very important for hiring but a good sign in general.

A few additional advice

Open your profiles and DM's on every social media you are using. It's very common situation when you just can't send a message in twitter to a person that may be interested in job.
Add contact info to your social media profiles.
Add photo to your profile.
Never start looking for a job without prepared Resume and Portfolio.

And one really helpful advice - find a friend-recruiter. Usually recruiters have several thousands connects in LinkedIn and they can boost your profile among other recruiters and employers. Your hiring chances will increase significantly.

I hope this information will be useful for you. These are just general and the basic tips. However, a lot of people forget about them.

If you want to know something deeper - write me.
If you want some Resume advice - write me.
If you want any help with hiring advice - write me.
Will do my best.

DEV Community: Stas Klymenko

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1. First steps

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2. Fundamentals

3. Time to practice

4. Advanced topics

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Node.js threads

Node.js speed and optimization

Security

Different topics

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Project goal

Project name and logo

Project colors

Project structure

Project tasks

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What is Tweetastic

Metrics

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Find a secret and get a gift from me

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1. I Want To Be A Developer

2. Community

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5. Hosting

6. Mentors

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7. Learning Sources

8. Practice

9. Social Presence

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2. Any local business

3. Freelance

4. Collaborations

5. Partnership with companies

How To Write A Resume: Part 1 - The Structure

How To Write A Resume: Part 1 - The Structure

Who will need to read this series of articles

Where to start

Chronological

Functional

Combination

Required and optional sections

Contact info (REQUIRED)

Objective / Short description (OPTIONAL)

Education (REQUIRED)

Additional education (OPTIONAL)

Work history / Professional experience (REQUIRED)

Skills (OPTIONAL but REQUIRED in functional resume)

Achievements / Notable things (OPTIONAL)

Recommendations (OPTIONAL)

How to become more visible for Recruiters

LinkedIn

Twitter

GitHub

A few additional advice