DEV Community: UnitBuilds

Step 3 - hiring tasks

UnitBuilds — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:06:08 +0000

So update, they think 'I'm a good fit', noted my manual review went poorly. So they gave me 2 tasks to do (compensated), so now comes the real-world test of can I do the job, yes or no.

Looking forward to the challenge and it's fun tasks too! Abstract filesystems and porting pgrust, both things I'm pretty familiar with, so shouldnt be too tough.

Fingers crossed it all goes well!

HEADS-UP QODER HAS QWEN 3.8 Flash FOR FREE!

UnitBuilds — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:28:37 +0000

Heads-up for everyone, Qoder is running a freebie till end of the month, Qwen 3.8 Flash is free! Proof

Go ahead and make the most of it!

Are you good enough? Who sets the bar?

UnitBuilds — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 08:56:18 +0000

Friday, I had a tech interview, aced it... Well except manual code review...

That had me spiraling. Both good and bad. Who really has the right to judge your potential for a role? Where is the bar set and at what point do you pass it? Does it all pivot on 1 thing, or is it actually a case of a standardized test, you either pass with flying colors, or the recruitment pipeline passes on you?

For reference, I aced the demos and technical questions, manual code review though, is becoming an archaic skill, I work on 12 projects at a time across 4 systems... It's not really a skill I practice regularly, let alone not EVERYTHING I do is in rust. So does failing a manual code review make me incompetent, or incapable of doing the job?

I think the answer to that isnt as clear cut as we'd like it to be... Manual review, is marketed as 'a competence test, to see how you think' and yet the environment is completely wrong for it? Who here still just LOOKS at code to judge it? Is writing tests and benchmarks not the preferred industry standard? Does having an AI do an initial sweep, fixing the obvious and giving context to the file, make you a bad developer, because you need hand-holding?

So many questions, with no obvious answer and it had my mind running all weekend, despite my best efforts not to... And I dont really think it's just me?

My opinion on it, is that manual review, with untestable code, during an interview, is more a trap than a real judgement of proficiency. If you review a caching system, but the last 1 you built was 3 years ago, would you still remember the right pattern? Would you be able to look at a bad design and scrap it entirely for a better solution? It's dated and relies on memory and experience, not skill and dont mistake them for eachother. Memory and past-experiences, are nuanced, that's the question you either ace, or fail, because you've either done it recently enough to remember, or you're shooting blanks. Whereas skill, is the ability to implement the mandate, correctly.

I do think part of it, is that companies have learned to devalue candidates before hiring. During the manual review phase, he said 'you actually caught the [u8; 16] for sha256, not many people caught that 1'. That was the only 1 caught, because that's the only 1 I had recently dealt with. Does that mean I'm a 1 trick pony? Or does it mean the code I was meant to review, is out of my domain? Or is it simply, 'I didnt do it before like this, so I wouldnt know'... As much as we rely on skill, being able to 'sniff out' bad code, or unoptimized patterns, that's hardly why we call ourselves developers? By definition, we develop, we innovate and create, we are each unique in the sense that our skillsets are tailored to our past work and our 'pattern recognition' has only had training data on what we've personally dealt with.

Dont get me wrong, take an expert of 20 years, have them review it, they'd likely still find all the issues... But how much of that years of experience is weighed in talent, vs 'I've done this before'? I think that's really where the world's conflated around hiring, years of experience, doesnt actually matter, it really doesnt. Take a developer with 10 years and 20 years experience, the gap between them is purely patterns they've dealt with, if it's a pattern the 10 year dealt with recently, vs the 20 year dealt with 10 years ago, chances are the 10 year will write a better solution?

So if it's all irrelevant, what really is the bar? Do you have to be confident? Do you have to 'know your stuff' even though your past job wont possibly map 1:1? Do you have to bring cool stuff? On that, I've always leaned to the business side of things... Do you bring value? If they hire you today, what does the ROI look like for that hire? That blankets over the entire job, over your capabilities, over everything. Because in the end, Claude is $20 (thank you for that 1 ex-boss...), we arent hired for coding anymore. So what value do we bring? Experience is circumstantial, skillsets evolve, innovations become standards, at some point value, becomes the norm and we'd need to bring more, else we're obsolete?

We develop, be that via AI, manually, or writing binary like it's Morse Code, with a telegraph... The creation medium is irrelevant, it's the problem solving skills, the ability to learn on the fly, experiment and discover new ways to do it and fight for innovation that makes a developer a good investment. Because in the end, that's exactly what we are in the grand scheme of things... Investments, that need to pay dividends, like a computer needs to bring value past it's power bill. So how do you set a value on it? Metrics... You use metrics, to determine if an employee brought value. Eg. my past job, I built the entire journaling system, stock system, manufacturing system, remote deployment system, the cashbook system, even the dashboard and debug logging system. Value delivered far exceeded my salary, because each thing I did, immediately gained them a customer or 2, which meant the profit far exceeded COGS for me within the first 3 months there... After that, everything I did was pure profit for them. Yet, companies get complacent, they forget that you did that, so they instead demand you do that again... and again... Till you cant keep growing their recurring revenue at an exponential rate. Then they see you as a liability and poof, you're gone, 1 way or another.

So back to the question that started it all, who sets the bar and how is it actually measured? Investment brokers need a portfolio to show their capability and a history of high-interest returns and yet, that's still a gamble. Vs if you need MS Office, you buy MS Office... Either your reputation precedes you, or you bring something they need out of the gate. The only question then, is hard can they haggle? How can they degrade your value, before signing, so they get a better deal? That's why they ask your current salary, not your expectation, so they know what's your actual floor, not the floor you're confident you're worth, because if they degrade your worth enough, you'll settle for that floor, just to have an income? And that's how professors become janitors and Engineers work at McDonalds... Once they devalue you far enough, you'll take what you can get. Despite dreamy eyed ideals, companies dont hire the best candidate, they hire the candidate that's lowest risk, highest return. Translation, whose the best value for money within the budget range and they will almost always scrape the bottom of the barrel, instead of pick the best talent, because it's easier to make a small bet that pays out smaller, than it is to risk it on the high end.

Manual code review, in my opinion, is 1 of those tactics. You dont do it daily, you cant possibly be high-throughput, while reviewing every line, like it's a philosophical koan, "what is this loop?", you'd be unproductive and a poor investment. So if a company wont ever hire you to do that, then why does it exist, beyond degrading your value, because people are notoriously bad at spot-checking an unknown? "Bring a project", is awesome, it translates to 'we want to see what value you bring on day 1'. Technical questions, are awesome, it translates to 'how much insight do you have into our industry, to identify bottlenecks and potential market gaps'. 'How do you use AI', awesome, because that shows whether the company's existing plans fit your usage, so they dont have to keep 20 different subscriptions. 3 high-value indicators, that actually show what value you actually bring, vs 1 that makes you feel like nothing, so they can low-ball you and you humbly accept their generous offer, because your self-esteem was crushed...

I'll admit, that's a very pessimistic view of things and I imagine everyone here'd have a different opinion on it? But that's where my 'clinical thinking' got me. Nobody wants to buy a brand new, shiny house at list price, they'd sooner look for cracks and water marks, so they can devalue it to where it's a bargain... Only, they arent buying a house, they're renting a person... And that degrading, is the degrading of the ego, which can have serious consequence if a person is unstable (I'm fine, incase you're worried). It's a business practice that we all practice in some way or another, like buying fancy things only when they're on special, we dont even recognize it's the same thing. It's only 'worth it' when it's devalued.

So I got a final question for you all. When you fail at anything during an interview, do you feel like your 'salary expectation' drops?

How to make a fool of yourself 101

UnitBuilds — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:28:16 +0000

So as some of you know, I had a technical interview with Wasmer today. I was up till midnight last night preparing and all morning today preparing. I got my velocity MCP deployed to edge, tested, built a nice little dashboard for showcasing, awesome!

then I took my durable workflows system and stripped a chunk of it out, to convert it to a durable state system meant for wasmer cloud, awesome!

I got the IDE nice and fancy, looks good, I can explain it well, fantastic!

I connect to the call, run through the first questions of the interview, did great, I showcase my demos, absolutely blows him away! I'm like YES, I got this!

He says 'I dont think it's necessary, but to be complete'... Oh dear... Oh no... Manual code review... Tiny little file, a simple cache. And I absolutely choked. I'm reading through it, I pause at spots, my brain knows THERE's SOMETHING HERE!!! But I cant explain it. I had gotten so used to just selecting a block of text I instinctively know looks wrong, then have the AI fix it, that I couldnt articulate.

I flagged a mismatch, hash is sha 256, but it's a 16 byte array, that's 1 point... That's about as far as I could get without him hinting... I felt like an undergrad that's never seen code other than that on the teleprompter.

So lesson learned, no matter how good you think you are, even if an interviewer can see you build fantastic systems, dont think that'll save you from manual code review... And instead of polishing up your demo's, rather focus on refreshing the basics, as stupid as it sounds, in the age of AI, that's the skill we're neglecting the most.

I knew that a file create inside an async loop is bad design, but I couldnt remember the name of it, tokio task spawn blocking... And bearer_auth for reqwest... a simple & for borrowing, to make sure it passes through anyhow context, making sure an await has appropriate tiers worth of ?... All things I missed...

Luckily, I redeemed myself during the final questions, I think it caught him by surprise when I asked questions about the exact things they're working on and need the most work on... Which is good...

So instead of getting DQ'd I got through, I had to write an email on the file, with all the fixes. Which I did (It took me 3.5h to refresh enough to catch all 7 bugs). He said while he cant watch me, please no AI. So I stuck to that, I did it without AI and it was a nightmare... All the skills I built up over the 6 years before I started using AI, were gone, I forgot how to correctly phrase my searches and I refused to use the AI assist bit at the top of a search result. It made me realize just how 'in your face' AI is these days, it's literally everywhere, you cant even open up VS Code without AI popping up front and center... Doing things without AI again was quite an eye opening tbh, like writing fortran, you really dont miss it... But refreshing on it just reminds you how far we've come.

I think anyone here who knows me, knows that I am all-in on AI, where it falls flat, I build infrastructure to correct it, rather than correct the code myself. That way I can atleast know it wont do it again... But I use it to make the changes... So my reliance on AI is so deeply vested, while not a bad thing, that I forgot entirely how to manually code.

To just make it clear, errors dont slip past me during AI-assisted work, infact, that's the weird part. I knew where the errors were, I hovered with my mouse over them, I knew they were there just by looking at it, but I lost the ability to explain it? Ok, a fair bit of it is stage-fright, but a considerable part of it is genuinely muscle dystrophy when it comes to coding and I honestly didnt think it'd happen to me? I used to keep up with 9 different programming languages at once (JS, C#, C++, F#, Rust, HTML, CSS, Go, Python), yet now I cant even articulate what's the matter in code, just caveman point at it.

I felt like 1 hell of an idiot and honestly, if it wasnt for the interviewer's final comments, I likely woulda been depressed. He said I had the most impressive demos, I asked really good questions, it's a shame that I fell flat during the manual review, but I'm not disqualified... But that realization. If I hadnt prepared all my demos, my hiring journey would have ended today. All because I didnt keep up with manual writing code and explaining what happens. Dont get me wrong, completely unnecessary skill in real-world execution, but they're still asking those questions? Manual code review? Explain what happens when the hash and the algo dont line up? Things that honestly just never crossed my mind ever having to explain beyond what it took me to make a decision in my head 'a 16 byte array, in a sha256 hash, would mean partial filling and incomplete reading, it would never hit the cache', that's enough for me + AI, but it's not enough when dealing with a human interviewer. And that's scary... The skill we're deliberately losing, is STILL the thing that gets you hired?

So my question is, who needs to change their ways? Do we as developers need to go back to roots and focus on manual code editing, or should the hiring system update it's methods to embrace the new AI age?

Side note: Honestly, blew my mind how much he knew! Clearly, I still have ALOT to learn about distributed systems and the ecosystem that runs things. Not just learn how to use them, but dig deeper into the underlying architecture. He said everything still uses POSIX, but it's archaic. That's definitely my next point of research, because I never paid much mind to POSIX, just POSIX compliant... All I'll say, is that I am extremely excited to work at Wasmer, I think I'm gunna learn ALOT.

WASMER RESPONDED!!!

UnitBuilds — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:57:54 +0000

WASMER RESPONDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I got in to the tech interview! What's surprising is it's not a pair-programming session, it's a straight up 'bring a demo, lets talk about it' which means they reviewed my GitHub!

To quit, or not to quit. That is the question...

UnitBuilds — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:05:15 +0000

Really should add a poll system for Forem... Might do that this weekend.

A bit of background, for the past year and a half, I've been working as a senior .Net full-stack developer at a company writing ERP software. All of it was remotely. Now it's apparently a problem...

A few months ago, I got a back injury which happened to coincide with my boss demanding that I have to drive to the office to work from there, instead of my home-office. Not a big deal in it's own (beyond the skyrocketing fuel prices), but I had a back injury, so I was medically booked off. And that's when the workplaces started to get REALLY toxic.

From non-stop pestering 'when will you be able to come to the office', to giving opinions on my doctor's treatment, to outright fabricating a paper trail, something just felt off about how they've been handling it.

They went so far as to send me an email, 'warning of code quality' after a merge and push, where their changes were broken, but they only tested it after I merged and pushed. Obviously I ran it first to test it, but JetBrain Rider hit the build-cache, so I had ran a stale build when I tested before pushing. I get a written warning, then a phone call, where he said I 'rely too much on AI' despite my colleagues sitting in the office dont even do their commits themselves, they fully operate through Claude... And that he 'hired a person, not an AI, Claude is $20'... That comment made my blood boil. I'm sure you all can agree, for someone to downplay 6 years of experience, let alone that you had built most of the core systems alone, being compared to a $20 subscription is rather insulting.

Now, he wants a 'meeting with management' to 'discuss my remote work and back injury'. Apparently Zoom doesnt exist to him, because he demanded it's either at a cafe, or my house! In what world is it appropriate for your boss to invite themself and core management staff to an employee's home? So I chose cafe.

All of this has been causing me stress, anxiety and I can feel the toll it's having on my body and mental health. So I ran the numbers... I have 5 months runway with the money in my pocket and I have a 2nd source of income doing tech support and SLAs for Doccit (automated accounting suite I built prior to working here). I have my own OPC and enough experience to start a solo business if I really had to. And I've been applying to jobs, even got an interview with Wasmer (fingers crossed tech eval goes well).

So my question to anyone who got this far, in my position, would you tell them to shove it? Cuz that's my plan for tomorrow. Hand in resignation and to tell him where he can shove his Claude subscription... When the clients I worked with directly, building out the systems they want to deploy across all their facilities (huge contract), ask them to add a feature, or make an edit, we'll see how far his Claude subscription gets him.

Question 2, anyone looking for a Senior Full-stack Developer, specializing in .Net, Rust and Fintech?

P.S. Just a theory, but I suspect the real purpose behind this harassment is due to them wanting to down-staff and he doesnt want to fire any of the puppy-dog eyed developers in the office staring at him... Much easier firing someone you dont see daily? Especially after the initial 'come to the office' motive being that it's when the rest of them first started using AI and had no clue how it worked, whereas I had already moved on from single agent to multi-agent orchestration, probably wanted me there to train them and potentially also to get their hands on my local model I use for most of my work... Again, just a theory.

Anyone else getting colour changing backgrounds on their user icon?

UnitBuilds — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:22:50 +0000

I noticed it today, first it was yellow when I noticed it, then it went red now? Anyone have any idea why?

I think I found my ideal job

UnitBuilds — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:26:08 +0000

Have you ever read a job posting and your heart just sings the song of "HIRE ME PLEASE!!!", yeah, it's more heavy metal, if you were expecting soothing sounds...

I just read a job posting by Fractile and my heart sang out... So much so that I went to LinkedIn to stalk the personnel and send them all DMs to say PLEASE!!! (sorry about that btw)

Essentially, Rust + AI + 'we build the hardware, so you can push it's limits' = Heaven. Literal heaven, that's the kinda job that I'd wake up in the morning and love every second of it.

For those who don't know, I love optimizing and I love saying 'it can be done better' and not just say it, prove it, by building it. That's why a company that says 'hey, push the hardware limits and the hardware department will push back' is music to my ears, it means I can design systems optimized beyond what's technically possible on consumer (or enterprise) hardware, because they tailor the hardware and software to make it faster!

I haven't ever been this excited for a job posting and it shows why, accelerating AI inference has been a hobby of mine, I even experimented a lot with various techniques on how to do it, but this... This is it... For a long time, I believed that Fractals were the key to unlocking faster, smarter, less error prone LLMs and here pops up a company with it in their name! AND they're building hardware and software, specifically for it! If the rest of them didnt have their LinkedIn's private, I'd have personally messaged every person in the building.

Funniest of all, I didnt even submit my Resume, I just wrote them a massive block of text, with GitHub links, dev posts, design ideas on how I'd improve it, etc.

The other thing that sang out to me is 'no tests, but our interview will be in-depth', loved reading that! Test my capabilities, not if I can remember syntax, test whether I can make a system better, not whether I'm literate...

So fingers crossed everyone, I hope I get the job!

P.S. Anyone from Fractile here?

Who needs a health and fitness app?

UnitBuilds — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:06:07 +0000

So, my fiance wanted a health and fitness app, to track meals, exercise routines, manage upcoming events that disrupt her routine, accommodates for sick days, keeps data private and of course, has a digital pet.

So I made 1, featuring a digital pet (choose wisely), which evolves with you. The idea being, which creature's nature do you want to embrace? Do you want to be proud like a dragon (boost your self confidence, be strong), or gentle like a panda (handle stress better, lower anxiety). Your choice affects EVERYTHING, from the degree of exercise expected, to how it engages with you. I did it that way, because animals seem to have life figured out, we're still struggling, so embody the spirit of a panda to keep calm, humble and fun.

It includes a personal AI trainer (adjustable kindness, strictness, or dynamic for both, based on your behavior), so you can keep yourself on track and ask questions. If you want to go out partying, ask your trainer, they'll say yes or no and give you a limit.

Pre-emptive discipline. If an event is pre-scheduled, it'll adjust your routine leading up to it, to compensate. Eg. B-day party, you'll eat and drink more, so you estimate the difference and it'll adjust your plan for you leading up to it, so when the event comes, you dont feel guilty, because you dont have to work your way back to the goal, instead, you already accounted for it.

Calorie and macro tracking, that's kinda a given, snap a pic of food, it confirms and enters the stats.

Smart-device linking, like a smart watch or smart scale, so your biometrics are recorded and your pet and trainer will respond if something isnt right, eg. you suddenly get stressed and heartrate spikes, get a nice warm buzz from a panda on your wrist, with a kind message to keep you relaxed and no need to manually enter your weight or BMI, just stand on your scale, let the app track it (visibly, or hidden for the people who get OCD about number tracking).

Household tracking. It's not just you, you have a household too, they affect the groceries you buy and your routine. Either granularly, if both are on a journey, or down to just tracking average grocery consumption.

Meal-prep, either ahead of time for x days, or spur of the moment, based on your macros and your household's macros (if tracking). That's something I found important for it, it tracks your grocery receipts to see what you have in stock, so when you want a recipe for dinner, it can give you a recipe you have the ingredients for! No more "steak and asparagus" during seasons when asparagus is really expensive... It can also prep a grocery list for you, keeping it cheap based on your actual receipts, not just 'this should be cheap'.

Everything is stored locally and optionally backed up to your own cloud backup, I dont want user data, please and thank you.

Still alot I want to add, like a menstrual cycle tracker, routine planner, sleep tracker, tracking buddy, leaderboard, sharing, enhanced mental health, etc. so any thoughts of desired features, lemme know!

Another question, current setup is BYOK, or default to using your device's native AI (gemini for android, siri(gemini) for apple). That good, or would you like the option to pay for my api, so it runs enterprise channels that keeps data private?

Is this something you'd pay for (once off if you go BYOK, I hate subscriptions)? Or if it were open-source, would you still use it? Android is simple, build the apk and run it, but ios dev builds expire in 7 days... Which can be a pain. I want to keep it free, so if it were free and ad-free, would you donate, so I can maintain the apple signing license and put it on the various app stores?

Do we need drafters for credentials?

UnitBuilds — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:41:45 +0000

Out of curiosity, how many of you have had concerns regarding AI agents having access to your codebase and credentials in your codebase (eg. appsettings, API keys, etc.). How many of you realized it's a problem after it's saved to cloud and I imagine on a subscription, not API where your data is kept private...

Bump if you think we need a lightweight (eg. 100m param) draft model, that is trained explicitly to filter any sensitive data and scramble it, as a middleware service, to prevent data leaks to cloud. Either that, or a tiny model to run on a codebase to replace all sensitive data with references and an interaction layer for the agentic harness to call the reference, instead of directly calling the credentials from file?

What that would mean, is essentially, your SQL connection string stays safe, your API keys stay safe, your logins stay safe, if you expand, it can keep your banking details safe, while allowing you to use your AI to it's fullest, without slowing it down?

Idk, thought crossed my mind again and I thought I'd actually ask who else has thought of it?

Resume Advice from the soon to be jobless

UnitBuilds — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:36:17 +0000

So I just had a convo with a friend

xulingfengFollow

AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 15yr QA → building AI test framework.

and well, he's jobless, I'm on my way there, so here's a hitchhiker's guide to getting hired.

For starters, throw away your Resume as you know it. Nobody cares where you studied, how many years of experience you have, or all the personnel skills you developed. Simply put, those are the bare minimum.

The Hiring Funnel

Hiring is done in a multi-phase funnel.

Phase 1 — Matching Filter

So what are they matching? Exactly what the job asks for. Degree, Years of Experience, skill set. That's non-negotiable — you have to meet those minimum requirements, else your application never even gets to a reviewer.

Phase 2 — Soft Match

This is where they use AI. It essentially takes the job posting and directly runs it against your CV, turning it into a scorecard. If you're not in the top 80%, consider yourself filtered out.

Phase 3 — Say Hi to a Human

This is the first time your resume ever reaches a human, but don't think they're checking your CV. They're just asking the AI "what makes this person special?"

Here's where you should pay attention.

The AI gives the reviewer your life in a single paragraph. That's why overfilling your CV is pointless — the AI won't tell them "Wow, this person is incredible!" They ask it "how good of a fit are they for this role", taking into account the company's industry. If they sell apples, make sure your CV says you sold apples, or pears — not cars or computers.

A broad skillset doesn't set you apart. We all like to think a jack-of-all-trades makes us exceptional, but they're not hiring exceptional — they're hiring exceptionally well suited for a very specific niche role.

Think of it like Cinderella's slipper. If you're trying to be too broad, you're a poor fit — you will step on toes, say bye-bye to getting hired. If your CV isn't tailored to the job's description, you underfit and you end up being seen as "needs work". Surprisingly, you're more likely to get hired as "needs work" than someone who'd step on toes — because teaching skills is easier than teaching you to restrain yourself from stepping on toes. Someone who "needs work" isn't a bad fit, they have room to grow. But you'll only get the job if they're cutting budget or can't find their Cinderella and you're the closest they can get to a perfect fit.

Short-Listed — Now You Shine

Congratulations! They now know you are qualified (Phase 1), you're capable (Phase 2) and you'd be a decent fit (Phase 3). Your CV is officially going to get read.

This is where the top 10 candidates' CVs are cross-examined by a team, who determine if you can actually add value, or if you're just a seat filler. This is where they look at:

Your past experience
The systems you worked on
The niche industries you dealt with
The hobbies you commit to
Open source projects
Released products

They aren't looking for the standard employee anymore — this is where they want YOU. And YOU need to stand out. Hackathons, Dev.to series, book publishing — these are what make you you and make you exceptional for some job!

But if you want to be exceptional for THIS job, you need to tailor your CV to it. Else you bloat their time with irrelevant stuff. Be concise and be relevant.

How to Prepare — The Two Scratch Pads

Here's part 2 of pay-attention and how you should prepare for job searching.

Scratch Pad 1 — Systems You've Worked On

Put all the systems you worked on in the past. Even if it seems unrelated, you never know. I landed my job because I did tech support on Sage Pastel — they happen to be writing an ERP system that interfaces with Sage Evolution. That's experience no degree can make up for. Don't think it's irrelevant — write it down. These are your soft skills that give you an edge.

Scratch Pad 2 — Blocks of Text

This is your fancy talk for what you did, why you did it, and how you did it — with tags for the skills involved (C#, SQL, etc.). This is what they'll actually read. This is your niche and will be the definitive reason why they hire you.

The AI Workflow

Now here's the fun part.

Step 1 — To make sure you get to Phase 3, give your AI access to:

Scratch Pad 1
Scratch Pad 2
Your default template CV (basic education and employment history — no blocks of text, no skills, nothing else)

Now that your AI has sufficient content, feed it the job posting and ask it to compile your CV from your skills and blocks of text to match this job. That way whichever skills are required get cherry-picked, along with the blocks of text relevant to it. When they read your CV, it's concise, well-structured, in your own words, and tailored to the job.

Step 2 — Red-hatting yourself. Feed a new chat the job posting and your compiled CV, then ask:

"Is this person qualified?" (Phase 1)
"How well suited are they for the job?" (Phase 2)
"Why are they an exceptional fit for the job?" (Phase 3)
"If you could score this applicant out of 100, how well suited are they?" (Interview)

If you get 90% or higher on your final score, and reading Phase 3's response makes you really feel "wow, this person would add value" — then you've done all you can to get this far. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Disclaimer

Keep in mind, these are my findings from personal job seeking (unsuccessfully, except for the 1 time I mentioned Pastel) and the experience I garnered from my shelved project, TUB (Talent by UnitBuilds), which involved more than a month's process of researching HR policies, hiring conditions, and what makes the system tick.

PLEASE, if you have anything to add — something that worked for you, something you'd adjust, anything that can help people get hired — mention it in the comments. I'll add it to the post. This is meant as a functional post, because at some point all of us will be searching for a job and if it can even help a single person land a job, then it's worth all the effort.

As a community, we watch each other's backs and we help where we can. There's no competition here, only strangers over the internet who have nothing but encouragement and well wishes for each other.

Anyone need an installer?

UnitBuilds — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:11:42 +0000

So a bit of context, I've been doing testing for V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. Drone and initially, I just copied over a binary, but I wanted it to be a bit easier to setup, so I thought I'd make an installer for it, so it can register as a system tray app. So naturally, I looked up what's the best installer and up popped Inno Setup 7. So I used it and it worked fine I guess, then I saw they apparently charge $155 for individuals, up to $1195 for unlimited users and that locks you to a version, if you want a new version, you need to buy a new license...

So per my usual, I built my own. It's smaller (tool), faster and completely cross-platform, using zstd with adjustable compression ratio, dependency checking, bundling, CI/CD updating, Delta-Updating, adding MSI compliance for managed deployments too and a few more nice to have features.

I'm releasing it under Apache 2.0, so it's actually free and completely open-source, use it commercially, start the next Microsoft and release a billion copies using it, you don't owe me a penny.

My reason for creating it, is like so many other times, I found that the industry gatekeeps actually making money out of software, tooling should be free, so the real products can be made, without any hidden fees.

So my question to everyone is, do you need an installer? And have you been burnt in the past by hidden costs from 'open-source' releases that charge you once you hit a revenue floor?