About two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about my journey so far in the programming world. I now want to bring you another update on the things I’ve been focusing on over the past two weeks.
The job-prep checklist
It took me those two weeks to finish my portfolio. I realized a lot my creative energy needed to go into it since I wanted it to be my ‘ace’ during my job hunt. In the beginning, I came up with a list of things I thought I needed to get my portfolio looking good. The list looked like this:
- Polish Social Media & Other Profiles: Twitter, Behance, GitHub, Linkedin, and even this Blog would contribute to the portfolio and thus needed polishing.
- Showcased projects: A handful of projects would be on the forefront of the portfolio to display skills and competency.
- An actual portfolio site. This was easy after I fleshed out the design on Photoshop. It was time-consuming during the development part. And the most frustrating part was, of course, figuring out how to configure the server and DNS provider properly to give my site a place to live. So many docs were read in the wee hours of the night…
After completing the above, I did a sort of ‘marathon project’ over the weekend and wrote a lightweight social media application using PHP. I learned a lot of PHP during the stint and now I have another useful tool (albeit a bit unsharpened) in the toolbox. It was a nice finish to the week.
Other projects
Oddly enough, I still haven’t finished the NodeJS chat app. A lot of my creative energy was focused on getting all the portfolio items done. However, I still learned a lot from the project and will enjoy working on it some more. I have also started up an interactive storytelling project – my first collaboration piece!
Let the games begin
And by games, I mean job-hunt. I feel like I’m prepared (read: confident) at last to begin seeking that full-time developer job I so desperately desire. The next two weeks should go something like this:
- Create a list of local companies to research
- Submit apps to the chosen companies
- Practice interview questions
And more work!
Other things I plan on poking at during these next two weeks:
- Ongoing projects (chat app & comic app)
- Get working with JS more regularly via CodePen
- Beef up Behance profile with more designs
The climb up these mountains has proved fruitful. I see the summit. However, it’s still far off; I have to keep an even, steady pace. I can’t get too excited, or else I’ll exhaust myself before I reach the top. One step at a time!