HACKER Q&A
📣 weakfish

What makes a project on an entry-level dev's resume stand out?


I'm a Poli Sci major getting a minor in CS (long story) and am curious what I can do project-wise to make them stand out from the crowd of simple CRUD to-do lists.

I'm currently working on a web app [0] to track my running data, but it has a long way to go and is frankly fairly useless at the moment.

[0] https://github.com/John123Allison/RunJS


  👤 runT1ME Accepted Answer ✓
While personal projects are good, even more impressive is contributing features and/or bug fixes to larger open source projects.

It's sometimes much more challenging to dive into an existing project, learn their frameworks/style/design, and work with existing contributors.

However it's also much closer to what happens on a real development team. Whereas a project with a single author can show coding skill, working in a large open source project shows collaboration, communication, and soft skills as well.

It is a huge gold star on a resume in my opinion.


👤 econnors
create something – like you have – but ship it to production. opening a project and seeing setup instructions like you have makes it seem like one of those other crud apps, nobody will take the time to do it.

"Check out this thing I made - runwithjohnjs.com" will have a much greater effect.

For bonus points, write about how you built it (just use dev.to).

A cool project will get you in the door, then you just have to perform well on the interview (for which many prep materials exist online).


👤 jppope
Go do REAL client work/ side work. You're half-brother's cousin's neighbor desperately needs a site/ app / script / etc, and you should build it for them. Contrived projects that lack the messiness of the real world tell you virtually nothing about an applicant.

👤 maps7
I think exposure and knowledge of the technologies that my team uses is the most important.

Our dev environment set up, coding standards, testing standards, release process etc will all be taught when joining the team.

I haven't seen it before but if you were able to say I fixed these bugs on this project (that had the same stack as my teams') then it would be something that stands out - I should take my own advice!


👤 emerged
I would go for a candidate who came up with an idea, designed the solution, got some other people involved, and executed on it well. Solo projects are good but to really sell your value it helps to show you can work well with others.

👤 andrewstuart
The most powerful thing you can do is to fix 100 bugs on an extremely well known open source project, and put that on your resume, with links to all the github issues/commits.

👤 mcgrathpm11
users, showing you learned from user feedback to iterate on the project

👤 jjgreen
Tests :-)