| > It doesn't help that my friends think I'm a good programmer if I can't prove it. Get an open source project, and contribute or start your own and keep yourself motivated. Documentation is scarce on any project, so you could start there. Learn the project as you go. It won't be long before you start addressing issues in the issue tracker, become curious with the code and eventually do some pull requests and be an actual contributor to the codebase. > too much perfectionism This is perfect. Code quality in some OpenSource projects are terrible, really. It may need your perfectionism in code quality, optimizations etc. Trust me, I'm one. I love code reviews because I'm that kind of guy. Just prepare to make a stand as to why your code is better. > There is stuff that motivates me. Game development. Procedural generation. Visualization. It's just not that related to jobs I could have a chance of getting (like web development), if there is a chance anyway. There are corners in the web development world that need visualizations. Especially in the data gathering age, people need to make sense of all the data they have gathered. Learn charting and graphing libraries like D3. Learn vector graphics libraries like Raphael. It's not really that far off. > I had the idea that I could write example implementations and visualizations of algorithms used in procedural generation. Create a blog. Write some code, even 10-liners. Pick them apart, show why it's wrong, why it's right, what is better. From what I see, you "specialize", and that's a good thing. There's this one front-end developer I know where every few days in a week, posts small snippets of CSS trickery that you couldn't even imagine possible (building animations, 3D stuff, just CSS). It's not really useful, but it shows the person is really into that kind of thing. > Would that be something I can put on my CV? If so, how "much" should there be so it doesn't look like "Hey that guy wrote 10 lines of JavaScript/C++/whatever and thinks we hire him". Everything I said above: - Learn a few tricks, library or no library at all. - Write a blog about that. Pick code apart. - Contribute to an open source project. |