| Late 30s? You're not old, kiddo. :-) Joking aside, as others have mentioned, you'll need to differentiate yourself, and for each person, that's different. For me, I found that I took really well to Docker and using Python to talk to APIs and AWS. I then started showing the world how well I knew those things by building a series of open source projects which leverage that technology. And--this is the fun part--each project was an iteration that built upon some of the things which I learned in the last project. For example, I built these over the course of several months: - https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-network-health-check (Uses Docker and Splunk to graph your network quality) - https://github.com/dmuth/twitter-sentiment-analysis (Uses Docker, Splunk, and AWS to graph Twitter sentiment) - https://github.com/dmuth/splunk-lab (Uses Docker and Splunk to stand up a generic log ingestion platform which is highly configurable) So maybe Splunk isn't your thing and Twitter isn't your thing. Maybe you're more a fan of ELK and the Facebook API. That's fine. The trick is to carve out some kind of interesting problem to solve, solve it, and publish your results upon GitHub. Don't worry if others have solved this before, it's more about YOU solving it, and showing the world that you can solve it. Then take it into an interview and show it off--people will LOVE that, especially if you have a README with really slick looking screenshots (presentation matters). My email is my username AT my username DOT org. Feel free to hit me up if you'd like to chat further, OP. (Or anyone else in a similar position) |