| I have a couple of things that I have mentioned at recent job interviews and helped me get the job, but in a sideways manner. Still make me smile because I essentially did them to learn something and they kinda acquired a life of their own. Long story short: I had a bit of a fixation with political data wrangling. This got me two really odd personal successes (excuse the slightly blowing of my own trumpet here, for story's sake): an app [1] that takes UK Parliament debate transcripts and makes an interactive n-gram analysis, similar to Google Books N-gram viewer, which was used by Robert Peston's political show on national TV and the press in the UK (e.g. on the Financial Times [2] and the Sunday Times [3]); then I did a quasi-viral blog post that used code to calculate the average face of a British MP [4], which got me a few contracts, including one with the BBC for the same thing in the US Congress [5] When I say sideways, what I mean is that the interesting thing is that the jobs I got when using these as examples were not hands-on data wrangling jobs (in fact, they are terribly dirty pieces of code, but that's another story).
What they got me is two things: from a technical perspective, the ability to see an end-to-end process to create a product, the running of a service no matter how small for a decade, the use of cutting-edge technology; from a broader point of view, they were great to show me catching the zeitgeist, seeing stories in data, engaging with national media. Both were incredibly "catchy" stories to tell during an interview, and even when challenged (my recent employers being in the public sector) they allowed me to explain myself and my journey. So, in summary, I love how these two one-day hacks turned into great interview stories, beyond the very minor direct income that they got me. Aside from the ability to blow my own trumpet a little, the broader applicable lesson here is that by working on something you have a passion for, no matter how geeky it might be, you can build something simple and not necessarily super tidied up, that will however be a good prompt to discuss both your technical and non-technical skills. I've coached a few candidates for interviews in the intervening years, especially people in tech roles, and it strikes me how often they play down their own side project, which are sometimes much way technically better than mine and with some pretty good stories around the initial motivation and use examples. [1] https://parli-n-grams.puntofisso.net/ [2] https://www.ft.com/content/d9db05e7-bb1c-4f38-9a02-bd6b66c9c... [3] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-are-becoming-more-loc... [4] https://puntofisso.medium.com/i-calculated-the-average-face-... [5] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face... |