| Misc thoughts: Perhaps sharing your take home exercise might be a more useful avenue for feedback? I’m not sure how large the market is for ASP.NET developers, but the skills you’ve learned so far are more transferable than you think. Try creating some projects with Django or Rails and spread your wings a bit. Don’t be a monoglot. A portfolio helps, as well as a personal narrative. Being a solo developer for 2.5 years is good and bad depending on the audience. For example it means you don’t have much recent experience working with a team, and I imagine clunky Belfast ASP.NET companies are not exactly hotbeds of entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe look for smaller companies or startups? Extremely personally, Azure certifications and such things are worthless, bordering on a negative signal depending on the context. But some people/companies may value them. Saying you think reading “C# in a Nutshell” is a good idea is concerning because you say you’ve got 6+ years of ASP.NET experience. Was this not using C#? Revision is always good, but identifying why you’re not already comfortable with C# is a good starting point. Build some solo projects with C#, not using ASP.NET, with some artificial constraints (speed, memory, etc). Then smash them. Could be as simple as parsing a 20GB CSV into memory: start dumb and slow then make it as fast as you possibly can. For me this beats a book on data structures. |
The take home exercise is here: https://github.com/mjb8086/checkout-kata/tree/main
I'd also created an launched an iPhone app in the meantime, and had an idea for another where I could write the backend in Python3/FastAPI.
Also, I mistyped, the book C# book I am reading is "C# In Depth", not "C# in a Nutshell". The former has details on the new language features of each version, when they'd be best used, etc