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by entreprenewb 4228 days ago
What's your previous work history and educational background? That's the first thing that's going to come up with any employer. It could be in your benefit or not depending on what you were doing previously. How you frame it to potential employers will be key in getting callbacks.

Since you don't have a deep dev background I would suggest a portfolio site with links and descriptions of side projects and any other relevant work.

Regarding a resume, if you're going to include all the different technologies you've been looking into you should provide some indication of your level of experience with them, e.g. beginner, advanced, etc. Personally, I get a bit put off if resumes from inexperienced candidates contain a laundry list of technologies without ranking and it just turns out they've only used them in passing.

Generally, you may not want to spread yourself too thin learning so much this early in your career. Getting some deeper experience with a few key technologies could be very desirable to potential employers. It sounds like you've been mostly concentrating on web stacks in which case you may want to focus your job hunt on web developer positions specifically rather than full stack or back end.

1 comments

Hey, thanks for the response. Years ago I was doing network and Windows system administration for a few years. Went back to school to get a degree in the humanities.

To be clear, I am planning on going the portfolio route. Part of the problem is that I have a few exciting ideas, and one is a full stack project, while two others would work best as iOS apps. Thanks again.

That's hugely relevant experience! And if you can bring good communication skills to the table, even better. Half the battle hiring qualified candidates is establishing if they are organized, communicative, and professional. I too have a humanities degree (poli sci) and as I've become more experienced the critical thinking and communication aspects have been extremely helpful. Use that to your advantage.

It sounds like you know how to navigate the technical waters well enough, I would say weigh which technology stack is more appealing to you and dive in. iOS and rich front end are both in fairly high demand, you might want to investigate your local market a bit to factor in whichever seems to have more opportunities if you don't plan on moving any time soon.

Oh, and the other thing, be prepared for in depth technical exercises in interviews. They're no fun, but a lot of places ask academic and somewhat irrelevant algorithm and data structure questions regardless of if your applied skills are great. My wife got me this book, and language not withstanding, it seems to cover the typical types of technical questions interviewers ask: http://amzn.com/098478280X

Best of luck!