| Make stuff relevant to the places you want to work. It's both a signal of competence and of drive and caring about that place. For example, assuming a data science team in an e-commerce retailer is hiring a Python dev: crawl their site, grab the relevant attributes (category, gender, name, price, discount), then upload a graphical, interactive representation of their inventory and a short analysis of their price structure. Do so on a page hosted on your own server (like a free AWS micro instance + $5/year for domain), then stick the code on a private repo which you share with the person you get in touch with ($7/month for 5 on Github). You've just demonstrated both technical competence over the whole ecosystem, and that you are at least aware of the "business side". You've also probably done more than 99% of candidates for the position. Recent example: I recently had a chat with a friend who explained to me a problem he had been having for 6 months getting a simple web tool up and running for his business. My co-founder and I knocked out a working prototype in 2 hours and sent him the link. He signed us up immediately. I think there's a lot of less technically literate folks out there who need some work done. Think your local tailor, restaurant, whatever. You can try ask them about it and present some solutions, and some might end up paying you. It's a start, allows you to say you put something in production. |