Ask HN: Improving my resume? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Improving my resume?

1 pointkrapp2 comments

I'm trying to improve my resume[0]. Most of my experience is freelance, including building websites for people (mostly custom Wordpress themes,) although I have worked for two small businesses. Unfortunately, the freelance sites are no longer online. I'm at a point where most of my practical experience either seems obsolete, is tied up in personal projects or is academic (CRUD apps in C# for school.) When potential web development jobs want a portfolio, the best I can offer them is screenshots, which seems entirely inadequate.

Should I even mention a portfolio of sites no longer being hosted? I've considered hosting what I have on my site, but I would need to remove logos and rebuild some of them, and I don't know if it would be worth it to maintain what amounts to a couple of wordpress installs and a Bootstrap template on top of Slim Framework, just to point out I know how to do that.

Basically, i'm concerned about what works against me and what works in my favor.

[0]http://kennethrapp.net/resume

Your resume is mostly about word smithing. What you have done, major projects, accomplishments and career goals. Make sure to include the alphabet soup of acronyms for technologies you have worked with, and reinforce them in your work history. Proof/portfolio work is a separate issue.

Build something slightly more than trivial for yourself, and host it somewhere. This can even be your resume/personal website. Put the relevant code up on Github under an appropriate license. Bonus points for actually using Github Pages to self-publish your project. Bonus points for automating this. Travis-CI is a free option, and you can encrypt your GH credential information to publish on a merge/commit to master.

If you're using modern JS tooling, modularize what you can into discrete npm modules, and re-use what's already available. This will show far more than what is on your resume.

These are just suggestions, if your work history doesn't demonstrate a strong knowledge/aptitude on its' own, your GH profile can account for a lot.

Also, interview and other soft skills are important. About half of the work I've had the past decade has been via connections at local user groups. If you have local C#/.Net or JS/Node user groups, start going regularly. Most will meet once or twice a month in most major metro areas. Phoenix, for example, has 5 technology groups around .Net, 3 around JS/Node and others on IoT and Web tech that you could go to meetings every evening if you wanted to. Every meeting tends to have at least a few people actively hiring.

I probably need to focus more on the quality of work on my Gitub profile - at the moment it's all personal projects. I've already had to explain to one employer

Thanks for the input.

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