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Comment by liquidcool | Hacker News Reader

I do, but I'm an outlier. I have a CS degree and 20 years of software experience, so I'll actually look at your code and if I know that language, take a look at your style. I've seen someone check all her Emacs autosave (~) files into Github. And unnecessarily jam multiple classes into one file. That was a bad sign.

All but a handful of recruiters will not because they simply don't understand any of that. They don't understand whats on the resume or job description. Better ones will take note of those things and pass them along to the hiring manager, who should take a look. But it's best if you link them in your resume.

Here's my comprehensive write-up on resumes, I think this is what you are looking for:

http://www.madeupname.com/optimize-developer-career/resume-t...

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If I have side project I have to do in Java, you bet I'm going to have a lot of static inner class abuse. Perhaps you just don't understand the tradeoffs.

First, this didn't stop me from inviting the applicant to discuss her work/knowledge relevant to the job. She did not respond.

Second, it's totally possible I misunderstood something. I do run the largest JUG in SoCal, so I'm not a complete Java noob. But in truth the last few years have been Groovy, and I'm not close to being a FT coder. I don't claim to be a Java expert.

However :-) You are assuming these were static inner classes, and they weren't inner/nested at all. These were multiple top level classes in one file. I can see how maybe you'd do that for composition, and I did it once to get around a wrinkle in Grails, but this really seemed unnecessary. They weren't short classes. This person was a masters candidate and had little production experience, and the whole thing came off as rushed and sloppy. Frankly, seeing all those ~ files because there was no gitignore bothered me more.

Why?

other than style what else do you look for when you check out a code base?

Depends on the job. Some considerations:

- your intent: playing around to learn, creating something serious, contributing to OSS, etc.

- how far you got

- who is using it?

- solo or collaboration

- how production ready is this?

I suppose you could sum that up with one question: "Where is this on the spectrum between homework and a real product?"

This falls into the topic of side projects, and I wrote about that in detail here:

http://www.madeupname.com/truth-about-side-projects/

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