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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

I would immediately update your posting with a CV, website, git, whatever.

You are on the front page of arguably the PREMIER network of people with access / need for technologists.

Oh also I've made http://affluentconfidante.com/ in Clojure and http://editfight.com/ in Node.js using WebSockets and vanilla JS, each in the span of about a day, within the past 2 weeks. Unfortunately that, plus the iOS apps I posted about in my submissions, are about the full extent of my public resume. I've done a lot of private work that I'm not at liberty to talk about, and all I have to show for that are skills. But skills don't speak as loudly as finished public products.

Honest feedback: those "one day" sites are not impressive, and they will not enable you to win decent contracts. I get what you said, but if you really do have 5+ years experience it confused me why you, someone who want to win clients for freelancing, have not spent any real time, even if a couple weeks, building something impressive for your portfolio. Or building something impressive x 5 given the time frame here.

I have a sweet portfolio site, mostly full of personal projects, that's made it quite easy to land remote gigs. My advice: put your 80-20 focus there.

What kind of thing would you consider impressive? Quite frankly, I have no idea what I should make that would reflect several years of experience (there is also the issue of finding time for all this among other hobbies, but that’s another issue)

Could you give a link to your portfolio to get an idea what kind of portfolio attracts clients these days?

There's nothing tricky going on. You should have things that are comparable to what your clients will pay you to build. Mine paid me for their startups, and my portfolio has multiple, complete startup-like prototypes.

Good idea, thanks.

Updated my profile with an email. Don't have resume in order yet. But have done plenty of Clojure, front-end and back-end work, made several iOS/tvOS apps that ship on the App Store.

If anything comes from this, great, but I'm not betting on it, so I'm going to focus most my efforts on the suggestions to give try toptal, upwork, and freelancer.com a serious try for the short term, and to build a network for the long-term.

Sounds like a person problem. You are at the top of HN. Get off your ass and take the few hours it takes to get a resume done. Maybe that's your issue in finding work. You ask for help but are not willing to do the most basic thing required to get a job?

I have a resume, sorry for the miswording. But my wife values privacy and so isn't comfortable with me just posting it up here on HN willy nilly. And although I am comfortable with it, I feel obligated to respect her wishes.

What has privacy got to do with anything? Nuke your address/phone numbers, but it's somewhat unreasonable to ask for a job without a resume, and substituting that with 2 days of work (You said it took you about a day each to build the projects you linked in another comment).

You may have a good reason to not disclose your identity, but how do you plan to get paid. Do you want to get paid anonymously in bitcoins or you just want to provide your identity to the future employer only which does not make sense to disclose privacy only to your future employer. I am confused here.

> Don't have resume in order yet.

In another comment you said:

> I've applied for pretty much every remote job from the last HN "who's hiring" post.

You've been applying without a resume? Maybe that's what the problem is....

No, I've sent my resume to them in private. I don't have a public resume available. That's the hardest part for me. I don't have anything I can publicly show off.

It might be useful to mention where you are (location), and if you confirm your ability to bill international clients.

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