It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a candidate

simonwillison.net

5 points·simonw··3 comments

But how to start with it? If everyone starts doing this, won't this make it even tougher than it already is? I have been thinking about just dumping my notes in the internet, but whenever I look my notes, I just feel bad about it because it's nowhere as good as original source. And after a while the note feels like ripped off copy. Same with the bugs, hacks, tweaks. It feels like everything is just out there and I am not creating enough value. It will be really awesome if you can show some pointers! I mean it's hard to detail about bugs that are trivial to everyone else. I may not represent most of the people, but this starting thing is difficult because the quality doesn't meet imagination.

The trick here is that literally anything at all will put you ahead of most other candidates in my experience. It doesn't have to be ground-breaking, or even original. It just has to be evidence that you are capable of doing some aspect of the work.

Bugs that are trivial to everyone else almost certainly aren't - and the value there is in describing the process you went through to get to the fix.

One of the reasons I like publishing TILs is that it helps emphasize that even with 20 years of experience you can still be learning new, potentially trivial things every day. I wrote one a few weeks ago about discovering that console vim has mouse support! https://til.simonwillison.net/vim/mouse-support-in-vim

> It just has to be evidence that you are capable of doing some aspect of the work.

I didn't think only this would make such difference. Thank you for marking that.

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