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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Why did you choose to put skill bars at the top that have no frame of reference rather than a listing of actual accomplishments? Your skill bars for node.js and mongo are at expert levels...what have you made with them?

* There are a lot of design issues with this but the main problem is how you prioritize your weakest qualities...the Education heading is the most obvious one. If you have nothing to list than just remove it. It's obvious YC type people don't require that someone graduate from Harvard in order to be successful. As it is now, it at best makes it look like youve submitted a draft resume. At worst, it shows that you can't break out of the conventional mindset, such as the one thinking that Education must always be at the top of a resume

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I've been working with node since v0.2.x Mostly JSON API's. I wrote an oauth library awhile back from spec to talk to the tumblr api. Recently I've been moving away from node for API's and towards Clojure, but that's a different issue.

As for Mongo, I've set up sharded, replicated deployments for clients to run node API's off of. Typically on AWS. I've also worked with GridFS for image/metadata storage and retrieval.

I was hesitant to put it so high because I am not intimately familiar with the gritty plumbing of Mongo, which lends strength to your point that skill bars are pretty subjective.

In the end, I made the skill bars as a way of saying "I'm competent to work with these technologies" and as a comparison between the various tech I have listed.

You are correct though. A frame of reference is important. I do plan to place aside information either in popovers or attached sidebars.

edit: That's an interesting comment about the education space. I placed it highly because I actually dropped out of college to start my own consulting business. In that way it would not represent the traditional model of a Harvard education representing the top of the chain and would add more to the story of how I became who I am, and how I can drive a company forward.

edit2: Thank you for making me look at the Education section again. I now understand why you think I'm still in school, awaiting a degree. Changing the wording now.

Here's the problem with skill bars: Bjarne Stroustrup rates himself at 7/10 for C++ knowledge. So if the language creator is at 7/10, where is anyone but the most skilled programmers? Probably somewhere around the 3 to 4 range tops (and the scale might be logarithmic).

But this is a problem because you won't get any jobs if you say your skill in the language they use is 3/10. And of course you have to compete against people even less skilled than yourself who rate themselves at 9/10.

Maybe the way to solve this is to take the space used for skills and use it to show off your projects. If you're new to a language, your most interesting project will be something small and simple. But for the languages you're most comfortable in, you will likely have built something awesome.

Thanks for the perspective. Skill bars are clearly non-trivial.

I think I will swap out the skill bars. Maybe some code/explanations would work better.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to just be negative...just realizing you're obviously trying to set yourself apart from the crowd (and should be applauded for doing so), and so am trying to point out where you can avoid creating pitfalls in the process.

I'm no YC-er so don't have much insight beyond what can be inferred in the discussions on HN...but the most interesting part of your resume to me was your D1 athletic achievements. To compete at that level almost automatically gives you cred as someone with drive.

Where you should put that piece of info, I can't say. If not at the very top, well, definitely not at the bottom where you have it now. To put a more pessimistic spin on it, the fact that the athletic achievements were the first thing to catch my eye also implies that you haven't done enough to explain your other concrete achievements. I criticized the skill-bars because I think you can do a much better job describing yourself.

I highly appreciate what you're doing for me. This is something that is very important to me, and every bit of advice and criticism is worth gold.

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