If you have Python Django or Flask experience, let me know. I’m hiring two positions.
Had I not got a great offer today I would’ve messaged you! Why do good things only come in waves
Kind of doesn’t matter since it’s been since before phones were smart. But as a hiring manager it’s going to depend on the position you’re applying for.
Mostly backend: need to have a load testable API with session management and security. Avoid using an ORM so you can display your master of SQL. Mostly front end: solid and stable client the exemplifies everything you know, cookie management, CSRF protection, rebuilt in multiple frameworks to show that you can work with the big ones. Mobile? Same thing. Balanced? Well you already built all the features so you should be fine.
Good luck, the market is pretty rough for now, but it will get better eventually.
Avoid using an ORM so you can display your master of SQL.
I’d probably still ORM, but with targeted performance optimization queries does in raw SQL so you show not only you can handle both, but also understand the limitations of ORMs.
I’d also maybe throw in some explicit error handling to show if you lose connection things don’t just spin forever, crash, or just show “Error, something went wrong”. I see lots of fairly nice UIs until something goes wrong, the server times out or whatever and the app completely shits itself.
Generally, show understanding of the topics not just how to use them. I’ve seen so many promising developers get completely stuck once the real world hits and it’s not exactly how they’ve been taught.
Not had to do this myself, but any time we are hiring someone technical their CV lands on my desk.
- Having a portfolio at all puts you in the top 10% of candidates. No, sticking your course assignments on GitHub doesn’t count.
- If I’m hiring a full stack dev, I’d probably be more interested in seeing a well-developed “thin slice” through all the layers than lots of features - it’s a portfolio piece, you don’t need to convince me to buy it, just that you might be interesting to talk to.
- No matter what you do, I’m probably going to ask you to defend your technology/design/architecture choices, partly to see how you react to criticism, partly to see if you can talk intelligently about things.
- Personally I’m a pragmatist, so I’d probably rather see that you’ve gone and found a suitable ORM/front end framework/… and used it sensibly than written everything by hand yourself (a builder who insists on forging their own nails isn’t a very good builder), but be prepared to talk about the tools you’ve used
I built a 4 layer data structure that allows you to fully configure a “task” list, allowing the configuration of things like recurrence, repetitions, as well as action flows based on various variables defined in the metadata. I went way too far. I was new in that job and they hadn’t given me any truly constructive stuff to do so I just went wild.
how far did you go in terms of features?
I’m a hiring manager for a company in a regulated field. In addition to what has been said already, if a candidate came with a list of their own requirements for the said app, preferrably with unit tests, and/or a checklist of how much work there is still left, that would be gold.
The fact is, that probably all organisations deal with large legacy systems. If a candidate shows the capability to think a bit further than a tech demo, that’s a huge plus.
The tasks are animals called todoloos and they hop around. You fence them in. Yes they have ears.
Mine pays people on Task Rabbit to track me down and harass me about the status of incomplete list items.
