Ask HN: I got laid off and I want to showcase my skills, any suggestion?

30 pointsby maury9112 months ago

I got recently laid off (the first time in my life ), and I have worked for around 11 years without being more than 2 days unemployed; I'm currently doing rounds of interviews and for the first time in my life, I have an extreme amount of free time.I can imagine people would recommend me to use this free time to follow my passions, get some rest, play videogames or do anything that is not working; but I'm not the kind of person that likes any of those things, I like to do something constructive, and I would like if this something can help me now or in future with my job search.I saw many job posts asking for a Github account to see what contributions I have done to open source, and unfortunately, my contributions amount to none, the companies I have worked for do not publish open source code, and with 2 hours of commute + 9 hours being in the office when I'm home I don't feel like I want to open my personal computer.With this in mind, I thought "Why not do a video series where I show my front-end skills". This will kill two birds with one stone, first I will get some contributions to dummy projects on Github and second I can show my reasoning on video.The first problem is that I don't have video editing knowledge, and I feel that will eat the majority of the time, resulting in a project that is less focused on what I'm aiming for.To avoid the video editing problem, I plan to do live coding, I believe thousands of developers did this before me, and I want to do a topic that is different than usual, with this in mind my topic of choice is to live code a web framework, my framework of choice is React.I plan to go through these milestones:<pre><code> 1. Rendering JSX directly into the DOM: get a js compiled through babel and just make it work 2. Create a shadow dom 3. Optimise the shadow dom 4. Support all react hooks 5. Further optimisations 6. Re-create redux 7. Suspense ( Lazy loading ) 8. Re-create react-router 9. Using babel API create a different output for jsx files ( different syntax ) 10. Create browser extensions for developers </code></pre> Note: I chose these milestones to make the video series help people understand how React works on the insideAnd following these rules:<pre><code> 1. No peeking on React source code 2. No stack overflow 3. No copilot/chatGTP/any AI 4. Looking at React documentation is OK </code></pre> The idea is to retro-engineer React, I know this looks like it contradicts the point of helping people understand the inner workings of React, but I want this video series to have some challenges ( and external help will remove that ), and the final product must be compatible with a subset of React capabilities so with it being compatible it must have similar inner workings, so even if not identical I believe they will be similar enough to help people understand how React works.Now that I laid out all my thoughts, I ask you for some advice:<pre><code> 1. What platform is best to start? ( I was thinking youtube ) 2. How to get the first views? ( My feeling is that I would be live-streaming to literally no one for months ) 3. Any other advice that I could not think of asking?</code></pre>

12 comments

PaulHoule12 months ago

Speaking as someone who learned to edit video on tape:I disagree with the people who think you are overthinking it. If you are planning to do something this big you’d better have a plan.How many hours on camera is this going to take? How much off-camera think time do you expect this to take? I’d imagine if I was coding something this big I’d make at least one major wrong turn that I’d want to if not have to redo.I think you should try a mini-project that is not part of the series so you can test your setup before you make something that you want to promote. You want to design things so that you get an interesting series even if you quit early.I’m a little skeptical of the turn to video in the last ten years. I mean, 10 years ago if I got stuck in a video game I could find the answer in a FAQ in less than a minute. Today I have to find the right video in a collection of 60 one hour videos and then seek to the right point in the video. From the viewpoint of a literate person this is a huge step backwards but I’m left with the feeling we’re on the path to Fahrenheit 451.Who has time to watch it? Is a recruiter going to watch a video that is longer than Game of Thrones?Myself as a photographer I’ve found that I want to share my works in progress and show people a bit of my behind the scenes work but I’ve found people don’t have time for anything less than the final polished works. People have never been rude to me the way they are to the Midjourney artists who always post the nine images they got without any filtering but I know the engagement isn’t here.

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llmblockchain12 months ago

First and foremost, fuck Github. It doesn't define who you are and what you are capable of. Don't buy into it.For reference, my Github is set to private and has a single repository pointing people to my personal site. My personal site has 8 sentences on it. It says who I am and what I've built (software products). I don't blog. I don't share code.What you need is to be able to demonstrate what you are capable of. If you have it in you, it's even better to demonstrate you are not another code monkey that is more interested in 1s and 0s than humans.My suggestion (biased, from what I've done) is to build one or more products (ex: a SaaS product, etc).In the best case your product brings in enough money you never need to work for someone else. In the worst case you demonstrate the ability to build a product geared towards regular human beings.

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nprateem12 months ago

Who would watch it? It's super technical so not useful for beginners, it doesn't really help anyone do anything, so no use for people trying to do x with react, so... who would watch it?

CharlieDigital12 months ago

You are making this too hard; don't overthink it.Video editing: OBS and DaVinci Resolve. OBS to record and Resolve if you really need to edit.I posit that for technical content like this, most of the time you do not need to edit heavily.Second is that your mindset on this for someone starting out is all wrong. You're already overthinking it and therefore increasing the impedance for yourself. Look at the first few dozens of videos for any long running channel and they are almost always just someone sharing and doing so consistently even with miniscule viewer counts.I follow a carpenter on YT (Scott Brown) and he had a great clip from his 100th episode where he talks about how you get better at things: you just do it, reflect, and repeat. Do this enough times and your 10th cycle looks nothing like your first. Your 20th looks nothing like your 10th because you learn with every attempt.So with that said, I encourage you to not overthink it and just start making content. Every day, there is someone trying to learn React and JS and that person is trying to find the right voice to learn from. That's why there can be hundreds of thousands of videos and recipe posts on how to make fried chicken; everyone has an affinity for a different voice.So with that said, challenge yourself to creating quality content once a day, even if it's short. Your first week, you'll struggle just to learn the tooling and workflow. Your second week you'll have nailed a pretty good process and focus on improving your content and defining your voice. The audience will come as long as you are consistent.For professional reasons, I think written form is better (so GitHub project plus blog writeup). I think rather than your proposed approach, just build and explore something fun and topical. How about building an app using AI tools and you review the tools and their output? Compare it to a human and give your commentary.

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csomar12 months ago

Why are you doing this? No interviewer is going to look at this or maybe even understand it. After 11 years (assuming you are around 35), you'll probably be interviewed with someone younger.I didn't find Github helpful either in the last 2-3 years. Culture has shifted and now it's about jumping leetcode like platforms and scoring highly on them. Then bullshitting your way into the interview.If you are strictly tied to front-end, you may want to look out for different options. The front-end market is by far the worst struck and is super tight. I also, most importantly, don't think it's going to be better anytime soon and it's going to get much worse from here.

unsupp0rted12 months ago

You're overthinking it.Although if you made a series of videos like "Re-creating redux", "Re-creating react-router", etc that could go a long way, yes.Don't make up rules. Don't tie one hand behind your back. This isn't a circus act.

ipaddr12 months ago

Use your extra time to apply to more places the roi is higher. Get feedback from interviews than focus on those areas. What you think you need might be different than what the market thinks

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codingdave12 months ago

It may be worth asking yourself if your career goal is to be "The React Guy". If that is your desire, you are on-track. But I've found that most people I know who hit an absolute wall in their career are folks who tie their career identity to a specific technology. Because over the course of multiple decades, odds are your chosen tech will fade.If I were you, I'd put this energy into learning something new, and your video content can show your progress and show off your ability to pick up new skills.

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SkyPuncher12 months ago

What’s your goal for showcasing your skills? Is it just to do something fun? Or, is it to get hired?If it’s the prior, this is a fun project.If it’s the latter, this is going to be a low effort activity. Employers aren’t going to watch it during your application. Further, Your target audience (people learning react) isn’t going to have much overlap with hiring managers.

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ilrwbwrkhv12 months ago

Hiring managers are usually dumb.Interviews at most tech companies are broken.They are run by developers who are usually poor communicators which means they cannot tell you what they are looking for etc.What you are trying to do will not help you at all.At 11 years of experience if you are not getting direct invitations to join teams without interviews you have done the biggest mistake so far: you haven't created a network.Your goal should be very simple. Make a list of director of engineering from top companies, see if they have a GitHub, check if they have a open source project and then contribute to that.All you need in your GitHub is a hyped up version of your skills.Do not do interviews, that is key.

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gsuuon12 months ago

This sounds like an interesting series, I'd watch it. If you do go for livestreaming, keep in mind a big part of that is interacting with chat. If that's not something you're into then maybe recorded content with light editing might be better.

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deadcoder090412 months ago

1. Twitch/YouTube/Twitter/Instagram Reels/TikTok - Basically every platform is becoming a video platform. You might need to edit a bit if you want to post on other platforms or make short videos but it would pop-off if you write hooks well2. It'll be a grind but you can post on places where followers don't matter. And if possible, create new accounts as new accounts are given more push. Also, pay the rent of platforms like blue check as it pushes the content to more people. Atleast that's how its on Meta/Twitter3. Use AI & build a useful app like Job Application using Personalize AI messages. Someone might've build this but recreate it. Why? This will get you job faster & if it actually works well, you can make it into a SaaS so you never have to work a job again if that's what you want or you can sell it for 10x with the AI hype that's going on