Article summary
Recently, I was asked by a recent graduate if he should spend his time going through online programming courses. This graduate was looking for things that would differentiate his resume in a crowded field. The uncertain economy and rise of coding assistants has made getting an entry-level programming job extremely difficult. Additionally, the rise of remote work has broadened the competition for jobs from the local pool of developers to practically anyone in the world.
Given these challenges, many people turn to taking online courses to try to expand their knowledge in programming languages, frameworks, and other development tooling. However, your time is almost always better spent working on a personal project that you can show to potential employers.
A Complete Package
While a course can teach you new frameworks and languages, a complete project is much better at demonstrating your ability to produce working code. Your code can demonstrate to potential employers how you like to organize projects and which aspects of programming you enjoy. If you’re looking for work in a particular tech stack, a project using those technologies is extremely interesting to employers.
A project can show that you understand how to host a website, distribute a phone app, or publish a dependency. Being able to discuss the more complex aspects of a project and how you approached them will be much more interesting than saying you went through a few online classes. Explaining what tradeoffs you made, which aspects you like, what you want to improve, and more will present much more unique and in-depth information about you and how you work.
Showing Your Passions
A project can also be a great way to show potential employers what you are passionate about. Companies are not only hiring you for your ability to program, but they also want to know what you’re interested in. How do you express yourself? How do you like to work? Showing off a hobby you have by creating something for it is a good way to reveal more about yourself. It is also useful to you to find a job where people appreciate you as a whole person, so discussing your project can also help you sense whether they care about your interests.
Generating Ideas
It can be difficult to come up with a project that you can feasibly do on your own. If you need ideas, there are always virtual hackathons happening. These can give you a topic or specific technologies to work in. A hackathon can also be useful if you have trouble sticking to self-imposed deadlines. It can be nice to be given a firm end date to finish your project. Some hackathons will pick winners, which will look great to potential employers in addition to any monetary rewards you could receive.
Another way to get ideas is to find open-source projects that align with your interests or technical knowledge and contribute to them. First Timers Only is a site with resources for learning how to contribute to projects and projects that flag issues for first-time contributors. Showing potential employers that you can find an issue, fix it, go through code review and improve existing software is incredibly valuable. Especially if you’re fresh out of college doing a few open source contributions is great experience that will apply to almost any job.
Overall, writing your own code that demonstrates both technical skill and personal passion is much more valuable than just trying to take as many online courses as possible. Ultimately when you are looking for a job you are trying to demonstrate that you will be able to produce well-made running code and what better way of doing that than showing off some well-made running code?