How to Build a Project That Will ACTUALLY Get You a Job

[00:01] but what if you don't have a computer science degree or any relevant to stand out from all the other candidates and prove that you have the skills needed to do the job as I'm sure you're aware blindly following tutorials

[00:15] isn't the best way to learn how to code you need to build your own projects but when it comes to getting hired creating another to-do list app tic-tac-toe or snake clone isn't going to help you in this video I'm going to be showing you

[00:27] what recruiters and hiring managers are actually looking for so you can actually get a job so a lot of the tutorials on YouTube will show you how to create how to code but if you want to be a professional software developer then

[00:40] skills recruiters need to know what you're capable of and on top of that own work I came across this great project the other day from another developer that showcases exactly what you should be doing in your projects if

[00:53] you want to stand out duraz created an Uber simulator that runs in the browser is quite quite an advanced project and in fact it took him 300 hours to finish it this isn't a simple application you can build over a weekend and in fact

[01:07] that's one of the things that makes it stand out the fact that we can see this with it brings me on to my first point you need to deploy your projects unless it is a desktop application it's no good having your project only running on your

[01:21] computer you need something that someone non-technical can see and appreciate Tech recruiters know what skills they're looking for in their candidates but to look through your GitHub repos and be impressed by all the code you've written

[01:34] understand what it means now you might not think this matters but if you can't impress the recruiter then your application isn't going to get passed on hiring manager who is probably a developer or at least used to be who

[01:47] will understand your code and be impressed by it there are often hundreds have something you can quickly show off to someone else your project is just going to get ignored deploying your projects to the cloud doesn't need to be

[02:00] expensive AWS has a very generous free tier and there's also other places like digital ocean versaillway and Heroku where you can host your application for the price of a cup of coffee a month if not for free so

[02:13] the cloud and you have all your code up on GitHub job done right well not quite doesn't prove that you actually made it and it doesn't tell those hiring you anything about your thought processes when hiring developers it isn't just

[02:28] about your skills or your winning personality they want to know how you think and how you solve problems duraj has done this by writing 35 blog posts he's written about why you pick certain Technologies how we design the map and

[02:42] everything in between you can see in these posts why is made certain switching the application to react and which database you used if you haven't way to do this is to keep a Daily Journal so each day you can write about

[02:56] you've made and which Technologies you you've used and why even just writing a project is a great way to prove that it's your own work and it's not someone you're building out your projects you should do the same things you do on an

[03:11] developers generally don't do very well is writing documentation so once you've decent documentation for it this might include things such as system diagrams user Journeys as well as API specs there should be enough information there for

[03:26] another developer to be able to pick up and understand how your project is built if you do manage to get past the first few stages of a job interview then the exercise to do such as building an API again don't forget to spend some time

[03:39] writing some documentation for your project it used to infuriate me when exercise when they didn't include any documentation they didn't tell me how to run their code or what API key to use it doesn't leave a very good first

[03:53] impression if the reviewer has to spend ages on your code to get it to run and has to hunt through your code to find what API key to use your documentation should be just as important as your code and even more so if you're trying to

[04:05] project is up and running online you need to treat it like a production application you wouldn't just put it online and forget about it you would put in monitoring and logging a CI CD Pipeline and you make sure everything is

[04:19] secure in this project garage has described how he set up Prometheus and dashboard public as part of this project it is this attention to detailed or make your project stand out from everyone else's this might all seem a bit

[04:32] these things set up you can use them again for all your different projects for a CI CD pipeline I would personally just use GitHub actions if your repository is public it's also completely free even for private

[04:45] month which personally for my own projects I've never got anywhere near of course coming up with ideas for projects can seem a bit daunting but if you're just doing it for experience or to show off on your resume then creating clones

[04:58] everybody to start you're not coming up with the idea from scratch but you still Technologies and write about your thought processes and like giraj did in simulate some of the user interaction it's not very exciting for the user to

[05:13] look at an application and it just to be completely blank if you're creating a very good if you're the only one that was tweeting if you're looking to be a create a project that's going to show off all your different skills even if

[05:26] you're a back-end engineer you need to create some sort of front end remember recruiters who are going to look at your application first so it needs to be something there for them to see so ideally your project should have a front

[05:39] end an API a database some documentation about how it works and a blog post that and on top of that if you want some extra credit it would be great if you as well if you can do all of that then your project will really stand out when

[05:54] you come to apply for a new job if you're struggling to know what to learn just said then check out my backend developer roadmap that will guide you in thank you for watching and I'll hopefully see you in the next video