🔮 5 Personal Development Tips For Budding Developers

I had recently held an interview with an enthusiastic Computer Science student, hoping to join the Persona team on one of our internship streams. Unfortunately his technical ability wasn’t suitable for the position, but we were gutted, as he seemed like a great guy.

However, I did compile some tips to help him become a stronger candidate in the future, as part of his feedback. I thought I’d share them with you too.

Practice, practice and practice what you learn

When you learn something new, make a basic HTML page to try it out and save that somewhere for yourself (like notes) and for people recruiting as evidence of your ability. When you learn a little more, revisit it and improve it.

Show off what you’ve done online

Even if you think it’s not great, don’t be embarrassed to put your work online. When recruiters ask for your past work, a lot of applicants will scramble to try to put together something and some just don’t have any or will have lost them. Having evidence of small things you’ve done (like the point above) will make you stand out against other applicants. Even professional developers currently working will struggle to do this, because normally all the things they have worked on will belong to the company they work for!

Write about your experience in trying to become a developer

When you put your work online to demonstrate the things you have learnt, having a narrative in the form of a blog to go explain what you learnt, helps people understand not only what you can do, but how you do it. You can share your blog posts on networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, where recruiters looking to connect with people can sometimes find you.

Get a GitHub account

GitHub is a popular service for hosting web projects online. When you want to show your work online (like in my second point), GitHub gives you a place to store your code for free and can host your basic “static” web pages for free too (this means a free place to show your work).

Read about the latest tech trends

Frameworks are changing all the time and if you stay out of the loop for around a year, you will have missed a lot. Check out what companies want (in terms of technical knowledge of languages and frameworks) and commit to learning them.

If you have any questions about the above (or need any help), you can send me a message through my website at: dalewebb.github.io/me