
Ask HN: What makes a project on an entry-level dev's resume stand out? - weakfish
I&#x27;m a Poli Sci major getting a minor in CS (long story) and am curious what I can do project-wise to make them stand out from the crowd of simple CRUD to-do lists.<p>I&#x27;m currently working on a web app [0] to track my running data, but it has a long way to go and is frankly fairly useless at the moment.<p>[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;John123Allison&#x2F;RunJS
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runT1ME
While personal projects are good, even more impressive is contributing
features and/or bug fixes to larger open source projects.

It's sometimes much more challenging to dive into an existing project, learn
their frameworks/style/design, and work with existing contributors.

However it's also much closer to what happens on a real development team.
Whereas a project with a single author can show coding skill, working in a
large open source project shows collaboration, communication, and soft skills
as well.

It is a huge gold star on a resume in my opinion.

~~~
mettamage
How do you get the ball rolling on that and are there any good open source
projects to start on?

~~~
detaro
I'd suggest going by what you use. At least for me, the initial motivation
worked way better when fixing a bug on or improving something I regularly use.
That can range from some random browser extension to tooling of a programming
language you use. Sending PRs to one-person projects can be a bit hit-and-miss
if they are active, but on the other hand they're often happy about any
contribution they get that shows someone else cares about their thing. On the
other hand, large projects are more likely to have a community where someone
might help a first-time contributor through the steps.

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econnors
create something – like you have – but ship it to production. opening a
project and seeing setup instructions like you have makes it seem like one of
those other crud apps, nobody will take the time to do it.

"Check out this thing I made - runwithjohnjs.com" will have a much greater
effect.

For bonus points, write about how you built it (just use dev.to).

A cool project will get you in the door, then you just have to perform well on
the interview (for which many prep materials exist online).

~~~
weakfish
Cool! I appreciate the feedback. I actually do have a Heroku hosted production
environment setup with CI/CD, but it's in maintenance mode until I feel
comfortable showing it off.

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jppope
Go do REAL client work/ side work. You're half-brother's cousin's neighbor
desperately needs a site/ app / script / etc, and you should build it for
them. Contrived projects that lack the messiness of the real world tell you
virtually nothing about an applicant.

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maps7
I think exposure and knowledge of the technologies that my team uses is the
most important.

Our dev environment set up, coding standards, testing standards, release
process etc will all be taught when joining the team.

I haven't seen it before but if you were able to say I fixed these bugs on
this project (that had the same stack as my teams') then it would be something
that stands out - I should take my own advice!

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emerged
I would go for a candidate who came up with an idea, designed the solution,
got some other people involved, and executed on it well. Solo projects are
good but to really sell your value it helps to show you can work well with
others.

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andrewstuart
The most powerful thing you can do is to fix 100 bugs on an extremely well
known open source project, and put that on your resume, with links to all the
github issues/commits.

~~~
weakfish
What would you suggest for finding a project that is sufficiently complex to
matter, but not too large for a student to contribute to?

~~~
parkaboy
Not "extremely well known," but our startup has released open source developer
SDKs (currently Android and Arduino) and example apps for our consumer
hardware device (haptic wristband). It's just been me and a colleague working
on these in our spare cycles.

[https://github.com/neosensory](https://github.com/neosensory)

We'll take any help we can get with contributing to any of the projects posted
up there.

~~~
andrewstuart
To the original poster .....

If you are being welcomed in to this project then you should take up the offer
and then do some serious hard work fixing every possible issue you can in the
github issues and asking guidance from the project maintainers as much as you
can when you get stuck.

~~~
username314159
Unpaid internships are the best indeed

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mcgrathpm11
users, showing you learned from user feedback to iterate on the project

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jjgreen
Tests :-)

