
Take me as an Intern – 19yo student seeking internship - MarekDlugos
http://www.hostmeinca.com
======
soneca
Your page looks great because you have great skills and achievements to show.
Remember that. You are getting A LOT of attention in HN, that will sure be
picked up by another places on the interwebs.

So, my piece of advice: do not use this fame and fall in temptation to start
capitalizaing solely on your personal brand, giving lectures, interviews,
writing books on how to be hired by the hottest startups and other
distractions. Keep focusing on working hard to _build things_. You are doing a
great job on this so far. Congrats!

~~~
themodelplumber
If you already know how to build simple things, why not write some books and
get publicity if you have the chance? It would only increase demand for things
that you are hoping to build in the future. I can build things like crazy and
I'm still hoping to write a book...someday...

~~~
Retra
Before you write your own book, I would recommend taking an assessment of the
number of books that are already out there and really making sure that you
have something to say that isn't already being written about. 99% of books are
trash. Don't write one unless you know it will help someone better than all
those already existing books would.

~~~
5435434553
Do you live in a fairy world? The point of writing and publishing books is TO
MAKE MONEY. Nobody cares about your opinions.

~~~
Retra
Well, feel free to waste your life and time writing a book for money. I will
be the first person in line to never buy such a book.

------
nickysielicki
As a 20 year old I'm frustrated that your eye for design is way better than
mine, but at the same time, I'm also frustrated that you're listing projects
and they're not on your github, nor are they apparently deployed at all... The
images aren't hyperlinks.

* Wire clothing - there are a billion clothing brands with wire in the name, which one is yours?

* VIDBY - google search shows nothing in first 3 pages.

* Mobile App - where can I see it?

* upload.it - URL definitely does not resolve to the site pictured.

* School Site - where can I see it?

* eStavebny Dennik - See, this one's real and it's awesome! [http://www.estavebnydennik.sk/](http://www.estavebnydennik.sk/)

EDIT: They do exist, disregard this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459684)

I've mocked websites and apps before too, but I always am sure to note that
I've mocked it, not built it. If you're a front end web designer, there's no
shame in that, there's a lot you can do with that. This site and eStavebny are
more than enough to impress people. If the other stuff was available to look
at, that'd be cool too. But don't mislead people, because if they're going to
hire you, they are going to want to look deeper.

Last month my dad was telling me about the interns he was interviewing for
this summer. He said he was most frustrated by the amount of overselling that
these kids were doing for themselves. No, your management experience of
managing your highschool robotics team is not relevant at a fortune 500
company. Related to this is the problem with college admissions. Everyone has
a 4.0 with multiple APs and played varsity sports and can write a boring
essay. Everyone is afraid to admit what they don't know. And I don't mean
unknown unknowns, I mean known unknowns.

I'm coexisting in this problem just as much as you are, and I just want to say
that I hate this. I wish we could all be honest with our skills and I wish
employers would appreciate that honesty more. But we can't afford to be modest
and honest, so I guess can't fault you for doing what we all do.

It's like steroids in baseball.

~~~
silverbax88
I have hired a lot of developers over the last 15 years and not once have I
cared if they have a github account.

~~~
teraflop
It doesn't really matter much to me whether the projects somebody has worked
on are open-source. But if they can't be demonstrated to _exist_ , that's
something else entirely.

~~~
apsdehal
Well, I have a pretty good github profile
[https://github.com/apsdehal](https://github.com/apsdehal) but I still had a
hard time finding intern this year. So I would say most of the github profile
doesn't matter much, but it sure makes you look impressive. Also as far as I
have experienced, if you apply in big companies, nothing matters for
internship, only thing you should know is competitive programming.

~~~
corobo
Having a quick scan of your Github profile it looks like a lot of lists or
collections of things or forks. I think you may be suffering from information
overload as I was unable to find a decent example of code within 30 or so
seconds

------
lachenmayer
Hey Marek, I see you've been accepted at UCL, would you like to check out what
London is like?

We at HackCampus [http://hackcampus.io/](http://hackcampus.io/) could offer
you a 10-week internship at some amazing startups (GoCardless, SwiftKey, Kano
and more) in London this summer. It's well-paid, and we'll give you free
accommodation over the summer with a batch of other awesome student hackers
like yourself.

[http://hackcampus.io/internship/](http://hackcampus.io/internship/)

I can give you more details over email, harry at hackcampus.io :)

~~~
neoromantique
#Not Marek

Wanted to apply on your website, during registration received error 500, then
CSRF verification failed. Request Aborted. And then My username is taken.

Reproduce-able too, I guess I should stop being admin and go into QA? :D

~~~
lachenmayer
Thanks, we just found out! This definitely worked for several weeks
previously, ha. We're looking into it right now.

------
agentultra
Nice looking site!

One piece of advice: don't put C, C++, etc on your resume unless you're really
comfortable with those languages and want to focus on them. Your resume
highlights your design skills and projects using web technologies. Great!
Focus on those!

For example, your Github has no examples of C programming skills and your
resume doesn't highlight any projects where you'd likely use C. If you were
interested in getting an internship where you'd primarily be programming in C
you'd be better off focusing on highlighting projects that interest you which
use that language. You'd stand out if you had contributions on Github or your
own libraries or applications on Github written in C.

~~~
blackkettle
he says 'a basic understanding of...', and 'code a _simple app_ using...' it's
clearly not the focus, but i don't see any problem with that. the only thing i
take away is 'he won't run away in terror if i show him some c++'.

------
daddykotex
From the source :

<!-- Hello stranger... Yep! I write clean code, enjoy it! :) -->

Hahah, you sure know HN! Good luck!

------
johnloeber
Just fyi, you have a typo on your "What can I bring to your team?" page. You
misspelled "radically" as "radicaly".

Otherwise it looks great -- good going! Very impressive for a high-school
student.

~~~
rxt
Also "databeses" in the "Experience with databeses" line.

~~~
pidg
Databese should be an alternate term for big data.

~~~
psylence519
This needs to happen.

~~~
sarciszewski
New CV item: coined the avant garde term "databese".

~~~
aclissold
Perilously close to the politically-incorrect "databetes."

------
argklm
I don't see anything exceptional about this. There are a lot of tutorials and
a lot of sites guiding you through building a site like that. You should never
put yourself in a situation to ask for something. You must put others in the
situation to ask for you. Making a website like countless others and having no
substantial code to back off what you are claiming, won't put you in front of
countless of other talented people that are a lot more humble than you.
Talented companies have talented eyes seeking for talent, don't put only a
good mask on. I wanted to say this, because I want you in a good company and I
hope that you will get the best of life. Keep working on your path: mastering
a framework is tenfold valuable than a "simple understanding". Regards

~~~
memonkey
Maybe because he's 19?

I agree though. This is not exceptional or very impressive. I don't really get
why this has more upvotes than the 14 year old kid who posted a relatively way
cooler site that utilized a bunch of APIs, etc.

~~~
argklm
He is young, surely, but in this very moment, there are silent young people on
GitHub with exceptional projects. There are some people in their early-20 that
are proving to be exceptional in the startup and the programming world. Maybe
we are stuck in time when we started: back in the days Internet was more like
a myth than a resource. And this feat would have been amazing. Nowadays you
can nearly be a programmer without knowing how to program. Today the entry
level was lowered exponentially... Back in the days there was an obscure
manual and in a lot of cases written in another language with the need to go
to the university and be laughed on the face, because you were too young, with
a question that neither the professor was able to answer... And this was the
easy part. For the hard part... Let the reminiscence kicks in and be amazed to
how far we have gone. Learning alone like 20 years ago, could be outlawed as
torture now lol

~~~
memonkey
Why do we all have to be young?

I'm 27 years old (am I still young?) and started self teaching 2 years ago.
I'm creating an API for poets/poetry because it doesn't exist. I'm
implementing my own API to serve the poems and let users metaphorically match
their favorite poems to their favorite alcoholic beverages;
poetryandalcohol.com (not up yet). I'm also working on something similar to
Yummly and BigOven, however, not only let's users plan their meals, but
incorporates the USDA food prices API to let them know how much their grocery
list will be for the week or whatever.

I have no reminiscing to do. The internet has ALWAYS been a resource for me.
But in different ways.

The feat this gentleman has made is no less than that of twenty years ago. You
still need a degree to get an entry level job of the same sort as ten years
ago. In fact, I'd argue that twenty years ago, people didn't care if you had a
degree or not in computer science, so long as you had the experience/could
prove you can do the work. Today, it's not only a degree/experience, which
this person has BARELY showed (aw crap, I forgot he's 19), but you also need
side projects, open source contributions, and a penchant for motivation. I'd
say it's still torture for us self-taughts who work in a warehouse 9-5 filling
orders for computer fans at a median wage.

------
porter
Congrats. You put a lot of American job seeking college kids to shame.

~~~
jacks205
This guy is selling out hard. Coming from a guy with a more active GitHub and
projects, I don't see how this guy is any different than any American college
kid.

~~~
kidsthesedays
He isn't much different from a run of the mill college kid. He just has a
"startup style" website with gratuitous pictures of himself all over it. It's
called "personal marketing." Apparently software engineers are supposed to do
that nowadays - our code no longer speaks for itself.

~~~
jcliff
code still speaks for itself. it just has to be framed and delivered to an
audience. your side project that's sitting on your hard drive or even your
unpublicized github account isn't doing you any good.

~~~
kidsthesedays
Um... I am old and I don't have time to work on side projects - I have dying
parents I need to spend time with because I won't get that time back. I have
friends that live all over the East Coast now and visiting them is very
important and now time consuming. My point is this is incredibly superficial
and the stuff that matters (his actual work) gets lost in all the needless
fluff.

Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.

~~~
goatforce5
You've got your thing going on and he's got his. There's no one right answer
to life. It's all good.

------
Johnie
Since he's from Slovakia, does he have the visa status to work in the US? Will
a startup go through H1-B process for a summer intern?

Also, if he doesn't go through the formal visa process and tries to do his
summer internship with a visitor visa, he may be banned from the US for 10
years. Given that he's publicly publicizing coming to the US to work, it would
be very easy for USCIS to block his entry into the US.

~~~
c0g
Having just got a J1 visa myself, he'd be well served with J1. It lets you
work in the US for up to 6 months in an internship. Might still be time!

~~~
ylem
But will it cause him any problems if he wants to come to the US to work or go
to school in the near term after his internship? From what I remember, don't
J1 visas require you to return to your home country for a certain period of
time? It was something we (in the US) worried about when thinking about having
an intern from India who was planning to attend graduate school in the US in a
year or so...

~~~
c0g
I don't think so, Slovakia isn't on the skills list[0]

[0] [http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/study-
exchange...](http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/study-
exchange/exchange/exchange-visitor-skills-list.html)

------
dcre
Very nice. Just one tip – in one of your testimonials Cristina uses the word
"pedant". She probably meant you're good with details (or that you're a good
teacher), but at least in the US, that word almost always has the negative
connotation of being _too_ concerned with details.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedant](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pedant)

------
thescrewdriver
> "There is still 1 month, 1 day, 6 hours, 55 minutes and 21 seconds until
> summer, which gives me a lot of time to learn new skills that you might
> need!"

Awesome attitude towards learning new skills!

------
thornofmight
Why do you want to intern? Seems like with your skills you could just work
(and get paid for) a real job.

~~~
jvehent
I don't know if that's the case here, but a lot of European colleges _require_
summer internships. Compensation is sometimes permitted, but status of
employment must be an internship.

~~~
neoromantique
Uhh, I've never seen that to be the case and I'm from Europe.

~~~
contergan
Germany here. I know plenty of people that have done internships because their
degree required it.

~~~
neoromantique
After or during studies, yes, but not as pre-requisite.

------
Raphmedia
This is better than the websites of half the web agencies out there.

------
Bahamut
You should remove the word "with" from those titles - the bullet points don't
flow properly when appended to the titles

~~~
CPLX
Listen to this person. This is the one glaring thing I noticed, it makes your
wording sound stereotypically Eastern European, and is jarring in comparison
to a document that otherwise flows quite well.

------
sheepmaniac
Small advice: do something with those brackets. They are in the middle of the
page and their misalignment with coding skills section is infuriating (at
least for me).

------
zaszrespawned
Talk about being web savvy at intern age..

~~~
pistle
I increasingly come to expect this sort of product since kids coming up expect
their products to be like this.

He may be a leader in this, but the group coming up definitely will be
demonstrating the "Yes, and..." attitude in terms of design and features. The
new kids invigorate the game, which is great.

------
sebg
Great work!

One thing - pretty much everything you wrote is about you...Which is great,
but it would be more compelling if removed any mention of yourself and made it
all about the company who is going to hire you.

------
xmpirate
Hey your resume looks impressive. Can you tell me how you made the resume?
Latex or anything? The design and presentation of skills is great! I'm 20 too
and want to update my resume.

~~~
phaemon
Creator : PDF Presentation Adobe Photoshop CC 2014

------
thesimon
Your page looks great, the photo is really nice and the mailto title is a nice
touch.

<shamelessplug> I should've thought about submitting to HN too :)
[http://simon-schraeder.de/summer/](http://simon-schraeder.de/summer/)

~~~
endymi0n
Sounds like you could have fun with our team at JustWatch... </shameless self
plug> Just sayin :)

------
philip1209
I'm confused - where does he want to work? Domain is "hostmeinca" which I read
as "Host me in Canada" but could mean California - and he doesn't really
specify anything except that he lives in Slovakia right now.

------
buraksarica
This kid will go places.

~~~
therobot24
seriously, that's a great looking resume - though it would be nice if i could
click on one of the skills (e.g., Print Design) and see some examples

~~~
MarekDlugos
Thank you guys! :) I will probably add this feature or just send people more
detailed portfolio via e-mail.

~~~
logicallee
you are getting feature requests. Are you getting serious offers?

~~~
mbesto
Seriously. Marek, if you're reading this - get a full-time job. People will
pay you serious money for your work and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

------
gabeio
I would love to make a resume page like this, and have the balls to publicize
it, I just have this super strong aversion to do such a thing because of the
amount of creepy people on the internet.

------
cozuya
Guess I'll be that guy - the design and content is nice and well done, but
this is just bootstrap copy/paste to me; I don't see a lot of "coding talent"
evident.

Not to say he doesn't have it, but creating a site like this basically
requires finding a similar one and learning what classes to put into your
bootstrap markup.

~~~
justathrow2k
For what its worth, I agree with you. That is to say, I feel like a lot of the
people here giving out praise are being a bit excessive with it and this is
simply a flavour of the day paint by numbers web page. Still, it's a good
effort for a kid in college looking to get an internship.

------
danielvinson
FYI in the US it is considered inappropriate to have your picture on a resume.

~~~
crusso
If he were sending a standard printed resume through the mail then you might
have a point. This online version is something different and I doubt that
anyone looking for talent would disqualify him for having his picture on
there.

~~~
nilkn
I'll be completely honest and say that it makes me feel slightly awkward
because it's a major component of the resume and yet is completely irrelevant
for deciding if he's qualified or not. To me, it's distracting and actually
makes me feel slightly pressured to cut him some slack because he put in extra
effort on making the resume pretty.

All that said, for someone who hasn't even started college yet, I think every
little extra bit helps. I would never recommend this for an experienced hire
or someone who's had several internships already in college, but for someone
trying to break in for the first time any way you can find of displaying your
interest and passion is going to help some.

~~~
hn_
I have to be honest here....

I review resumes and have a say in hiring decisions in my company. I would
probably have a tendency to disregard this resume because of the picture. It
is pretty distracting and frankly makes me uncomfortable. I don't wish to
evaluate a candidate based on their looks but this one says "my looks are
important to my job qualifications." Perhaps I'm old fashion and this is over
the top but it just rubs me the wrong way and I feel the "type" of candidate
who includes a picture like that isn't the "type" of candidate I'd like to
have on my team. It comes off to me as narcissistic.

Perhaps the younger, hipper crowd appreciates this sort of thing - if you are
going for that type of work. Long established companies might pass this one
up.

I might be completely out in left field here though.

~~~
vacri
Distracting? You can't see the photo when you're looking at the 'resume' part
of the page.

It's pretty a standard marketing format - big friendly picture of one or two
people from the waist up, whether it's a support person speaking into a
headset or a hard-working suit-wearer tapping into a computer.

~~~
nilkn
I believe he/she was referring to the actual PDF resume (as was I):
[http://www.hostmeinca.com/cv/Marek-Dlugos-
CV.pdf](http://www.hostmeinca.com/cv/Marek-Dlugos-CV.pdf)

------
meow_mix
Translation: "Hi, I'm Marek Dlugos and I'm the most pretentious 19 year old
ever"

------
sailfast
You're the person that posted the same site two years back, right? (saw on
your CV, and remembered the first site).

I was impressed at the time but alas am not in California. Did you ever find a
host family in California when you posted this the first time?

------
logicallee
and they say geography isn't destiny. a design like this can get a solo
founder a $2M valuation on an idea in the valley (making him an instant
millionaire), whereas a slovakian is trying hard to close an internsihp
(meaning he hasn't gotten $8/hr, or 1/250000th of that amount.)

1/250000th.

~~~
SomeCollegeBro
I think you need a little bit more than a website to get a valuation...

~~~
radicality
Not if your product is... a website, like many startups are.

~~~
justathrow2k
These companies products generally aren't simply a website - their web sites
serve as a catalyst for delivering an actual product that provides
functionality. The link is question isn't a product hosted on the web, its
simply a personal website.

------
mholt
Brilliant work. I wish I had your skills at 19. The photography and design
mesh perfectly well together.

I bet you will have no problem getting to the USA to study and work.

~~~
HNdev1995
For work - what about H1B visa? Even if a company agrees to go through the
process, he still has a slim chance of getting the visa, right?

I am just trying to familiarise myself to the process since I will be going
through it next year.

~~~
chrisper
You need a bachelors degree in order to get an H1B.

~~~
jrm2k6
And more than that, not enough spots for everybody. Big companies are going to
get most of them no? Especially for an intern, it is almost impossible.

~~~
chrisper
No company is going to waste thousands of $ to hire an intern. Most H1B go to
those fake Indian companies and Google etc.

------
jonathanpoulter
From the page source:

<!-- Hello stranger... Yep! I write clean code, enjoy it! :) -->

Nice.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Honestly I was a little disappointed with a disclaimer like that:
[https://i.imgur.com/vqz9wRX.png](https://i.imgur.com/vqz9wRX.png)

~~~
tjbiddle
Looks like those are spaces, while everything else is tabs. Probably has his
editor set tabs to 4 spaces where it matches up - Easy to overlook unless you
have your editor show spaces with a character.

------
diimdeep
Personal Branding well done.

------
lamosty
I'm once again proud to be a Slovak citizen. Firstly
[http://takemetosiliconvalley.com](http://takemetosiliconvalley.com), now
this. I should really do something too :D

------
elchief
I managed to graduate high school near the end of the early 90s recession,
university at the beginning of the dot com bust, and B-School in the beginning
of the 2008 meltdown.

I promise to never to go back to school again.

------
kidsthesedays
Good god can we please stop with the photos? Do you people really want to go
back to the 1950s where a photo was required with a resume? Do you really want
your potential employers to be judging you on your looks/race/ethnicity at the
resume stage? It may be beneficial to you (you are the "correct" race and
gender and you look young and not ugly) but for those of us that aren't - we
don't want pressure to include photos because that will make our resume look
unattractive to potential employers.

~~~
vacri
This isn't a submitted resume, it's a marketing site.

Would you have all marketing sites also strip out photo portraits? A ton of
enterprise services have landing pages with the portrait of an attractive
support officer talking into a headset, or some besuited office worker tapping
into a keyboard.

------
nakovet
The site looks great, I wish I had the frontend skills to do anything 5 times
worst than this, I just don't get the sentence at the bottom:

> I HAVE DONE THIS SITE DURING ONE WEEK, INSTEAD OF LEARNING FOR MY LEAVING
> EXAMS AND PARTYING WITH MY FRIENDS. I HOPE IT IS GONNA BE WORTH IT!

Did you fail your exams? I had a feeling that you wanted to mention college is
not that important because saying this is cool these days. Nevertheless,
that's just my interpretation, kudos for the site and the projects listed.

~~~
Taasden
Translation:

> I DID THIS SITE IN A WEEK INSTEAD OF STUDYING FOR MY EXIT EXAMS OR PARTYING
> WITH FRIENDS. I HOPE IT WAS WORTH IT!

------
ChristianGeek
Very impressive...If your skills are as good as you claim, I'd hire you full-
time now if I had an opening; you may want to reconsider whether finishing
school is a worthwhile investment of your time and money.

One small tip on your site: Get rid of the word "with" in the "I can help you
with" headings. It's grammatically incorrect for the way your lists are
phrased, and having "I can help you" appear three times on the page is a nice
subliminal message!

------
agounaris
I hope this will not be the start of a spam-fest by others. Good luck with
your job seeking.

------
goffley3
Great job on your website. I would fill out your GitHub a little bit more so
people can see your code. I'm jealous a little bit that I didn't get into web
development as young as you did. Keep it up and continue to build awesome
stuff!

------
brianzelip
Great markup - I especially enjoy that `<main>` is used for only (some
wrapping `<div>`s and) an `<h1>` which conveys the authors main call: "This
summer I’d like to be your Intern (June - September)"!

------
nbrempel
Wow there seems to be a lot of negative comments here. Do I sense a bit of
jealousy?

------
hamandcheese
Now you can add "Made it to the HN front page" to your resume!

------
Brajeshwar
Minor Typo in "<meta property="og:title" content="A 19 year old student
student is looking for an internship">"

------
JDiculous
Great website! But FYI, in the "Just shoot me an email" part towards the
bottom, the text goes outside the screen on my Samsung Galaxy S4

------
swagmeister
Nice shroom haircut.

------
vdnkh
This is great, I'm making my first website now and you've given me a lot of
great ideas for design. And made me feel bad about mine!

~~~
hn_
Here's some more ideas:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9427856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9427856)

------
ttty
>Experience with databeses

Typo in "databeses"

Good looking resume (:

------
alpacaaa
Wish you best of luck dude, very well done.

------
whoisthemachine
Great resume. I agree with the others, I am jealous of the skills you have
displayed at your age.

------
tomw1808
Now, I love that design ... it looks like we could never afford you. :)

------
spacecadet
You must have ideas? Skip all this and just run with one of those.

------
infinitone
Great presentation and design skill, you'll def land something. Though if you
want big 4 or even big 20 tech companies, then you'll need to show more real
code. A good 20k loc app would be nice.

~~~
jakejake
Seeing as how he is just finishing high school yet, I'm guessing he will have
more code on his resume by the time he's looking for a job in 4 years.
Although, with the speed of things, who knows what will be the hot skills
then!

------
blt
Personal Branding!

------
thomasahle
I like the star graph in the bottom a lot :)

------
kenrick
Really nice job. Fix the instagram link :)

------
general_failure
Great stuff! I love how your CV looks.

------
HNdev1995
Where are you hosting this website?

------
karnajani
This is awesome. I'm not in CA, but I hope a team over there picks you up.

~~~
chrisper
I don't think that would happen as there are enough people here seeking for an
internship.

------
mceoin
small typo: "Experience with databeses."

Should be databases

------
andrewmcwatters
Did you steal some of that code from Visual Idiot instead of creating your own
version?

[http://www.hostmeinca.com/assets/js/animated-
background.js](http://www.hostmeinca.com/assets/js/animated-background.js)

[http://vaguelyexciting.com/js/site.js](http://vaguelyexciting.com/js/site.js)

Edit: Thanks HN; I wasn't aware the code was from Codrops. Move along, folks,
nothing to see here.

Sorry dude! Nice site. Don't go for an internship though. You command an
escalation of experience that opens doors to regular full time positions. You
clearly don't know what you've got.

~~~
juliangregorian
"steal" as if you never used someone else's code. There's not even a notice on
the original, I'm hard pressed to find him at fault.

~~~
eropple
Can't speak for that poster, but while I've used other people's code for
educational purposes I am not aware of a time when I've used someone else's
code against its restrictions. And bear in mind that code without a license
notice is not a free-for-all, it's restricted until other rights are
explicitly granted.

(I have no opinion on this situation nor am I qualified to judge it. Other
people have a more fully-formed opinion than I do, and it does sound like it's
properly open-sourced anyway.)

