I’m a product manager transitioning into software engineering. Since there’s a variety of different types of engineers (full stack, front end, back end, etc.), I was wondering what the most effective sample projects would be to have on my resume. My goal is to create 2-3 sample projects that maximize the amount of jobs I qualify for. I would love to hear recommendations on languages, frameworks, databases, IDEs to use. Cheers!
If you are going for a web dev job, then language-wise, JavaScript is a great place to start. As I’m sure you know, you can use it on the client and the server (Node), as well as a bunch of places in between (e.g. task automation) It is literally everywhere and is a good string to add to your bow.
Personally, I’d recommend something that motivates you. If you’re motivated, you’re more likely to do a good job and see things to completion. You’d base whatever you build around the requirements of a modern web app (e.g. data fetching, managing state, updating the UI, persisting data, user authentication etc).
Wes Bos offers some great courses in this regard, both paid and free. Depending on where you are starting from, you could do worse than taking JavaScript30 (free) then going on to React for Beginners (paid). You’ll end up with a working web app after the React course, which you could use as a template for creating something else of your choosing.
We also have a bunch of good material here on SitePoint. For example, here’s a tutorial on building a simple web app with Node and MongoDB.
It was written by me (disclaimer) with the aim of introducing readers to a range of things you’re likely to encounter when building a real-world app. These include routing, templating, dealing with forms, and interacting with a database.
YMMV, but it might be worth a look.
Edit: lol, sorry, I just read that back and realized I was rambling. TL;DR: it doesn’t really matter what you build, but what you build should demonstrate your understanding of the requirements of a modern web app. In times such as these, you could do worse than building your own COVID-19 tracker.
1 Like
Hi James,
Thanks so much for all the pointers. This is incredibly helpful and gives me a good starting point.
I keep seeing angular and ruby on rails as buzz words on a lot of applications. My understanding is you don’t need to know tons of languages when applying for jobs, instead have a solid foundation of how languages work in general. For a talented engineer, learning a new language should only take a matter of days. Do you agree with that? Right now, I have a solid understanding of python, swift, java, html, c#, c++. Are there any others that you think would be critical for me to add to my toolkit besides javascript?
To become familiar with the basics and get a superficial understanding of how the language works — yeeeah, maybe. But to properly learn the nuances of a language, its edge cases, what it’s good for, what kind of tasks it’s not suited to etc. would take longer, I think. Also, you need some point of reference. For example, I don’t know Python, but as I’m familiar with Ruby, I’m sure that it wouldn’t take me too long to put together a simple Python program. But with a language like C++, I’d be starting from square one and would need to learn about things like memory management, pointers, compilers and so on. That would be a matter of weeks or months, definitely not days.
Rails is my backend framework of choice. It’s opinionated (which I love) and is great for getting an application up and running quickly. It’s used by quite a lot of large tech companies. So definitely cannot harm if you are familiar with it.
Angular is quite enterprisey and uses TypeScript. Again, it can’t harm you to know it (depending on the type of job you are looking for).
That’s a pretty impressive amount of technologies to have a solid understanding of. But before rushing off to learn Angular, Rails, or anything else, it’d probably make more sense to narrow the field. If I were you, I’d search for developer jobs in the right salary range, in the region you want to work in. Then make a list of what technologies these employers are after and prioritize your learning accordingly.
You make it too easy James 
Thanks again for all of this insight. This really helps me lock in on an approach to my job search. Cheers!
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.