Drumroll, Please: Make Your Portfolio Projects Fun and Prepare for the Following Questions
Meet Stevie Gill 🇬🇧! Stevie was a scientist, a medical writer and an editor, and then he wrote about video games. Eventually, he moved countries and changed careers. Nowadays, Stevie lives in Toronto, Canada, and works as a full-time front-end developer at Kijiji. In this episode, he shares his story and everything he learned along the way that can help you land your first developer job!
🎙 About the episode
Meet Stevie Gill 🇬🇧! Stevie was a scientist, a medical writer and an editor, and then he wrote about video games. Eventually, he moved countries and changed careers. Nowadays, Stevie lives in Toronto, Canada, and works as a full-time front-end developer at Kijiji. In this episode, he shares his story and everything he learned along the way that can help you land your first developer job!
You'll hear how Stevie learned to code, how he prepared for the interviews, and that LinkedIn can be useful even if you only have a handful of connections. He reveals how he took a generic portfolio project and made it his own - and why you should do the same. Stevie and Alex discuss Stevie's interview process in depth (be warned: there are some witty HR people out there) and also answer the question of whether you should be dreading the gaps on your resume.
🔗 Connect with Stevie
⏰ Timestamps
- Stevie's journey into coding (02:01)
- How moving countries helped Stevie switch careers... and discover Scrimba in the process (05:27)
- Is LinkedIn that important, and how can you stack the deck in your favor (07:56)
- A hiring manager discovered Stevie's LinkedIn. How? (13:40)
- Can you have seven years of React experience and still be a junior? (15:39)
- Are there any hidden perks of generic messages from recruiters? (16:44)
- What do recruiters want to know when they're getting to know you as a candidate? (18:40)
- Taylor Desseyn on how to spot a good recruiter on LinkedIn (19:48)
- How to deal with a gap on your resume when you're changing careers (20:51)
- How to stand out from other job candidates (23:14)
- Stevie's four job interviews: deep dive (24:19)
- Fun HR questions in a soft skills interview: how to answer them and why are they there (24:30)
- How to prepare for a tech interview + how Stevie impressed an interviewer (27:59)
- Stevie's final interview, and how he made an app that became a major talking point (33:56)
- How to make a fun portfolio project and impress your interviewers (35:40)
- Don't do this! (39:02)
- How Stevie got a job offer... with a drumroll! (39:41)
🧰 Resources Mentioned
- FreeCodeCamp
- The Frontend Developer Career Path
- Stevie's RetroFix app
- Scrimba Podcast: How To Work With Recruiters According to Senior Recruiter Taylor Desseyn
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You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so they can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏
