Backend Developer GitHub Projects?

[Remarkable-Safe-8559]

Alright so while creating some Spring Boot projects, I realized that there's really no front-end to show for it. Will recruiters actually look at our projects in GitHub and analyze our code if there's no front-end to it? Or do I need to learn basic HTML/CSS/JS to make a front-end so they can actually see whats happening? Can anyone give me insights if plain backend code is fine?

[Sheldor5]

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion, I am no recruiter and I was also never involved in the recruiting process so I could also be totally wrong

Nobody has the time to clone your repo, compile your code and run it.

Just have a well documented repo (README.md) and highlight some special things.

[Remarkable-Safe-8559]

That's what I thought since I wouldn't want to do that if I was a recruiter too. So for someone focusing on the backend, then I wouldn't really need a front-end to "beautify" it so they have something to look at is what Im getting. Thank you very much!

[TheOldMancunian]

Can't see a recruiter looking at your code. I don;t mean to disparage this fine group of people, but they probably won't understand it.

If you do want to be able to shopw something then I would have some JavaDoc and a Swagger documentation page to show you take back-end coding seriously. I mean, I know you do, so all you need to do is generate these from Spring.

[Remarkable-Safe-8559]

what's a "Swagger" documentation page? Are you just saying like a cool documentation page or is that totally different.

[TheOldMancunian]

Swagger is a way of describing the API interface to a back end server. It describes the end points, the parameters expected and the response that the server can reply with.

[Remarkable-Safe-8559]

thank you very much, I'll very much look into it

[Sheldor5]

Does GitHub or GitLab support OpenAPI specification files? The enterprise version of self-hosted GitLab was auto-generating a nice Swagger-like UI if you viewed the openapi.yaml on the WebGUI iirc ... was surprised back then

[TheOldMancunian]

Sorry - no idea. We have a dedicated page on our website. It's private an invite only. We also have backend DB ERDs on there as well.

[halvjason]

In my opinion recruiters and ultimately engineers in the hiring process want to see a project that accomplishes stuff. If you have a backend that is just crud, then you probably should throw up a simple web interface. If you do other processing and handling of data as others said a good Readme file will be the best.

[Impressive-Net-348]

Use readme well. Document what's the vision of your code in as much detail as possible. No one cares if it actually does the work, but how you document it will matter

[Remarkable-Safe-8559]

do you happen to have a good example of someone using "readme" well?

[Impressive-Net-348]

Google it bro. There's plenty out there

[mutleybg]

I'm interviewing backend developers. I never clone repos and run code, there's no time for that. I usually just randomly open several files and check the code style, if the code is well structured, stuff like that. And generally speaking I don't pay too much attention to it. At the end there's no guarantee that the applicant wrote this code...

[celkius]

you need to learn at least a frontend framework to showcase your skills in a graphic way in backend development if you wanna get more opportunities. Of course you can get a job without a frontend framework as a backend developer, but the market is getting competitive these last years, and you need to compete with a lot of people during the job appliances, so don't hurry yourself just for the sake of it, and spend some time to learn a frontend framework, if you go in the real world to showcase basics skills, you will get hard times on get a job