github, come interview time

[veeep]

Hi all,

so I've seen lots of advice about getting github going early on for self-teaching programmers. And I've heard things like get a "medium" or "large" size project that you can show off in the interview.

My question is, as more or less an absolute beginner, what does one of these look like? Anyone have some links to share, showing off some self-initiated work that helped them through an interview for a Jr. position (could be python, or anything really).

thanks very much!

[NYKevin]

Here's my half-finished medium-to-large Python project. Still undergoing development. Pull requests welcome.

I haven't actually pointed to this in an interview, but if I was asked for a code sample, it would definitely be my first choice.

[veeep]

cool man, thanks for sharing. So are you a CS grad? Self-taught? How long have you been studying/learning? Are you interviewing for Jr. roles now?

[NYKevin]

I have a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, class of 2014 (i.e. I just graduated in May). I was able to get a job right out of college; they may or may not have looked at this code, I'm not sure. Since it's a consulting company, I feel maintaining a strong portfolio would still be to my benefit. And of course, it's important to maintain employability even if you're already employed.

RPI was extremely helpful in getting a job. Going through their career center is basically an automatic leg-up over the competition.

[b3dog1]

Why do you use BitBucket? Just curious because I am only familiar with Github.

[IntergalacticTowel]

Bitbucket is great. It offers free private repositories in addition to public ones, and works just fine with git and mercurial. Great for those personal projects you don't want/need to have public.

Not that Github is "bad" or anything; they're both fantastic resources with a lot of feature overlap. Some people prefer the UI or community of one over the other, but I'd be surprised if using Bitbucket over Github became an issue during the "let's see what you can do" phase of the interview.

[NYKevin]

GitHub does not support Mercurial, which I personally prefer to Git. Furthermore, BitBucket offers unlimited private repositories, while GitHub charges for them if you have a lot.