How do you know you're ready to start applying for jobs?

Key Takeaways

hello my friend and friends and welcome to my podcast General musings my name is Kevin and this podcast is the audio version of my weekly Sunday newsletter where I talk about whatever is front of mine for me in any given week usually in some way that's related to front end development as well as share interesting sites and resources that I've come across in the past week as well as share what I've been up to as well this week is going to be a little bit of a preview for a more in-depth video that's going to be coming out on my main channel in probably a few weeks from now because I'm in the middle of breaking down a few interviews that I've done to get some insight on helping people get their first jobs in the video I'll be talking about everything from positioning yourself to help you land interviews to how to have a successful interview and how you can sometimes even skip a few of the steps along the way but for this podcast I want to focus on how do you even know when you're ready to start applying for jobs I've noticed that there are a lot lot of people who fall into one of the two extremes when it comes to when they start applying for jobs the first group feel like they're ready to start applying for jobs after about 3 months of learning through free resources and the second group of people are ones who have way more than enough experience and skills to start applying for positions but they don't realize it or don't feel like they're actually ready yet and one of the people that I interviewed Danny Thompson has seen both sides of this as well he attribute some of this first Camp to all of those learn to code in X days or X months things that you see out there and I agree that many people out there are giving unrealistic time frames for how fast you can learn something and then land a job the other extreme he was part of himself actually with a major case of impostor syndrome and not believing that companies would want to hire him which I can also totally relate to and I've actually talked about in the past and I'll put a link to a video that I've done about impostor syndrome down below as well and so with all of that how can you know that you actually are ready to start applying for jobs well Danny and Shashi L the other person that I interviewed both agreed that it's usually when you're able to create projects of a decent size on your own now on your own doesn't really mean without any help at all because you might have to look up how a specific API works or you might still have to find a tutorial on how to implement a specific feature and that's fine the idea isn't that you're building things from scratch without referencing any other material because that's not realistic even once you have a job and even once you have lots of experience the point is that you've moved past building a weather app or a to-do list by following along step by step with a tutorial and you're able to complete bigger scale projects and things where you can figure out how to do things on your own and of course then use resources that are out there to help you complete features that you're struggling with or to find solutions to problems you might be having once you've reached that step it means you have the skills to work independently and be a problem solver which is exactly what you need to actually do when you're working in the real world and it also means that you have some projects that you can put in your portfolio you probably don't want to include a to-do app or weather app that you followed along line by line with a tutorial in your portfolio since you didn't actually build it but use someone else's code to do it but if you have something that you did yourself that's a really nice piece to have in your portfolio because of of course when you have no real world work experience having unique projects can go a really long way there are also a few other things that you can do to both gain some experience and help pad your resume as well which I'll help set you up for success with Dany and shashy both mentioning hackathons as well as contributing to open source projects these don't only help demonstrate the work that you've done on them but they also demonstrate other skills as well that it's a little bit harder to have on personal projects like being able to use git as well as working with a team and also means you know how to communicate and all of those types of things so if you're in the camp of I think I'm ready but you're still following tutorials step by step maybe give it a few more months at least and if you're at the other end where you're making all sorts of cool stuff but you don't believe you're ready yet start getting yourself out there and applying for jobs now moving on to the other awesome stuff from around the web section of this podcast chrisopher dandi recently put out an article looking at three approaches to organizing and loading in your CS C which included a bunch of modular files using the at import or using one big concatenated file which is probably the most common one that we see when we first got HTTP 2 one of the main benefits of it was that it allowed us to have multiple simultaneous downloads all happening at once rather than with HTTP 1 where we have to download every file one at a time but every test seems to show that one file still wins out now one interesting thing from the test that Chris did in his article though is that the differences weren't really that big especially compared to a similar test that Harry Roberts did Harry was using bootstrap which was much bigger than what Chris was testing with and it BS the question that maybe there's actually a crossing point somewhere where maybe instead of having a lot of individual files you have one main.css file and then maybe one to three smaller ones that might be more page specific and at that point we might cross over into where that actually is more performant in this section of the the podcast I'm liing off to other people's stuff and content so this isn't a test that I've done myself and I have no idea what the results would be but I think it'll earmark this as something that might be worth looking into a little bit more one thing I will say though is if you're worried about optimizing your CSS you're probably pretty far along in your journey and if you're newer into the world of CSS and still struggling with it a little bit I'd recommend giving the talk why you suck at CSS by Zack jens's a listen Zach happens to be a mod in my Discord Community which you should totally join if you haven't already and in his talk he breaks down a lot of the fundamentals of CSS including the parts that people often Overlook get wrong or just don't know about and you should definitely give it a watch he did a really good job with it and speaking of the fundamentals of CSS this week I did put out a video covering one of those fundamentals with a deep dive into the position property with over 700 videos on YouTube that are almost all about CSS I've somehow never made one that looks at all of the CSS position values I've compared relative and absolute in the past I've done a few looks at Sticky but I felt like a deep dive video would be a good idea there are already a handful of videos like this on YouTube already but I find that they try and cover the information as quickly as possible and they don't go into enough detail on how things like containing block work or some of the small gotas that you can run into and those quick ones tend to use random floating boxes for their examples so I also tried to root this one into something that was a little bit more realistic as well another video that I put out looked at the newer viewport units namely that we now have dvh svh and LVH and I did this because I see a lot of people still using VH and then complaining that it doesn't work the way they thought it would especially with the issues that can pop up on mobile devices so in this one I explore the new options that we have instead and mostly come to the conclusion that svh is probably what you want to use most of the time though there are situations where dvh will probably be what you want as well and I I do want to mention that I didn't really talk about it in the video but along with these you could also use dvb svb and lvb which are The Logical property versions of the viewport height units but looking at the Block size instead of height and that's it for this week depending on how you're consuming this there is a podcast version and a YouTube version if you'd prefer one or the other or maybe you'd like a written version more in which case there is a link in the description as well as links to everything else that I've mentioned along the way as well thank you so much for listening and until next time don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome