The Great Hunt Begins
I'm guilty of not having posted in quite a while -- super sorry about that -- because I've been kinda busy with the 5th quarter of the Web Development Immersive course: Job Hunting. This post will cover the final chapter of my time at General Assembly, along with a little bit about what I've learned during my first week of serious job-hunting.
Final Project
This project was definitely one of my favorite to work on. Unfortunately since I had 100% creative decision-making, I ended up making some weird calls along the way, and definitely rabbit-hole'd myself in design work. I think I should take a course or something just to get me to a base level of awesome so I don't have to struggle when I want to work on functionality so badly.
The idea of the app was to take your basic profile information from your LinkedIn and to convert it into a more readable format for both yourself and potential employers. One of my main gripes with LI is that they treat your work experience and information as though it were a CV instead of a resume. I might still look into working on this, or at least figuring out how to start an open source project dedicated towards developing a universal importer. Currently the best one I've found was when using any job site with Workable's importer. It was gorgeous and easy to use, and it pulled the right info and ignored some of the irrelevant garbage.
Anyhoo, below are my feelings about the project:
Top 3 Wins
- I got to build a full MEAN Stack App! I wanted this to be my final project, so I was putting together everything JavaScript into one unholy beast.
2.** I managed to get basic logging in with LinkedIn working (holy cow).** Since I hadn't really dealt with too much authentication in the past, I was really proud of myself in learning the LinkedIn API and figuring out how to configure my NPM modules appropriately to create user sessions and all that. Really rewarding. - **It looks pretty shmexy if I do say so myself...**Check this out for a brief demo, even if it doesn't work you can see how my initial layout looks kinda cool. For this, I used materialize for angular, and it made it look really cool but was (for me) difficult to figure out how to initialize and implement. But I did it!
Top 3 Learnings
- Not fully operational. I ran into some serious problems because I could sign up to use LinkedIn's full profile API (I'm not a company, and couldn't fill out the application or find one to fill out for personal use). This seriously backtracked my work, since I could no longer use anyone's full profile information.
- Angular can be useful, but use with caution to make sure it's right. For my project, it was really just a single-use app, with only a few models. This isn't exactly the perfect use case, as scaling one model isn't going to be the most difficult thing in the world. This definitely means that going forward I'll need to increase my planning stage for any personal projects to make sure I don't get locked in or too buzz-word-frenzy-ish.
- Don't skimp during project week. I made the mistake (I think) of focusing too much on trying to set up interviews, find great workplaces, and make connections by going to meetups. I think that time would've been better spent studying JavaScript & Ruby best practices & code design and really working on making my app kick-ass. So now that I've made that mistake, I think I'm going to spend much more time this week doing exactly that, and potentially launching an entirely new project for the Meet & Hire on August 3rd (If you're a company looking to see my work, feel free to grab a ticket and stop by).
Overall I'm about 85% proud of what I did during the last project, and I'm really looking forward to revamping and improving it going forward. In my next post or two, I'll talk about how this job search has gone, what some struggles are that I ran into, and detail some interesting strategies I've picked up along the way!
Alls fair in love and code, thanks for listening!
-Æ