Advice wanted on creating a portfolio for an entry level golang job

Hi all,

This is my first post on the forum. I’ve been learning golang for a few months and wanted to see if it was going to stick before participating in the forum. It has, and so here I am!

This question is mainly directed at past and present hirers & firers, but all comments welcome. My education is in business, I got into programming a few years ago to help bootstrap some websites for hobby projects, I liked coding a lot better than my job and have been transitioning into web development as a main source of income.

I’ve been working with PHP and nodeJS mostly, golang makes a lot more sense to me as a choice for web development in part for performance reasons but mostly for clarity and TDD. I’d like to pursue it further and perhaps take an onsite or remote position.

Which leads me to my problem. I don’t have a CS degree behind me and am not going to get one. As I see it to demonstrate what I can do to a potential employer I would need a strong portfolio. As someone who hasn’t worked in an IT office, I’d like to know if there’s any specific type of portfolio items I should focus on if I wanted to go that route, as well as any other tips you may have.

Right now I have exactly nothing so there is some way to go, but I’d at least like to be going in the right direction.

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Write code, lots of code. Utilities for personal needs, demo websites, toys, sets of challenges from programming puzzle website, contests, whatever. Put it somewhere like Github. When I was hiring programmers we tried to figure out whether they could program - in any language. Languages can be fairly easily learnt, if the brain is wired / trained to program.

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Another good idea is to contribute to some existing open source projects. This shows that you know enough about them to get changes accepted.

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Brilliantly and succinctly worded.

Thanks for taking the time to read and reply.

David,
+1 for Jakob about putting your work on github. I would also recommend coding some classic algorithms on searching (binary search etc) sorting (quicksort, heapsort etc), and datatypes (graphs/trees etc). I recommend the lecture slides here: http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/ These will introduce you broadly to most concepts in computer science and help you with interviews.

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Looks like a good resource, will check it out!

What does this mate publish on this Instagram account? Code screenshots? :wink:

Hi,

I can relate to you as I am a self-taught in my job. And it didn’t prevent me from becoming a technical architect ( I started programming professionally almost19 years ago) . Previous advices are good, people always stress to write code. Don’t forget to read even more ! Every writer has read much more information than he writes into his book ! Let alone the tons of books they read for inspiring their style (check this : https://writingcooperative.com/100-famous-authors-and-their-writing-spaces-8ee25c50c927) . By reading a project like kubernetes for example, you will know very soon what part of the language you have to work harder. And to feed your portfolio, a contribution to such a project is worth all you can do anywehere else. Don’t think it’s too hard, kubernetes maintainers propose regularly issues good for a first contribution at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/labels/good%20first%20issue. You will improve more and faster by reading good projects like that than by following any tutorial at least for creating better code.

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