Your Resume Sucks!? Need more Projects?
This is a guide on how to have better projects for FAANG for resumes
Overview
One of the things I see a lot of time is that people just don’t have that many good projects on resume. Especially for high schoolers entering college, or even being in college, if you haven’t been focused on improving yourself technically then that is a big problem.
My opinion is going to be based to have a foundation in full-stack web development, or some part of it. Why? (B/c I’m biased and I did full-stack web development). But also b/c I believe it serves as a generic knowledge foundation for other fields. Now, if you are into low level embedded, robotics, microcontrollers, dev-ops, mobile great! Go for it! All of those are super valid, and you should do what interests you. But sometimes, especially for people starting out, they have zero knowledge where to start, and this is meant to help those people.
Are these projects good enough for FAANG? Yes. I’ve taught many mentees, whose resume especially as freshmen / sophomore / junior year, consists of just projects built from the foundations of what I talk about in this article. Obviously, the most successful ones are those who take the knowledge further, but for a first internship this is more than enough (seeing people get internship from JP Morgan Chase to Amazon to Microsoft). Even myself, for a long time I mainly just had primarily projects on my resume until I was able to get more work experience.
Moving onwards in this article, I will be referring to Udemy courses, I am not sponsored by them, I just think they are the cheapest method for you to get guidance on establishing knowledge, and then you can go out there and use the projects you learn in the course, adapt them, or use them to build other projects. If you want to, go ahead and use Youtube and the million of other free articles and resources that the programming community has created. I just personally, like video courses where the creator also has a financial incentive to be a great teacher. And considering how cheap it is + the refund policy for Udemy, made sense for me. If it doesn’t, there are tons of resources out there you can do for free with just a simple Google Search.
Projects you can do:
THIS IS MORE SO FOR BEGINNERS and for people who don’t want to do web dev, want a starting point for backend, and just wants to get started. But you will need to extend more than just basic python scripting at some point. Maybe after this look more into Go-lang projects, or other backend languages / projects.
Scripting with the Python section under this course is a great place to just instantly gain 4 projects in 3 hours that you can immediately put on your project.
Specifically here are some ways that I think you could sell some of the projects on the scripting course. The idea is ultimately just to think of any sort of application, ex. emailing and SMS automation can be used for a lot, web scraping can be used for a lot, mass pdf correction and watermarking can be used for a lot, figure out how to make your project interesting, and discuss the technical aspects that went into it:
Created an automated emailing and SMS system in order to automatically process club events and do system-wide announcements to club members within certain groups about events. Difficulties included XYZ
Created a web scraper in order to scrape through school classes and help generate a list of possible classes to take. Difficulties included... XYZ
Use Python to generate automatic deal listings from Craiglist that they SMS me a message.
Note: the course does get more intermediate at latter points with different backend services such as Django, Flask, Numpy, and other great introductions and decent projects. Just I know most people tend to drop out after getting to SMS, but it is up to you if you want to continue
Build Web Apps with Vue JS and Firebase
Also another great course with 3 full-stack web apps, all written in Vue, and very easy to learn quickly. You probably won’t know what you are doing completely but a good dive into Vue and you can go deeper into it through other Vue courses but this one you come out with three solid projects to start with. I recommend Vue bc a lower learning curve than React, much lower.
One of my first several mentees she did this course, and ended up getting Amazon + Meta afterwards. This was for a long time the projects she put on her resume b/c before that she only had tutoring / TAing at school.
I ALSO HIGHLY RECOMMEND ZERO TO MASTERY ACADEMY (affiliate link):
I used to be a mentor in it! But it is one of the best places I think where the academy monthly pricing gives a lot of access to the Python Developer course, React Developer course, a Mastering the Coding interview course, and a Big Tech Coding interview course so it definitely is more cost-effective I feel in terms of resources and very high quality!
They also have many of their courses still on Udemy, which you can purchase, so if the full academy is too expensive, just go to Udemy! You are in no way compelled to use their academy.
My personal path: I learned from the Complete Web Developer Course:
Which if you want to go down the React route versus Vue, I think is an amazing course and where I first got started. But this course is very large and thorough and isn’t maybe as short-term as the other courses above if you are just looking to build a resume. This is more for a foundation as a developer, and less so for interviewing short-term. You build a full-stack web app from scratch, learn React and Nodejs and Postgresql and make a face detection website.
You can go through this course first to learn fundamentals before diving into a framework your choices like continuing down React or Vue.
Note: they used to have the course on Udemy, but they took it off. I highly recommend, any other instructor on Udemy who also have great rating to consider looking into them.
Note: While most the above are all hacky ways to fill your resume, I do think at some point, do try to pick a specialty.
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Literally, just start with any Udemy project. Maximillian, Zero to Mastery, Stephen Grider, Angela Yu, are all great teachers.
My only recommendation is DO NOT GET STUCK IN TUTORIAL HELL (meaning that you only keep doing tutorial without doing things yourself. You become stuck in a loop where you can only do work with a guided tutorial - meaning you don’t actually understand or push yourself outside that defined boundary). Just doing a tutorial doesn’t mean that you are a master, take that knowledge and push yourself deeper, explore, build projects on your own.
I love courses though b/c I think it introduces to you in a friendly way a perspective that you might not have known otherwise.