The most consistent piece of advice I’ve got amongst the many comments in my Reddit post about going to Uni was: “Work on your portfolio. That’s the number one thing recruiters look at when assessing resumes for entry level positions”.
Many people went so far as saying that a college degree isn’t necessary at all, if I work on my portfolio. They might be right, but I still wouldn’t pass on the opportunity to study cheaply to be the best engineer I can be. I know it’s three years of hard work and that can potentially hinder my short term capability to get into the tech industry, but I really don’t care. I’m sure in the long run having a degree is better than not.
So this is my number one goal in life right now. To build a solid portfolio. I have an income goal, fitness goals and relationship goals, but these are all secondary right now. Build, build, build, that’s all I think about. I have to be so good and develop a portfolio that people just won’t be able to ignore.
What to build?
My idea is to create several full stack apps that showcase my ability to put an UI together with Angular/Ionic and a back-end with ASP.NET, with the help of Firebase and Azure for data, hosting and authentication.
I’ll create apps from scratch but also use ideas from tutorials that I’ll follow and then tweak to add functionalities. I can’t overthink it. I’m a wanna be engineer. Engineers build stuff. And that’s what I have to do.
Building Knowledge
Obviously I can’t just build. I have to create detailed checklists and manuals for myself so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I start. For that I’ll be using “Roam Research”, the best notetaker I’ve ever found, where my notes can easily be cross-referenced so I can build a body of knowledge. I’ve tried making notes on Evernote and Google Docs, and they’re good apps, but they hierarchical way in which they’re organised limits the cross flow of notes and ideas. Roam Research is built with that in mind and I highly recommend it.
