The 1 Coding Project Idea Guaranteed To Get You A Software Development Job

today I'm gonna show you the one coding project you should build that will guarantee that you get a coding job before we again if you want to get a job as a software developer I've laid out five steps that you need to follow to get a job you'll learn how to win the interview what projects to build and how to work with recruiters if you want to learn more about that you can go to coder friend comm slash job roadmap and that'll give you all the details you need to get that first coding job that's codified a comm slash job roadmap so choosing a coding project for your portfolio it can be difficult and sometimes very challenging especially for a beginner so you here looking for a project or you're building portfolio I want to congratulate you on building that portfolio because you know and I know that you have to have a portfolio in order to get a job and so you you're in the process of putting that together and you also know that your resume if your career switch are a beginner and you don't have any work experience that your resume by itself will not get your job and that's also correct so this portfolio has to be spot-on it has to be strong enough to get you a job and you're building these projects like tic tac toe random quote generator or something like that and you realize that they're kind of toy projects and you're thinking are they strong enough to get me a job and the answer is no they're not so you've went to the web and you start looking cool coding project ideas and you find once I 1500 choices and so you're wondering like well how do I build or which one should I build and we're here today to tell you the one project that you need to build and put on your portfolio that will get you a job so I'm going to show you what to build how to build it and how to present that to an employer but first let me clear up some myths about coding projects [Music] the first myth that people have and I see this advice online a lot is build a project that you're passionate about you know and and while that's like them probably the most use device on the internet it's also the most wrong device so you don't need to build a project that you're passionate about you need to think about what is my audience and who's the project be targeted toward it so your project is targeted toward a development manager or a hiring manager at a corporation and you got to think about what would they want to see what would resonate with them and so you need to build a project that they can instantly recognize if it's good or not I saw this from a comic writer called Todd McFarlane who's talking about how to break into the comedy book industry and he was saying that you know you can't really show Marvel or DC your work or your custom work if you want to get a job there you need to draw a Captain America a spider-man or a Superman and then they can judge where they're okay that's a really good captain record that's a really good spider-man that's a really good Batman but if you show them your custom character they have no idea or no frame of reference whether that's good or not and so your project must resonate with the employer and you need to give them something that's instantly recognizable alright so another myth is it doesn't matter what tools or languages that you use to build your projects and that's patently false see companies use tools and languages to build their projects and so if your resume or your portfolio that you're showing the employer it doesn't align with those they're less likely to get you hired let me put another way let's say that you have a fantastic portfolio it's well-built it's well-constructed and it has these great projects on it but it's built with tools and languages that the company you're interviewing with doesn't use and then another person interviews for the same job and they're equally skilled as you but their portfolio projects were built in the stack or the tools and languages that they use guess which employer that which employee they're gonna hire they're gonna hire the one who's stack or language and tools aligned with what the company does and so what you do is build your projects with the tools and languages that the company uses that you're interviewing for now one of the other myths out there that is and this may be a little controversial that you can like work for one hour a day and turn yourself in our Pro developer or build your project by coding one hour today and what I wanted to caution you on is do not go down that rabbit hole what you need to do is is take off blocks of time to build your project and how you do this we're getting this more later is just make a schedule stick to it and you may work an entire Saturday and Sunday and on Monday or something like that but you need to put blocks of hours together when our day isn't enough and then I'll probably work for the gym or getting you in better shape but if you're trying to build a project that's just not enough continuous time to make to make it work okay so before I can tell you what the project is that you need to build let's talk about how you're going to constructor or how you're going to put it together because that is just as important as what you build and so I'm going to tell you that your project must contain the following elements to be successful [Music] so one thing your project definitely needs is to follow an architectural or a design pattern now you may ask us well what is a design pattern design pattern is how you organize your code your files and your photos on your disk to produce web pages or websites companies follow these design patterns so that they can have a repeatable process to produce websites web pages and code and so that no matter what happens someone can go back and look at page a or page B or page see and it's written in the same consistent matter so that it's easy to debug easy to fix and easy to maintain now what beginners mistakes what they make is they don't follow a design pattern and so when they look at your project if you're pushing your code on git or github or bitbucket or something like that they'll look at your project code and it's probably unorganized or the the pages aren't written in a consistent matter and that can make you look more junior than you may actually be but if you built your project list of the design pattern and they looked at it and then oh wow that's that's clearly organized it's clearly consistent and it's built in a way that's maintainable and easy to follow so always use a design pattern on your coding projects probably the most popular design pattern for web applications is MVC when that stands for Model View controller MVC is not a language it's not a set of tools it is a design pattern how you structure your code now what's more important I could tell you a lot about MVC at this point but what here's what you really really need to know if you build your application utilizing the NBC design pattern it's more than likely and actually probably very likely that the person you're interviewing uses MVC in their environment and what does that mean that means the thing that you built the thing that you implemented is the same way they build apps and what does that mean that means that the hiring manager is more likely to hire you because you already have adopted a design pattern and it doesn't have to teach you that going forward you already have shown that you can implement it so the next thing your portfolio needs is a professional UI it must be clean Vaslav which means works well on mobile and desktop because you don't have they're gonna use it and this is what I can tell you for sure if you build your coding project with a clean professional UI and you show that to an employer people are what I would call visual buyers which means they will look at that project and they will judge you based on how it looked and this is what they'll think Wow that thing looks really cool therefore the code behind it must also be cool now you may not believe me that people would judge it in this way even the most hardened IT manager will look at good says that and say wow that's really cool I'll really like that UI we have seen hundreds of students come through cutter foundry that show their projects to do hiring managers and they get hired based on the look of it alone almost and so like the way it looks matters if it looks cool they think the code behind it is cool you've got to understand that and that's what I'm telling you today so how do we achieve that so the one way you can achieve it is this or what I think is the best way is to take bootstrap and download a template from somewhere that I get a free one or get a paid one and use that template on your project you do not need to build this from scratch with HTML and CSS in fact I'm telling you not to please listen to this get a bootstrap template put it on top of your project and get the thing to market what happens when people try to write the HTML CSS from scratch is they'll spend weeks or months down in that instead of building the project that they could show someone the smart person has built the project that put a bootstrap template and they're interviewing next week get a bootstrap template put it on top of your project make it clean make the UI responsive and show it to somebody now the next thing your project needs is a database so if you've picked a coding project and your coding project does not have a database you need to pick a new project that means it's not robust enough or not sophisticated enough to warn a database it's not professional enough for you to interview with someone and get a job and so your project must have a database in addition to utilizing a database you must perform the crud options which is create read update and delete all of those screens must be present in your project one of the other essential things you need to put on your portfolio or your coding project is security and so that means that they must have a login page what we call this is authentication and authorization authentication is the act of logging in to your website authorization is giving the people permissions on what they can do once they're logged in so imagine that you have an admin role or regular user role those would be all those would be under your authorization authentication is you're in a username and your password now one way to do this which i think is very simple but also very powerful is utilizing a third-party service like all-zero now alt 0 handles all the complexity of the authentication process for you and the authorization process now here's what's cool about using something like Al Jarreau now don't let people tell you you've got a third-party dependency don't do that just make your project clean except in this case what I would say is this is an actual benefit now imagine that you're in the interview situation and you got your login page and the dev manager asks you hey how did you do that and you're saying well I utilized off Xero to do that and then the interview manager comes at oh that's that's really cool we would like to implement that here how did that work out for you what you've done is you've changed your interview from being an interviewee so now you're in the consultant chair and so that if I alone can get you hired because I can promise you the enterprise people that your interview with want to implement these third-party services for various reasons and an ulcer as one of the most popular ways to do it so implement security and you'll be well ahead of everyone else that's interviewing for these jobs so the next thing your project needs is to make sure that it solves a business problem now a business problem is something that's commonly solved in enterprise today and it should be immediately recognizable by a hiring manager and anyone else that looks at it and it must solve this business problem so if you're building toy apps like calculators games or take that - or something like that those are not business problems you need to write an application that a hiring manager will say ok we're solving that in our company or yes I can see what you're doing there because that that's important to me so if your project solves a business problem and it's immediately recognizable by the higher measure as an industry wide thing you have a leg up against everyone else that's interviewing because they're showing your tic-tac-toe game they're showing the other kid games and you're showing a problem that is solved that either the company has already solved in the organization or they may be trying to solve it so if you solve a business problem you're immediately gonna seen as a professional in this industry and that gives you a leg up against all your competition that's interviewing your professional projects should be built with a design pattern like NBC it also needs to include a professional UI a database handle security and solve a complex business problem so now I'm going to tell you the exact project that you should build following this strategy [Music] okay so the project that we're gonna make is what we call a bug tracker or an issue tracker and now for those that don't know what that is development teams take defects in from their software and they track those defects and issues or tickets and then as they close those items that can mark them open closed or under development and give us a workflow and it allows the dev manager to see kind of what the process is for the overall project and so building a bug tracker and the reason that we get this project because it's very important every dev manager has a bug tracker their even uses something like JIRA and they're using fog bugs or bugzilla or github projects or something like that every dev team has some sort of issue tracking or a bug tracking software and so when you build this project and you walk into an interview with this particular project they will immediately recognize the domain that you're existing in immediately you say oh that's a bug tracker oh that's an issue tracker how did you handle notifications or how did you handle the collection of items how did you handle attachments and so they automatically know this and so that gives you guys a common ground or common thing that you can discuss and that is a super powerful tool because if you walk in and show someone something and they begin to ask you questions about your project you should be able to answer all of those questions because you wrote it and so that makes the interview process that much simpler and that's a very powerful motivator where you can control the interview by simply showing the thing that you wrote and getting them to ask you queries about how you did it how is it structured how is it architected on top of that here's another really hot tip with a bug tracker you can also literally change the logo and call it a helpdesk ticket system or you can call it hey I want a delivery notification system or for my repair guy this is my field force automation you know and so all of these things do the same kinds of things and so depending on where you're interviewing at if you're interviewing at a logistics company or you're interviewing somewhere that it's doing repairs or things like that you can you can just literally change the logo on it say this is my notification system or I help that system and and then immediately you have built something that they use on a daily basis and then they can talk to you about that and so that's a powerful powerful tool in an interview situation okay so now we've talked about two key things we've talked about like how we should build something and then I just told you what you should build but you're probably thinking there how do I get to the end how do I get through the construction phase how to actually deliver this actually have something to show because this is so easy to say hey you build a bug tracker but what how do I get there so let me talk you through what you should do you need to build a cess RS and you can look this up on the internet but that's down sort of software requirements specification write down all of the features and benefits that you want to have in this project okay and then you take off those features and benefits and you divide that up into one-week sprints so what can I do in five days so this is why we went back and said you can't code for an hour at a time you probably need to dedicate your Saturdays and your Sundays and your weekends to this and you say all right this weekend I'm gonna create the UI next weekend I'm gonna lay out the database after that I'm gonna do this in the military I'm gonna build this and construct this thing all right and then what you need to do is track your progress as you go through your week Sprint's track your progress and keep up with hit my deadline did I miss my deadline did I not work on the weekend because I had to go somewhere or whatever did not about the time and then you keep doing those sprints those iterations over time over time and eventually you will come up with a finished project because you have a deadline details of things that you need to do and you finish them and you start checking them off this keeps you from getting down in these rabbit holes of like hey I need to do this now I need to do that now all I needed to learn more about this or that and you just focus on the thing that you need to build which is a buck tracker and so finally if you do this and this is a super super deep hot hit the guys are looking at me right now shouldn't tell you this but I am is use the bug tracker that you're building to track your progress in the project and then when you get to the interview show them your bug tracker that you built with the progress as you went through the project and so you take your SRS you take your weekly sprints and then you show it with the project you built and show them how you went through the construction phase and I'm here to tell you right now and I'll make this guarantee if you did all that interview I hundred percent know that you will get hired if you do not get hired then those dev managers need to call me and Semyon essence I mean why didn't you hire a person that went through this amount of effort during interview because this does not happen this would set you apart above everybody else that's interviewing today most people are trying to memorize code trivia you walk in with a working project and the sprat and SRS and then you actually used your software on the project as you built it that's next level okay so we've gone over the complete framework at this point I've told you how to build something what you should build and then the production process of actually going through the construction phase and how to show it to somebody what I wanted to do is give you the common mistakes people make when utilizing this framework whether they're in code or founder you're outside of cutter powder the first mistake is if you go around the internet and you say people will tell you that it doesn't matter what you build this with and I'm here to tell you that it does you need to build this with dotnet NB C and C sharp this is why because dotnet by far and away is probably the most popular framework out there especially for junior devs so that means that your hiring manager is using the stack that you built your project in and so don't listen to them where you build it with anything that you want because then you'll be misaligned during the interview process so utilize dotnet C sharp and it's be done that MVC second a lot of people are going to tell you to start small first they may say that this bug tracker is aspirational goal that is something you should try to achieve too but you need to do these smaller things first at tick-tack-toe as you go on on your learning journey and I'm here to tell you you shouldn't do that with whatever knowledge you have right now use the plan that I set out for you take your your srs and divide this project up into very bite-sized components things that you can accomplish okay for example you could say alright this week I'm going to build a login page and so just do that and then if you follow this plan to its completion you will end up with a bug tracker Wow learning how to code there's no reason to lay your prop your progress to market by building five other or six other projects that you're not going to show anyway and finally the last step or the last common mistake that I see and that's people that are coming out of our program or people an outside of our program you build this bug tracker this beautiful piece of software and then you don't show it to anyone you talk to a recruiter and you don't show it and you're saying recruiters won't talk to me okay call a recruiter and based on your work history and your resume they may not give you the time of day but if you can say I know what you're saying I believe you that on my resume I work if she doesn't really show what I can do but let me show you my projects and you show them that bug tracker and when you show it to them they will say oh that's different I can sell that into the hiring manager and when you get to the interview process all you have to do is ask the interviewer right when you walk in and say hey I've got a piece of software that I would like to show you this piece of software will tell you and me if I'm a good fit for your organization do you mind if I show this to you for five or ten minutes and then you whip out your laptop you turn it around and you start demoing it to them and once they start asking you questions about the piece of software that you wrote ie your bug tracker then you will be taking control that interview you've controlled what they're going to ask you by looking at your software it also demonstrates your professionalism how you went from point A to point Z through completion and built an entire project not tic-tac-toe and not these other things this is a complete working piece of software that makes you professional and that makes you very very hireable trust when I say this if you show it to them you're gonna get hired now what we'd like to say this as well if you're watching this and you've watched the whole thing and you're like wow that is really aspirational I really would like to do that but I don't believe I could and you're feeling like I need some more things Kota founder would love to be your coach in fact it would be honored to be your coach and what our coaches do our teachers our mentors will walk you through the process of building these things showing you how to demo them and showing you how to get a job and that's what we want to do and we'd be honored to be able to provide that service to you but either way good luck and keep cutting [Music]

Channel: Coder Foundry

Views: 879,502

Rating: 4.869772 out of 5

Keywords: coding bootcamp, learn to code, dotnet, .net, c#, programming, software developer, coder foundry, coding bootcamp in north carolina, coding project, coding project ideas, bobby davis, bug tracker, srs, issue tracker, coding projects, web development, software development, software developer portfolio, projects for resume, web dev projects, resume projects

Id: oC483DTjRXU

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019