Ask HN: Approaching 40 and trying to get a foothold into Software Engineering
Honestly I quite like your portfolio. Judging from it alone I&#x27;d give you an interview if I were a recruiter. However, I&#x27;m not, so I couldn&#x27;t tell you what sort of secret sauce goes into that pre-interview pass. My experience is having worked in the industry for a few years (have I made it clear enough that my worldview is very narrow? I don&#x27;t want to beat you over the head with this fact)<p>I hope you don&#x27;t mind some constructive criticism about your site anyway:<p>List your languages&#x2F;skills strongest-to-least-strongest left-to-right. I clicked C++ since it was the the first language I saw and it told me that you weren&#x27;t actually that good at it. I would probably opt for more positive sounding language like &quot;this was my first language and while I&#x27;m familiar with it I mostly program in X.&quot; (here&#x27;s my naive take - C++ and Java are some of the &quot;traditional&quot; backend languages, so if you want to sell yourself as being fullstack it would especially behoove you to be more forward about your experience with them).<p>Load things quicker. At least on Firefox, it would take as much as a second for the animations to finish as I was scrolling down. I know that I might have no attention span, but surely any recruiter looking at your page has a legitimate reason to want to see your work easily and fast.<p>On that note, the top bar seemed to disappear unless I scroll up. IDK if this is like a common pattern, but I&#x27;d prefer to have it more easily accessible.<p>I&#x27;d recommend that you put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter who is giving your life story an 8 second glance when it comes to your website. Try and flush your mind (I know you&#x27;re intimately familiar with it), open it, and decide within 30 seconds whether you&#x27;d give yourself an interview. Ask your friends to do the same if you can.<p>Regarding your resume, I think that for junior roles your stuff is good. Don&#x27;t pad it and make sure that the recruiter&#x27;s eyes go immediately to your most impressive projects&#x2F;skills. I think you have more than enough stuff, so you&#x27;ll have to be careful about what you pick and how you present it.<p>I want to say again, your page is seriously cool. I hope you don&#x27;t take my criticism personally - I wish you the best of luck!