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You don't sound like a wanker at all! That's all sound advice you've given. The problem is that I'm very good at building things, but not so good at branding/

You don't sound like a wanker at all! That's all sound advice you've given. The problem is that I'm very good at building things, but not so good at branding/marketing/selling them. It's my job to engineer things, not sell them. And, for some reason, I always feel uncomfortable selling myself. I don't really enjoy boasting. Check out my profile. I've made things, I've shown them to HN. I built, probably, the most powerful bookmarklet to date. But the splash page sucks, and it's confusing, so I'm scrapping it. My website similarity search engine is doing pretty well, with traffic growing 15% a week for the last 7 weeks. But, I don't have a personal website, or a blog, or a twitter account, etc. I don't care for starting flame wars about "Why you should[n't] do X" or "How I did some amazing thing in some short amount of time". It's really not my thing. While I completely agree it'd make it easier to get a job, and is probably the optimal approach, it's not an option right now. It would take a large amount of time to suddenly build a brand/identity. On the other hand, optimizing my approach to the current systems of job postings is probably a better use of my time. This is the type of advice I'm looking for.

alnayyir 16y ago
>You don't sound like a wanker at all! Thank you, but I hate feeling/sounding like a robo-MBA. >The problem is that I'm very good at building things, but not so good at branding/marketing/selling them. That's okay, you'll learn. You're an HN user. Start with telling people on HN about it. Ask a designer from HN to collab with you on it, making it explicit that it's a silly portfolio builder and that you'd both be doing it for that purpose. You don't have to make a product you'd be selling, just...make something. And get people to talk about it. Something you can show people, even if it's just an open source helper-library you can talk about in a tech-screening. >But the splash page sucks, and it's confusing, so I'm scrapping it. Start from scratch, get help, get feedback, respond to feedback and pivot quickly. Don't let it languish without seeking advice and learning. >But, I don't have a personal website, or a blog, or a twitter account, etc. Well, I don't like that sort of thing either, so here's what I did. I made a very plain business card website. It links to a blog that's actually got a single post (but a thoughtful one, I'd like to think) that is in fact a tech demo for a micro CMS I rebuild a few times a year from scratch. It also links to my CV which is W3-conforming html/css. It also links to my twitter which acts as more of a connector-hub. I'm not an active twitter user, I just use it to ping random industry people occasionally. I'm not saying you should become some kind of social networking maven...just...poke, prod, get yourself out there a bit. You don't have to be famous, you just have to have a presence of some kind. Look at how many people in writing/journalism or in the entertainment industry that have a presence but aren't necessarily 'famous'. That's what you need to seek. Just because you don't have the capacity or credentials to become some kind of coding superstar doesn't mean you shouldn't try at all. >This is the type of advice I'm looking for. In the new economy, being a more efficient resume-monger isn't enough. I hope for your sake I'm wrong, but I doubt you'll do much better than par for the course that way. If you're satisfied with merely doing "okay" and not really pushing your career to the next level, then I honestly don't understand why you're on hackerne.ws Isn't lateral thinking, novel approaches, and aggressive self improvement while pushing past your comfort zone the whole point of this community? We're here because we glory in achievements and advancements, code and business alike. This isn't the monster.com forums where we talk about how to better organize our 100 resume and cover letter submissions per week. I'd like to finish by saying, please don't respond to this looking for some kind of way to rationalize or defend your accomplishments/approach to job hunting. It's not my business, it's not the business of those reading this thread. You came for help/advice, and I tried to introduce a different way of thinking about your career. Good luck, this is where I sign off.
stevejohnson 16y ago
My solution for the last three or so years has been to maintain a personal site (http://www.steveasleep.com/ http://www.steveasleep.com/) that consists of these things: * Links to and descriptions for relevant projects * List of recent blog posts (optional) * Latest 10 commits I have made to Github * HTML/PDF résumé * Links to my profiles on SO, HN, etc. As a college student casting about for internships, that simple combination has helped me a lot. If you're interested, I could help set you up with the super-simple backend that can be hosted for free on App Engine. I've also thought about adding a "hacker résumé" to supplement the regular one. The college job search format usually requires a conventional (boring) one-sheet résumé, but I would also like to provide a summary of hackerly accomplishments for the people I actually want reading my site.
- techbio 16y ago
  Sounds like a steady setup. How packagable is it? With AppEngine, you could make this an easier transfer by consuming a short list of URLs in a textarea (homepage, resume, blogA, blogB, profileA, profileB) and simply spawn a clone. Seen anything alse like it? I sort of asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827294
  - stevejohnson 16y ago
    Very packageable, actually. Here it is on Github: https://github.com/irskep/steveasleep https://github.com/irskep/steveasleep It reads the sidebar from content/site.yaml. Sidebar items can point either to external links or refer to Markdown files also in content/ which are converted to HTML at request time. The only other remaining customization is to change the theme in content/templates/. I like this instead of the feed-me-URLs setup because you can edit the Markdown and just hit Deploy in App Engine Launcher. Also, if I ever decide to move to App Engine, I have almost no barrier because I use the data store only for caching Posterous and Github information.

alnayyir 16y ago

>You don't sound like a wanker at all! Thank you, but I hate feeling/sounding like a robo-MBA. >The problem is that I'm very good at building things, but not so good at branding/marketing/selling them. That's okay, you'll learn. You're an HN user. Start with telling people on HN about it. Ask a designer from HN to collab with you on it, making it explicit that it's a silly portfolio builder and that you'd both be doing it for that purpose. You don't have to make a product you'd be selling, just...make something. And get people to talk about it. Something you can show people, even if it's just an open source helper-library you can talk about in a tech-screening. >But the splash page sucks, and it's confusing, so I'm scrapping it. Start from scratch, get help, get feedback, respond to feedback and pivot quickly. Don't let it languish without seeking advice and learning. >But, I don't have a personal website, or a blog, or a twitter account, etc. Well, I don't like that sort of thing either, so here's what I did. I made a very plain business card website. It links to a blog that's actually got a single post (but a thoughtful one, I'd like to think) that is in fact a tech demo for a micro CMS I rebuild a few times a year from scratch. It also links to my CV which is W3-conforming html/css. It also links to my twitter which acts as more of a connector-hub. I'm not an active twitter user, I just use it to ping random industry people occasionally. I'm not saying you should become some kind of social networking maven...just...poke, prod, get yourself out there a bit. You don't have to be famous, you just have to have a presence of some kind. Look at how many people in writing/journalism or in the entertainment industry that have a presence but aren't necessarily 'famous'. That's what you need to seek. Just because you don't have the capacity or credentials to become some kind of coding superstar doesn't mean you shouldn't try at all. >This is the type of advice I'm looking for. In the new economy, being a more efficient resume-monger isn't enough. I hope for your sake I'm wrong, but I doubt you'll do much better than par for the course that way. If you're satisfied with merely doing "okay" and not really pushing your career to the next level, then I honestly don't understand why you're on hackerne.ws Isn't lateral thinking, novel approaches, and aggressive self improvement while pushing past your comfort zone the whole point of this community? We're here because we glory in achievements and advancements, code and business alike. This isn't the monster.com forums where we talk about how to better organize our 100 resume and cover letter submissions per week. I'd like to finish by saying, please don't respond to this looking for some kind of way to rationalize or defend your accomplishments/approach to job hunting. It's not my business, it's not the business of those reading this thread. You came for help/advice, and I tried to introduce a different way of thinking about your career. Good luck, this is where I sign off.

stevejohnson 16y ago

My solution for the last three or so years has been to maintain a personal site (http://www.steveasleep.com/ http://www.steveasleep.com/) that consists of these things: * Links to and descriptions for relevant projects * List of recent blog posts (optional) * Latest 10 commits I have made to Github * HTML/PDF résumé * Links to my profiles on SO, HN, etc. As a college student casting about for internships, that simple combination has helped me a lot. If you're interested, I could help set you up with the super-simple backend that can be hosted for free on App Engine. I've also thought about adding a "hacker résumé" to supplement the regular one. The college job search format usually requires a conventional (boring) one-sheet résumé, but I would also like to provide a summary of hackerly accomplishments for the people I actually want reading my site.

techbio 16y ago
Sounds like a steady setup. How packagable is it? With AppEngine, you could make this an easier transfer by consuming a short list of URLs in a textarea (homepage, resume, blogA, blogB, profileA, profileB) and simply spawn a clone. Seen anything alse like it? I sort of asked here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827294 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1827294
- stevejohnson 16y ago
  Very packageable, actually. Here it is on Github: https://github.com/irskep/steveasleep https://github.com/irskep/steveasleep It reads the sidebar from content/site.yaml. Sidebar items can point either to external links or refer to Markdown files also in content/ which are converted to HTML at request time. The only other remaining customization is to change the theme in content/templates/. I like this instead of the feed-me-URLs setup because you can edit the Markdown and just hit Deploy in App Engine Launcher. Also, if I ever decide to move to App Engine, I have almost no barrier because I use the data store only for caching Posterous and Github information.