On Tuesday December 20th, 2022, I held a talk about How to get a job as a developer with soft skills when tech skills are weak.
It was for the last episode this year on The Monthly Dev event hosted by daily.dev.
Other skills
Github offers other things you can focus on like security or automation with GitHub actions.
You might find a niche you want to focus on more, like accessibility, SEO, or performance. With Google Chromes Lighthouse Extension, you can easily get into one of these niches.
Write about these things in the project's readme or wiki. Write about what you learned while creating a project, important concepts, share your design processes. This will strengthen your writing skills.
As you can see, there are so many other things you can focus on when you're not so good at writing code.
Conclusion
Soft Skills is what landed me my first job. These skills are still the strong ones even after a year in my current job. And that’s totally fine.
In the end you are working together in a team, so everyone will have their strengths and weaknesses but together as a team it just works. Be proud of what you know and what you are good at. Focus on these skills.
Don't focus on code alone, because most of the time in your job you will be googling for a solution to your problem anyway, or talking about concepts and possibilities with other developers.
Focus on how to solve problems, on the mindset of how to develop a product (from the beginning of planning, to the development itself, to finishing the whole process), on business and social skills.
Be aware of your skills and talk openly and honestly about your strengths and weaknesses, what you know and don't know, and how you would handle a situation if you were unfamiliar with a subject.
This will help the interviewer get an idea of who you are and how you would fit into the team. There are a variety of positions on a development team, so there will be a place for you.
Watch the full episode
{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGiw3KVVM_E&t=4115s %}
Resources shared in all articles
- GitHub Projects https://docs.github.com/en/issues/planning-and-tracking-with-projects
- Labels & Milestones https://docs.github.com/en/issues/using-labels-and-milestones-to-track-work
- What is Scrum https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-scrum
- What's a Git Workflow https://dev.to/yuridevat/whats-a-git-workflow-2ncm
- Project shown on Page 13 (ReadMe, About, ect) https://github.com/YuriDevAT/sos-animals
- Communication for Dev https://dev.to/yuridevat/communication-for-devs-31bm
- Pull Request Example shown Page 14 https://github.com/dequelabs/cauldron/pull/808
- How to create a PR https://dev.to/yuridevat/how-to-create-a-pull-request-18a1
- Using wikis https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-project-with-wikis
- Google Chrome Lighthouse Extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lighthouse/blipmdconlkpinefehnmjammfjpmpbjk?hl=de
Thanks for reading.