A few years ago, my friend Ed Cross and I had the opportunity to serve the UCF Design and Code student community on getting started in the design and code industry. I appreciate their leadership team enabling us to share with the group.
I loved how Ed shared his career journey, times of persistence, and various tips to jump start. I appreciate Ed sharing his time and insight with these UCF students. I have great respect for Ed’s thoughtfulness, creativity, industry, and craft. Make sure to check out his awesome YouTube channel at Design deli.
For reference, I wanted to share a few tools and tips that I mentioned in my talk “Start with Wow: Hacking Your Next Job Interview”.
- When you put good into the world, it comes back to you. Consider doing volunteer work around a passion area. You never know how a friendship might lead to an opportunity. My critical start gigs came from friendships who knew me from playing violin in a church choir.
- Join a local developer group, here are a few to consider:
- Contribute to open source. During the summer, Google offers paid “internships” to contribute to key open source projects.
- Tips to optimize your LinkedIn Profile
- Consider Starting a blog. Talk about the tools, methods, and patterns you’re excited about. With social media, you should feel empowered to share samples of your craft.
- Learn to write software that’s easy to test. This is a Google tech talk from the inventor of Angular. – Clean Code talks at Google Test automation will continue to be an evergreen skill valued by every hiring manager.
- Learn to write SOLID code. Start by creating classes that have one responsibility.
- Learn a cloud provider – https://www.skills.google/ has some great learning tools. These tools have greatly improved in the past couple of years to help connect you with practical certifications.
- For reference, here are my slides from the talk.
Finally, I want to give a shout out to my friend Stacy Devino. She’s an amazing Google Developer Expert in Android and maker. I feel that her linkedIn post captures a concise resource people on their job searching that I wanted to pass along. Hope this helps!!

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