A bunch of useful thoughts and links that I have decided to put together after being helped and helping a lot of others in the Reactiflux jobs-advice discord channel. There are a lot of questions that had me typing similar responses over and over so I've decided to make a repo to make that information more easily available.
Expect this to be a combination of my thoughts on various topics as well as useful links to articles and other resources that may help you in your career. I'll keep this updated as much as I reasonably can and/or when I see some really golden advice. Feel free to add things that you think are useful as long as they are in line with my goal of this being easily digestable and not a massive link dump.
I have a ton of things to add but I'll be starting off with some links for those that are looking for jobs and tired of the usual sites!
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter!
There are tons of places but a lot of them are a mess to sift through. Here are some of my favorites but these definitely aren't the only places that you can find work
- AngelList Startup Jobs
- Stackoverflow Careers
- Github Jobs
- The Hacker News Monthly "Who's Hiring" Posts
This will list the posts from 2018 but I'm sure that there is a lot of value in modifying the query to view the 2017 posts as well. HN Hiring is a site dedicated to searching through these posts but keep in mind that you need to click through to see comments because there can be useful information in them. There is also a monthly post for Freelancers as well as a Who wants to be Hired? post for people willing to post their info and be contacted directly instead. - Regional Tech Slacks
Many cities or regions have a dedicated tech slack group and they usually have a jobs channel for people looking for work in those locations. This is a nice list of them put together by Tracy Lee - Companies you like
Most companies have some sort of "jobs" or "careers" page. Think about companies that are using technologies that you enjoy or have a product that you like and maybe even use. Not every job gets posted to the major job boards - The Reactiflux Jobs Channel
A lot of cool jobs (many of these are react focused) are posted in the #jobs channel in the Reactiflux Discord. You can join here if you'd like to view the channel directly or interact with the largest developer chat room/community that I'm aware of on the internet. - LinkedIn - LinkedIn can be good for finding work especially if you live in or near a tech hub. Keep your profile up to date so that companies can reach out to you too.
- We Work Remotely
- Who Is Hiring
- Remote OK
- Remotive
- Remote Jobs from Hackernews hand picked by Remote Leaf
Keep in mind that networking will always be better than any of the things listed above. I'll write about that soon but keep in mind that you're up against the world when you're only focused on cold approaching companies with job applications.
Networking is most deifnitely the best way to find land your next role or gig. Many many many many positions are filled through recommendations from friends/family/coworkers/ect. Already having a connection to someone inside of the company that you'd like to work for puts you ahead of everybody else sending in applications.
- Conferences
Meetups but on a larger scale! (I am attending my first developer conference in a few weeks. Expect updates on this after that!) - Meetups
Meetups can vary greatly in my experience. Depending on how active your region is, this can be a great way to meet devs and learn about companies in your area that may be hiring. They often have a segment of time scheduled for networking/hiring related talks as well. Try to enjoy yourself and make friends! If you really want to get the max value from meetups, try giving a talk or even starting one if your area doesn't have a meetup for your topic of interest. - Social Media
I recommend starting with Twitter. Many devs of the tools you use have Twitter accounts that are easy to discover. - Content Creation
Blogging and creating tutorials(medium or host your own), youtube videos, podcasts, cast studies, ect. All of these can be FANTASTIC ways to attract attention from companies looking to hire awesome devs. Get good at this and the jobs will find you! - Open Source Contributions
This is a great way to interact with devs while also building real skills that you will use on the job. You also get to help out the devs working for little to no money that are making the tools that power our ecosystem.
- This is a skill that I'm still building myself but it's still valuable even if you aren't great at it. Every job that I've had besides my first came through a connection of some sort. I'll update this more as I develop more thoughts on Networking
Here are a couple of services that I think are great for hosting various projects like a portfolio!
- Netlify
Netlify is my favorite way to host a static site or client-side application these days. It seamlessly integrates with Github and you can also drag a project folder right into it(useful for that short period in time where you haven't tried Github out yet). With modern static site generators like Gatsby, Hugo, or Jekyll, you can even host blogs for free! - Github Pages
Github Pages is an extremely popular way to host a website directly from your github repo. It's quick and painless and a fine choice for hosting a client-side app or static site - Now by Zeit
A ridiculously simple tool for hosting node js applications for free! It's an insanely useful tool as long as you don't mind that your code is open to the public (fine for portfolio sites for example). - Surge
Another great tool for hosting static sites for free with a slick command line interface - Digital Ocean
This is a more traditional VPS host and my go to when I need more control over what I'm hosting. They don't have a free plan but the cheapest is $5 (a cup of coffee) so the pricing is definitely reasonable. It's a quick and easy way to spin up a vitual machine. They have a ton of presets as well so you can be one click away from having the stack of your choice live and running on a linxu distro.
The format I'm using is definitely inspired by Mark Erikson's repo, React/Redux Links which is the best of any of these link compilation repos that I have seen 🔥