4 Tips to Build Projects That Look Great on Your Resume
By: Dhananjay Trivedi
Tags: Coding, Programming, Software Engineering, Software Development, Startup

Tips for Your Project

You don’t have to implement them all, but every single one of them adds a lot of value to your project and your confidence. So try to follow them all.

1. Follow a standard architecture/design pattern while building your project

You could build a to-do list app that works, and it would mean nothing to the company interviewing you. But if you tell the interviewer that you built the app following this particular design pattern — even if it only partially works — that would mean a lot!

An interviewer who is a developer will always be more interested in knowing how you built something rather than what you built it with.

They would want to know what key architectural decisions you made and why.

They would want to know how you structured your code and why.

They would want to know what technical blocks you faced and how you resolved them.

They would want to know how you would scale this application.

If you don’t know what design patterns are, now would be a great time to learn about them.

2. Build a professional UI, but don’t waste too much time on it

People have a visual bias — they literally judge a book by its cover.

Similarly, make sure the UI for whatever you build looks good and professional. When it comes to applications, people often make the assumption that if the app looks good, the code is good too. I know, it’s sad.

Here is the great part: There are tons of great-looking free project templates that you can use to build your awesome-looking application. This way, you can focus more on building the core application rather than wasting too much time on aligning things vertically.

3. Think about database and security

This is where things start to get tricky, giving you a lot of things to talk about during the interview. If your project doesn’t have any database, it just might not be sophisticated enough. So maybe pick a new one?

There are four basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations that you need to add to showcase your skills. Spend time planning your DB’s architecture and think about how you can optimize for the reads and writes. This is another great talking point in the interviews.

Also, have at least some sort of authorization that adds basic security to your application. You can totally use Firebase Auth to take care of basic authentication in your application without having to waste too much time on it.

When you are making decisions like depending on third-party solutions to quickly build your app and not reinvent the wheel, that’s a really valuable skill to have and show during your interview. You can talk about it and how much value that decision added to your project.

You can always do more things to make your application more secure. See what is feasible and required as per your application’s scope.

4. Solve a business problem

This is something I learned in my first year as a working professional. No matter how cool the technology you learned is, don’t just build anything to show your skills.

Identify a suitable business problem and then implement the solution using technology. When you do actually solve a business problem, the business doesn’t care about the technology you used to solve it. True story.

There will be candidates showing random applications and games, while you:

Invested some time into understanding the business — learning ability.

Identified its problems — analytical ability.

Thought about a solution— problem-solving ability.

Built something — your technical competency.

Those are the skills of a working professional and not just any developer, and that’s who the businesses are looking to hire.

Bonus tip: Follow the industry standards

There are some industry standards around the development process, and if you already know them, it will portray you as a professional. These are:

Clean code standards.

Writing unit tests for your code.

Maintaining a code repository.

Continuous Integrations and Continuous Delivery.

Being agile.

If you can also learn and showcase these skills in your side projects, they will definitely make all your projects more valuable and give you a lot more keywords to add to your resume and talk about during your interview as a true professional.