I attended a web seminar on hiring for software engineers this week.
The seminar was hosted by Will Sentance of Codesmith and one topic covered was how to show hiring managers that you had suitable engineering experience. Bootcamp students build web apps as part of the curriculum, but they don’t have to deal with users, which is the most critical thing that can break an app or produce edge use cases.
Real websites and applications can have many thousands of users a day, and even more interactions on their user interface. In the real world, web engineers have to deal with people accidentally breaking their web app, in addition to the possibility of people intemtionally breaking their code.
As a software developer in training, one way to gain experience with users is to build developer tools. These can be simple npm packages or ruby gems that handle problems that developers might face. Making this project public and accesible to other devs, i.e. users, could reveal bugs in your code and new features you may need to perfect your code.
Another blog post I read this week on creating your own npm package: Medium