Prepare a Relevant Portfolio

Imagine a restaurant owner hiring a chef. The owner grills the candidate on his skills, asking “Can you make chicken pot pie?”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” he replies.

“How’s your lasagna? Enchiladas? Pad thai?”

“Fantastic, without peer!”

“Can you make baklava?”

“Butter soft and flaky!”

“Great! You’re hired!”

How can the restaurant owner possibly know the chef can cook what he says he can? More important, why would you hire a chef without tasting his cooking?

Now turn that into a programmer interviewing for a job. The hiring manager asks, “You can do Perl, right? Perl objects? How about SOAP? DNS queries? Third normal form database structures? Recursive descent parsing?”

“Done ’em all.”

“Do you write ...

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