Kamran Ahmed Ansari

I learnt this from one of the best resumes I came across... it solves the problem of missing details while trying to make a one-pager with loads of things to share. You can make the first page of your resume the one-pager summary of everything laid out beautifully. All the details that you wished you could add but had no space for can be added from the second page on. This makes your first page the ideal one-pager resume, for whoever wants details of anything can go the further pages. Serves both kinds of readers well.

In case you’re not satisfied with your portfolio, don’t fake one, build it. Not everyone starts off with exciting stuff but everyone passionate enough deserves a chance. To build your portfolio without an exciting enough opportunity, you can start to look for problems to solve in real life, and start solving it. Nothing impresses the interviewer more than when you have a share at least one difficult or exciting personal project in your portfolio.

From a individual contributor standpoint, its a continuous learning process on how to estimate a given work more accurately, but from my experience it is always better to overestimate the work and add some buffer, because things might not turn out as expected. Most common reasons of delay include dependency not being cleared on time, running into technical issues, or may be even change in requirements. You personally cannot control any of these, hence usually overflows the estimate. From an overall team standpoint, the leader needs to learn about the estimating habits of all individuals within the team and add buffers accordingly. It is always better to deliver before the estimated time than to be late.

You can also try to find good internships where you'll be given real work and good mentors to help gain some useful experience.

Look for opportunities or problems that you can solve in your own life, what's the one thing that you wish existed as an app on your phone or anything that could be better? If you need a backend, you can use stuff like Firebase, Backendless, etc to concentrate on app development without worrying about learning backend technologies. Be the first user, use it extensively, learn the shortcomings and try to fix them. When confident, publish and invite friends and family to try the app. You'll learn more than you would expect and gain real experience.

Test Driven Development (TDD) gives you (arguably) the best peace of mind with the best code coverage in your unit tests. Unit tests are like a parachute in Continuous Delivery, you won't jump out of a plane if there is a single hole in it. When you've built the product from the ground up with TDD, you know you can trust when all tests pass and delivery time is pretty quick.