Chapter 6
How to stand out
If you want to go 3–5 days to the office and earn an average salary, you can skip this part.
A crucial part of getting hired is standing out among hundreds of other candidates. This step you cannot just memorize or practice. You need to prepare it in advance.
Build Your Stuff
The most important thing for a developer to do is to develop. You have to build something from scratch — take it all the way to deployment with at least some real users.
You can use this experience during interviews. You will talk to the interviewer about your project and steer the conversation in the direction you want, not the direction they want. It gives you more control over the process — you can talk about the things that were genuinely hard for you, the trade-offs you made, and the problems you solved.
This also shows the interviewer that you can think beyond just code. You understand that a real product requires engineering trade-offs, project management, and finishing what you started.
And forget about grinding LeetCode and studying algorithms all day. In this new era of AI, you MUST be a product owner, QA, manager, and team lead all at once. You should be a one-person team.
Build. Your. Stuff.
Doesn't matter how. Vibe code it, write a chatbot, build a Chrome Extension. Anything. It is the single best thing you can do as a developer.
Write About Your Stuff
This is less crucial, but an important nice-to-have. Get visible.
You have to be active in promoting yourself. That means writing articles — on LinkedIn, or better yet on a blogging platform like Medium or Dev.to where other developers are actually reading.
These should NOT be generic AI-generated articles on "Latest Java 21 Features" or "When to Use Kafka vs RabbitMQ."
In a world where AI can produce all the basic generic content, you should sell your personal experience. You must be YOU.
Write articles like:
- "How I built a microservice that handles 50K transactions/day and what we learned along the way"
- "How one error cost me a 3 AM call from my company — and why every senior on my team missed it"
- "How I launched my website with AI and what I learned after it was hacked on the second day"
As a developer building your personal brand, what matters more?
You get the point. It has to represent your personal experience. That is what no AI can replicate and no other candidate can copy.