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I landed a job I wasn't qualified for on paper because of open source work I'd done in my free time. Here's the specific story, what the project was, and what contributing to open source actually signals to employers.
I was a 28-year-old former marketing coordinator who taught himself to code. Here's exactly how I got my first developer job — the portfolio strategy, the applications, the interviews, and what actually worked.
I was underpaid and knew it. After 18 months of not saying anything about it, I had one conversation that resulted in a 35% raise. Here's exactly what I said and the preparation that made it work.
After conducting over 200 technical interviews, I can tell you what makes a developer portfolio stand out — and it's almost the opposite of what most portfolio advice tells you to do.
In early 2024 I was getting paid well, working on interesting problems, and completely miserable. I almost quit tech entirely. Here's what was actually happening and how I found my way back to enjoying the work.
Every junior developer thinks getting promoted means writing better code. After watching people get promoted and not get promoted for five years, I can tell you: it's mostly other things.
My AWS bill for February was $3,417. My expected bill was around $180. Here's exactly what happened, why AWS billing is so hard to predict, and the specific change that fixed it.
Everyone in the cloud community acts like Kubernetes is the obvious default. It isn't. For most projects, K8s adds complexity that doesn't pay for itself until you reach a specific scale you probably haven't hit yet.
I've run production workloads on all three major clouds over the past four years. This is my honest, experience-based comparison — not marketing copy, not benchmark charts.
Our AWS bill was $4,200/month for a workload that should have cost about $1,600. The fix took two days of configuration changes and saved us $31,000 over the next year.
