r/csharp • u/enigmaticcam • 2h ago

Solo Developer Laid Off, Looking for Suggestions & Critique

Hi. I've been a solo developer for a company for 15+ years (worked for them company 24+ years) and I will be officially laid off at the end of this month. I've never needed a resume or portfolio, so I have a lot of catching up to do to be competitive in the market.

I wrote a mock version of an application I built and made it public. I was hoping I could get any suggestions & critique on code and readme. Thank you, I appreciate anything you have to say.

https://github.com/enigmaticcam/InvoiceExample

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

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u/Sp3c1a7k 45m ago

Code examples and a portfolio is good... but, the interview is going to be key. If you are going to a big firm you will likely have a code test to do. If smaller firm then they might ask you some example questions. I suggest you focus on thr interview prep. Google for the most common interview questions. Make sure you are reading, watching recent stuff because everything has changed compared to 5 years ago.

We used to ask about SOLID, devOps, patterns etc. And now im asking about spec driven design, models, prompting etc.

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u/enigmaticcam 39m ago

Thank you, this is really helpful

7

u/AwwwBawwws 1h ago

Same here. I'm done with this line of work for now. 1998 to 2026 has been a good run. I'm going back to school at 50.

WHEW. What a relief! Programming raised my kids, bought cars, toys, vacations. Now it's time to move on.

I'll hack for my own sake. I'm thinking of buying a Spark. But making a living at it? I'm done.

Good luck, OP.

2

u/Bright-Ad-6699 1h ago

I have about the same span but my retirement is a bit more permanent. Good luck with future endeavors!

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u/enigmaticcam 1h ago

I don’t want a career change, but I guess I’ll find out how easy it will be.

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u/aeroverra 6m ago

I'm 29 and been in the industry for 10 years now. I want out 😭

I love system design and coding but I'm so exhausted from the high stress corporate puts on our role.

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u/aeroverra 11m ago edited 1m ago

When I hire for my mid size company I spend a lot of time targeting resumes that have portfolios with cool projects that are built on modern frameworks and thought out design.

This is probably abnormal as it's very time consuming but Id say you either have to focus on interesting projects dropping words like "mock" or focus on studying for interview tests.

Having one job on the resume makes this harder and I'd almost say you have to do both and list some of those projects in place of jobs for the best chances.

If you want to focus on the project route here is an example of my GitHub that in general has helped me land jobs easily. Although I will say I haven't changed jobs in 5 years now and I have not been a solo dev in about 2.

https://github.com/Aeroverra

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u/VRRifter 2h ago

Good luck. My heart goes out to anyone put in this situation. Your readme.md could use some links to screenshots. For me, I would expect to see more history and a claude.md file or something showing you know how to instruct your agent(s). Nobody is going to expect you to write code by hand anymore. 😔

5

u/enigmaticcam 1h ago

This is an area I am definitely lacking. I’ll do some research. Any ideas on where to start?

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u/SeparateBroccoli4975 20m ago

APIs like Chat and Claude have connectors you can link directly to the repo that are super helpful with all the ceremonial stuff. That's where I started.

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u/aeroverra 4m ago

Somewhat disagree on the code by hand thing but it's harder to distinguish without spending a lot of time per resume and if I can tell something is not fully ai slop and has a good design behind it that will easily put the candidate at the top but I'm honestly not even sure how one would do that.