As coding bootcamps such as Coder Academy and General Assembly churn out more and more software developers, and as more and more people start to realise the importance of software, companies these days are facing an increased amount of candidates applying for junior dev roles. Recently we had to take down our job ad for a junior full stack React and Elixir role only a few days after posting it due to having received about 300 applications. Suffice to say, the competition is fierce at the entry-l...

Due to COVID-19, not many companies are hiring at the moment. The company I work for therefore is in a very fortunate position to still be thinking about growth and hiring. As a hiring manager for almost a decade now, I've personally reviewed thousands of job applications and CVs, and many hiring managers would probably agree, the vast majority of CVs are terrible. Let's change that! During COVID-19 where more and more people are either losing jobs or having their work hours cut, we are experie...

Hiring is usually a long and difficult process - in order to streamline and simply it, I use Kanban to manage the whole process. I believe, hiring should be as lean and agile as our development process. My Kanban board for hiring (we just started hiring at SitePoint!): [] Using a Kanban board offers a number of advantages: - a clear picture of the candidates with their feedback from code tests and interviews - a straightforward view of where a candidate is at in the hiring process - lim...

A couple of days ago, a blog post titled "First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed!" has made to the Hacker News front page and has spawned some great discussion and debate. Since I had just been screwed recently, I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to share what I’ve learnt. After my story got picked up by Hacker News and some other sites, I was contacted by my client. It was a very interesting and surreal experience which included keywords such as sue, settle, d...

Today is my last day at Envato. I have been working here for a year and half and it has been, without a doubt the most fulfilling experience I have ever had in my professional career. I was hired as a PHP developer initially. Who knew, several months into the job I was ‘converted’ voluntarily to a full time Ruby developer - and it has been the highlight of my career progression. It is hard to imagine what I would have become if it wasn’t for Envato’s support behind my conversion. During my time...