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I understand what you want to say but you can't judge based on how much time I spent at university. I starting learning computer programming while being in middle school, to give you an hint I successfully coded my first lines using the beginning of PHP 5.2 in 2007.

I am sorry if "I wasted your time", I didn't say that I master all this languages but I am pretty confident with most of them. I will not list all my skills and experiences but to give you a brief example:

C/C++: I wrote tens of thousands lines while writing UNIX and video games team projects. PHP: Thousands lines for various projects, personal website, URL shortener engine, blog engine for friends... Objective-c: During my first year internship I wrote and published 2 iOS app on the Apple Store. While I had no previous experience with such a language, this may show you that I am a quick learner.

Maybe you are too much used to regular student taking standard classes at university, but my university is way different from any classical university. It is a software engineering school. With its unique pedagogical approach, we (students) have dozens of projects (about 60 technical projects just for the 2 first years). This is a type of participatory learning that allows us to unleash our creativity through project-based learning. It's an atypical university, instead of regular lectures we have technical/practical projects to work on, all along the years to learn by ourselves.



A few links to your projects would be very helpful here - are any of your projects opensource? Can you put some of your personal projects on Github? You said you published two iOS apps - could you post the links?

____________________________

A few notes on your CV:

1) "Personal portefolio" - it's "portfolio" in English.

2) I wouldn't list McD job there.

3) "conception and realization" - "planning and implementation" sound a bit better to me.

In any case, good luck!


All right, this calls for an interleaved response.

> you can't judge based on how much time I spent at university

I was judging based on your age, assuming you're an average-aged student. You're right that if you were a career developer who went back to school then I would be out of line. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

> I starting learning computer programming while being in middle school

You, me, and half of the other CS students with whom I attended college. Unless you're a Peter Deutsch-class wunderkind it probably doesn't make much of a difference. When I look at some of the horrifying trial-and-error code (https://gist.github.com/briangordon/8569048) I wrote back then, it's hard to imagine how that experience helped me the slightest bit- and I've heard other people say the exact same thing. I too wrote a lot of PHP 5(.0) and did some basic CRUD stuff with MySQL - and made some cool things happen - but realistically I don't think that experience would be much of an advantage if I were to do that kind of thing today. It's really easy to pick up a new imperative language like PHP. Any developer with the same knowledge of fundamentals could just work off the documentation and do approximately as well as me. And no interviewer looking for PHP expertise is going to be impressed if I get called in for a PHP developer interview because I had it on my resume and all I can do is mumble something about superglobals and variables start with a dollar sign and how mysql_escape_string is deprecated. Sure there are many employers who don't care if you know their codebase's language coming in, but then those people don't care that you have that particular language on your resume in the first place.

> I am sorry if "I wasted your time"

That's not what I meant; I meant that you'd be wasting interviewers' time. I've performed screening interviews a couple of times and I was consistently frustrated over and over again by candidates who put some technology on their resume but couldn't answer basic questions when put on the spot. The whole point of having something on your resume is to show that you can bring expertise to the table, not as some kind of trophy case of tech that you've used in the past. The bottom line is that if your level of experience on some subject can be acquired in a 40-hour week, then there is no material reason for the employer to hire you over someone with no experience on that subject.

> C/C++: I wrote tens of thousands lines while writing UNIX and video games team projects. PHP: Thousands lines for various projects, personal website, URL shortener engine, blog engine for friends... Objective-c: During my first year internship I wrote and published 2 iOS app on the Apple Store. While I had no previous experience with such a language, this may show you that I am a quick learner.

I've written maybe ten thousand of lines of C++ but I wouldn't put it on my resume at the same level as my primary experience. Expertise is something different from being able to cobble together a working program. When integrating with other people's code it's super important to read and write idiomatic code for the language. I do not have that level of expertise in C++- in fact, I have a copy of the C++ standard and it terrifies me. Even cdecls scare me a little sometimes.

But whereas I'm drowning in Stroustrup, I'm swimming like a happy fish in the JLS. In that domain, I'm eager to attack any question you can throw at me. That's the meaning of putting something on your resume, in my opinion. If you're resorting to the argument of:

> this may show you that I am a quick learner

then that stuff is better relegated to an "other experience" footnote which is just a link to your dazzling GitHub page.

> Maybe you are too much used to regular student taking standard classes at university, but my university EPITECH is way different from any classical university. EPITECH is a software engineering school. With its unique pedagogical approach, we (students) have dozens of projects (about 60 technical projects just for the 2 first years). This is a type of participatory learning that allows us to unleash our creativity through project-based learning. It's an atypical university, instead of regular lectures we have technical/practical projects to work on, all along the years to learn by ourselves.

That sounds really cool, and an interesting counterweight to the traditional math-heavy computer science curriculum. With that many projects I advise you against putting every tech you've ever worked with in a list on your resume. You could make a really impressive portfolio with all of those projects, and link to that. I had success getting my current job by putting a big link to a "portfolio" of undergrad side projects at the bottom of my resume under my actual experience. Feel free to steal my layout/ideas:

http://www.brian-gordon.name/portfolio/index.html




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