10 Tips for an Awesome Technical Resume

I've been asked a few times about providing tips regarding resumes. I'd like to provide them here.

1. GPA is a must for some companies, keep it on if it's above 3, off if it's below (but know who you're applying to, if they care about GPA then you'll need to give it eventually).
2. Don't use your school's email address on your resume. If companies don't have any openings but like you, they may not be able to get in contact with you in 2 years when they do if you use myname@unm.edu on your resume.
3. Personal Email addresses should be professional looking. If you have an email account that has inappropriate words in the name, email is cheap, get a new address, you can link to your main account if you need to, but don't put dogpoo@gmail.com for your contact info.
4. Quantitative, Quantitative, Quantitative. I think it bears repeating.

   I supported Einstein creating the Theory of Relativity, did you get him coffee, or tell him the secrets to the universe. I might hire the person but I would need to know if they make good coffee, or change the world first.

5. Anything that is older than 8-10 years not related to what you're applying to, remove it. Generally if it's not useful to show a potential employer you had a paper route, leave it off.
6. I would generally exclude Office, and Windows and probably iOS as "skills" employers expect you to know those two, and you don't need to explicitly state it. Linux is good to mention somewhere.
7. Your intro shouldn't be "I want job x, with company y for reason z". That's boring and most hiring people are probably going to jump over it, instead opt for an intro. Tell people about yourself and what things you're interested in (this should typically be someone related to the job).
8. Be concise, keep the resume to 1 page. It's amazing how many new grads straight out of college have bolstered their resume to 4 pages. I would dare say, with almost any amount of experience aim for 1 page.
9. You don't need to break up your current job by project, and/or year.
10. Remove redundant data. If you've written requirements on 3 projects, specify only that. You don't need to specify all 3 projects and what you did for each specific one.

If you want to take a look at my "sort of living" resume check out http://onaclovtech.com/

Above all, a resume is a piece of paper that attempts to give you an opportunity to talk to someone in person. Your goal is to give people something easy to read, that makes them want to talk to you at the end (or even mid ways through ;)).

Environment Tips

This tip comes from Phil otherwise known as @civissmith on the interwebs.

Often times you have to swap between screens, I usually use alt/tab or some combination of swapping between document/editor in order to read and update. A neat tip Phil alluded to was that if you set your command line to semi transparent, you can still read any commands or notes while typing your code or commands over. This is a great tip as it can save time on having to constantly swap between (possibly losing your train of thought).

Thanks Phil and any other tips you pass along I'll be happy to post!

Command Prompt

I frequently find myself needing access to the command prompt when I'm inside a folder, one of the ways I do that is:
1. Click start
2. Click Run (or alternately to get to this Windows Key +R)
3. Type cmd
4. Then Type cd
5. Then drag the folder of the location I want into this window
6. Hit enter (ok so not literally, I didn't hit it)
Today, I'm going to introduce how to use the right click menu to make life easier for those (in windows) to be able to jump to command line pretty easily,

1. Open an explorer window, this can be accomplished by either pressing "Windows key + E" or just opening a folder.
2. Select Tools Folder Options,
3. Click the Tab File Types
4. Select Folder
5. Select Advanced
6. Select New
7. For Action name, Just name it something you'll remember like "command prompt"
8. For the application used to perform this action enter cmd.exe /K cd %1
9. Select Ok's to exit.
10. Try it out, now go to a folder and right click on it and select whatever you named your action.

Time to explain what I had you put in the application used to perform.
cmd.exe opens your command prompt, /K means "run the following" and the following is cd %1, cd means change directory, and %1 means what was passed to the command in this case the folder location (I.E. c:\New Folder).

I hope this helps some people out there, let me know how it works for those of you who try it!!!

Thank you for reading my first "real" post.