The easiest way to get your first job (as a developer)

Vacancy requirements for a mobile developer usually look like this:
- Several published apps (AppStore/GooglePlay)
- Coding a layout from Figma
- REST principles
- CI/CD
- Some advanced state management approach
- Some libraries used by this company/team
- 1-2 years of experience

And why do all these points matter (except for the last one*)?

The answer is quite simple. Small business needs an app from scratch here and yesterday. And if you've built something cool already and managed to deliver it to the audience, probably you'll do it again. No matter how good it will be from a code perspective.

Congrats if you've already made several apps that appeared in stores. You're on fire. Everybody wants you. But what to do when you want to land your first job?

Most programmers learn fundamentals and practice them here and there by building small nobody-cares-about apps. But in this case, they miss out on a large part of app development. Architecture, theming, CI/CD, testing, different capabilities like notifications, in-app purchases, and much more.

The easiest way to stand out from the crowd of juniors is by building a production-ready app and posting it to the store. I talk about real pet projects. Not tic-tac-toe or another to-do app. This way, you'll cover the whole project lifecycle.

You probably already have an amazing idea for an app. Find a free API or create one with some cloud backend like Firebase. Get a mobile app design sample from google. Create tasks in Trello or somewhere else. And start coding. Screen by screen. Feature by feature. Try to touch every point from vacancy requirements.

I know it's hard to build something great** because you don't know how to structure your app, divide it into layers, why it even matters, and many useful tricks and hacks. Find a person who will review your code. Then fix everything and ask to review it again.

Voilà. You've just increased your chances to land a job by 1000%.

*I don't think that measuring experience in years is an accurate approach. It highly depends on the person.

**I've built a quiz app with the help of Firebase. I've changed my initial design in Figma to make it look more modern. I've changed state management to more advanced when I realized that my code is highly coupled, and it becomes harder and harder to maintain it. I refactored it a couple of times, added theming, linting, and localization in the process. Today I can see that there is so much more to refactor. But I've learned a lot during the development process.