Something, anything, is better than nothing.

We Regret to Inform Your Application Has Been Unsuccessful …

I’ve recently returned to software engineering and I am job-hunting. I left my teaching position on March 14th 2025 and since then I've applied for two roles. Both were rejected at the CV stage. First round rejections rarely get a response as to why, you just take it on the chin and move on. Despite past hiring experience, my own CVs failed at the first hurdle. That disconnect (right in the feels btw) was revealing — and useful. Each CV I sent had a different approach. One was a minimal one-pager and the other was a more verbose two pager. I was hoping this "lazy" approach would work, after all, being lazy makes for great software engineering.

It's always good to see if the low hanging fruit does the trick because often it does. However, in this case I realised that I need to break out my design chops and get to work designing a creative solution these problems:

The problems:

  1. Find a company that I believe makes the world a better place.
  2. Get through the CV filtering stage.
  3. Get through the technical interviews.
  4. Achive an offer that works for me and my potential employer.

Designing.

Here's my basic design solution to the problems two, three and four on the above problems and executed on my favourite bit of hardware - the whiteboard. This post is specifically about problems one, two and three.

A whiteboard sketch of my solution

The pillars of my job search are based around my Github profile and this shiny new website.

Github

In 2022 I mindfully and willingly deleted all of my github repositories. I distinctly regret doing that now, but I'm sure at some future point I will be grateful for doing it. With a nearly empty set of repositories I was free to make every repository count.

I've been on Github since 2008 and despite my own infocide, I have repository history going back over fifteen years, it is evidence that I understand how to be software engineer. It also serves to demonstrate that I have particular competence in Python and Elixir. These were the two languages I was, and soon will be again, most familiar with. On a secondary level it communicates familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and also how committed I actually am to learning new languages. It's one thing to write that you are, it's another to spend your own time actually doing it. All the better if you've got the receipts.

jamiecurle.com

I have maintained an on and off web presence since the early 2000's. I've used a few domains to do that and from 2015 onwards I started using jamie.curle.io. I was going to use that domain again until I looked at the cloudflare analytics for my various domains.

Screenshot of traffic over various domains with 'curle' in the name

The jamiecurle.com domain is already getting a fair few visitors, whereas the curle.io one isn't1. If promotion is the objective (and it is) then it is clear what domain name should be used. The aim of this website is primarily to give me somewhere to put words. I can be very wordy and I like being wordy. However, an abundance of words on a CV is an unforgivable mistake. However there is a conundrum: On my CV I need to explain my recent career choices AND objection handle AND make it seem positive. A tall ask if you're trying to do it on one page, but easy enough if you can link out to a personal website.

My gamble in my design process, and it is a gamble, is that if I can lift someone from my CV to my website (or my github) at the CV screening section then I stand a better chance of getting to the next round. I'm making this gamble because it has worked for me in the past to get a role, and it's worked on me in the past when hiring people.

Personal Brand

It feels "icky" saying it, but a personal brand is a thing. I have a few of them2 and this new "be the best software engineer you can be" is simply another one. I take it seriously of course, hence the website. I'm gambling that a candidate with a solid personal brand, that is to say, a multi-channel professional appearance, is more likely to get through filtering stages at the start. All things being equal imagine you had two candidates and that they presented exactly the same at the CV stage. One had a solid personal website, aesthetically pleasing and with recent relevant content. If the website was the only deciding factor, which one would you choose?

It's the CV stage that I'm looking to crack through.

Something, anything, is better than nothing

This website is a tailwind-plus template, I don't like using templates but it gets the job done. It's also been a nice reason to play around with next.js, React, TypeScript and vercel. I have not yet completed the 90 days of HackerRank challenges, but I have done five weeks worth in Python and I've started chipping away at them in Elixir and Go. I've still got a fair few days left to get through the Go language tour, but I've absorbed enough to start exploring the language on my own. I'm not exactly where I want to be with Elixir again and I've still got a load of Pragmatic Studio lessons to get through, especially the most recent one on Full Stack Phoenix. However I'm confident enough to be chipping away at an Elixlr version of this personal website. I had ChatGPT design icons for the various projects on the projects section of this website (and they're vile), but it's given me a sense of where to take such a set of icons when I sit down to design them Figma.

Everything I've mentioned above is not finished. But it is started. I'd argue the case for the journey being more important than the finished article. On the caveat you actually finish it of course. That's part of my design solution to the problems above. This website can capture words and processes. Github can capture projects, workflows and evidence. I'm trying to be creative about how I design solutions to finding a job and I'm using the process as an advertisement and a promotion of my skills.

You just have to start somewhere and so something, anything, is better than nothing.

Next article - the CV.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. If you're wondering about "jocurle.com", that's my wife, she is an acupuncturist. ↩

  2. I maintain a YouTube channel (a bit neglected) called "Tree Jamie" and I also write about trees and code on substack. Personal brands are a thing. ↩