pouët.net

Hi Pouet!

I would like to bring up a subject that I imagine affects several people here.

When I write up a list of experience for my CV, it is clear to me that the work I have done through employment at various places tells only a small part of the story. The main bulk of coding experience that has given me the competences I have today have arisen from coding demos and similar hobby projects.

Since my demos are a large number of small, largely unrelated projects, I find it difficult to fit this kind of experience into the usual CV format, especially in a way that is easily appreciated by people not familiar with the demoscene. Some of the long-running, tool-focused projects (packers, demo tools), it makes sense to mention separately, but listing dozens of demos both takes up too much space and is not very informative.

What do people do?
- Pick out a few high-profile examples?
- Summarize the kinds of challenges tackled in general terms?
- Put some numbers? Winning statistics?
- All of the above?

I guess that you could do a portfolio aside from your CV. If you do one or if you put it directly inside your CV, I guess the same rule applies : pick out the best of your works, then remove half !

Have the portfolio online and put a link to it in the CV. Demos needs visual (images at least) in order to have an effect.

i would explain what demoscene is in 2 lines and list the soft skills it brought me, then link to personal homepage with selection of demos/intros.

usually these kind of jobs ask you what you do on your free time (to figure out if you have initiative or not), and that's usually a good opportunity to list your demoscene accomplishments.

This is what I started doing, because the list of things I've done/used/am familiar with became too long/obscure/irrelevant to list in its totality.

Another tip: don't list stuff that you know about, but don't really want to work with. Eg, I used to list that I had Delphi-experience, but that started working against me when I was put on every Delphi-related project, since I was one of the few people in the company that had experience with Delphi.
What they don't know, can't hurt you.

I laugh some times. I put Dirty Minds, Optimus on CV. What employer would think? What if they search for my nick and find Pouet and my threads. Hahaha!!!

I also went to interview long time ago. Guy was asking me "When you say realtime graphics, what do you mean?". And also "I see you know assembly, have you been into hacking maybe?". "What is this demo scene you say?"

XA!

You could write something like:

Complementary informations:
- Making real time computer animations (C, C++, WebGL, whatsoever...)
- Participating to size coding competitions (.exe music, 4k, 32k, 64k executables)

You could even put our rank and the demoparties you participated to by saying this are programmers festivals or so....................... I already did that once and it helps :)

Cheers.

Depends a whole lot on where you're applying. Most of the places I've worked for have known what the demoscene is..

My demoscene activities more or less got me the job I have at the moment (rendering engineer at a VR company). Literally the first thing they told me in the interview was "your 4k has been running on the flatscreen in the lobby". What I did was this:

I wrote an "european-style" CV (just following the moderncv latex package); that means you have the standard sections like "education", "work experience", a summary of "technical skills" and "languages", but you can also add other sections like "voluntary service", "artistic skills", "publications" or "projects" as you see fit.

I listed two scene productions in the "projects" section like this: "4-kilobye Intro 'white one' (Realtime Computer Art), First place at 'the Ultimate Meeting' 2010, (C ,GLSL)". In the "Artistic Skills" section I mentioned the demoscene again with a very brief description. In the section about technical skills, I underlined computer graphics and coding skills the by citing the scene as a source, along with university stuff. So in the end I mentioned the scene three times, each time from a slightly different angle. I hoped that this would make people google the term :)

Putting a portfolio online might be a good idea, but probably only if it is impressive enough, which in my case it was not :) I just hoped they would google the things. I wouldn't list more than three scene productions, but maybe mention that this is a selection. Choosing a few different ones is probably a good idea (two intros/demos that are quite different, plus one tool?). Winning statistics wouldn't mean anything to somebody not familiar with the topic and might sound like bragging, so probably rather use the precious space for a small description of the challenges (teamplay, deadlines, code, art,..) or mentioning being a long-time contributor/enthusiast/innovator (i.e. sticking to stuff).

And "glöps"

To round this up: It was me showing "white one" on our flatscreen years before cupe applied for the job, but we never met before he started working here ;-)

Heh, and then you speak about 4k, and they ask you "Wow, you did some work for a 4k display?"

Make sure to put a link to your pouet profile!

It's partly democoding related, but I got ALL my of my job interviews (then the jobs) not because of 99% of my CV but because I mentioned my website chiptune.com at the end of the CV as "personal projects", people watched it and wanted to see me about that and didn't care too much about my previous work experience :D

It depend mostly of the job you want, but as front-end web developer the demoscene helped me a lot to find a better job, my CV gain a lot of interest for recruiters compared to others people who wrote "I like music and cinema", "I enjoy to travel" when I wrote "coding in ASM on Commodore 64 and making C++/OpenGL 64k intro on PC" as hobbies :D



I put most of my prod on my CV (on an additionnal page) with pouet link + direct link to Youtube video (so people can check it quickly).

Write a CV demo running from a custom circuit-board business card that auto-plays when plugged in!

(Well actually don't do that. It's pretty much mostly been done and some places have problems with plugging in untrusted devices. But if you do, this guy already won. It was originally to be an interactive business card.)

Blueberry,

I have been reading CVs/résumés and interviewing candidates in the last few years, and in my case I obviously appreciate demoscene to be mentioned in a CV, and I guess everybody that knows about it would appreciate.

If you want to use a different term easy to understand for people that doesn't know demoscene, I believe "realtime computer graphics and 3d" sounds good.

Me and my team specially appreciate technical blogs and Github accounts. The most of the time, a good blog and/or Github's activity tells much more about a candidate than a CV. If you have projects you don't mind to open source, I totally advice you to do it. It is also very interesting to see candidates that collaborate in open source projects.

About a blog / personal website, making an interviewer to look at an executable binary is not specially easy, as they will probably be using their job computers and discouraged to use software from non trusted sources. But you can always have examples that run in the browser and interviewers will definitely take a look of them.

Finally, remember that in big companies the CVs might be pre-filtered by HR teams, and those teams might not have much tech knowledge. So, put the main information clear and first for them and for that first filtering process, that is: related previous job positions, education and skill set.

I wish you good luck!!!

stay real!!!

Mostly reiterating what Texel and others said.

I've been in the recruiting process for a while: reviewing CVs & programing tests, interviewing, ... a github account + technical site + speaker deck + clean portfolio + an unconventional journey always made candidates stand out of the pack.

For demoscene/executable/obscure releases I'd go for link to the original package + video capture to make it easier to check + a very short write up.
Also, to explain Crinkler in lay man terms you can add naive comparisons along the serious ones.


Code and work examples speak louder than a lengthy CV, and you're Blueberry / Loonies for fuck sake! Your CV could be a 5-6 liners:

My decision will be very quick if I receive that kind of CV.

coders should have portfolios and showreels like artists.. :)

anyone who's got a good set of hobby projects they did on their own or in their free time and produced something good out of should definitely highlight it on their cv and show it in the interview. one of the big questions you have in your head when interviewing someone is "great, you worked here and there, but what did _you_ actually _do_?", and being able to show a demo youve done answers that question very neatly - as well as demonstrating self-motivation, leadership skills, a range of technical and creative abilities etc.

however if you're leet like blueberry then (in related industries like games and graphics) just dropping your name, a few projects and compos won goes a long way. many people you'll come across will have heard of the demoscene to some degree and when the cv goes around the office it'll probably go past someone who's heard of either you, something you've done or at least a big party you've won. i used to mention on mine a couple of projects that won those major parties a lot of people have heard of like assembly.

200% yes! I've been doing quite some interviews the last few years and everything Smash said is true. Heck, I once invited a guy for an interview solely on the fact he had pushed an iPhone in my hands at a career fair saying 'Hey, I've made a game!'. I didn't even have his CV. (We also hired him)

I guess it depends very much on the type of company.
I've found that it can go either way... People may have heard something about the demoscene, and know about the skill, effort and dedication that goes into creating a demo.
Or, they never heard of it, don't understand just how much of a workload your graphics routines are on the hardware, and just how unhumanly tight the code is that you wrote for that.
I mean, I've had people asking me basic questions about multithreading, synchronization primitives or even Win32 API functions such as GetTickCount() (where the guy asking the question was actually WRONG. He said it returned the number of ticks since application startup. So I corrected him, and said it was since system startup. He didn't believe me, so I told him to open MSDN).
Okay, if you're asking me questions at that level, you've obviously not understood a word of what I wrote in my CV.

Related to that, I sometimes had the idea that I was answering a question at an entirely different level than what they intended. I mean, to me, multithreading means optimizing an algorithm for efficient parallel execution. Something basic like starting a thread that waits for some blocking I/O or whatever is such trivial functionality to me, that I don't even think about that sort of thing when the term 'multithreading' is mentioned.

"showreels" are a good idea. I've been to a couple of interviews where at some point they said that they usually give programming homework to candidates, but they'd visited my site and figured there's no need.

Didn't get the job in either of those cases, as more suitable candidates were found, but.. at least I didn't have to do the homework. =)

Most places I am likely to apply to will have heard of the demoscene. I personally don't list individual prods, but just summarize the experience I believe I have gained in making them.

I listed a few various demos on mine that have reached high positions at parties, and in my online portfolio I put in a few links to Youtube. I've been in the game industry though, and if I tried applying for somewhere else, I'd probably be more descriptive.