Why Building Your Personal Brand Matters and How to Do It
With these tips and tactics, building your personal brand can be a straightforward process that doesn’t require any professional help outside your own efforts.
100 Ways to Work Out Loud in 2020
What kind of project are you the most invested in: the one that suddenly pops up out of nowhere, or the one you’ve been watching unfold for months? This is the basic principle of working out loud. By showing the process of your work, you establish your authenticity. You build your reputation as someone who…
Compound Your Career Opportunities
You’ve probably heard about the miracle of compound interest, one of the most powerful forces in investment that exponentially grows your returns. For example, investing $5000 a year from 25 to 35 yields more than investing $5000 a year 35 to 60. The 25 year old starter invests $55,000 and ends up with $615,580 at…
Portfolio Project Ideas with Python
So, you are learning Python and want to build a portfolio that helps you land your first technical job at a company. You’ll want to show that: You know how to problem solve You write clean, well-documented code You can synthesize documentation and learning resources to build real things instead of just following along with…
How to Leave Your Job
So you have a job offer from another company and are ready to leave your existing role. You want to know how to leave your job without burning the social capital you’ve built up over time. What do you do? First, relax. Having that first conversation with your manager is usually nerve wracking, but everything…
12 Tips for New Managers
Praxis alumni Nate Baker and Nick Rundlett both became new managers this month. Congrats, guys! Nate asked the community for tips on how to be a good supervisor. Here is what our advisors and alumni had to say.
16 Books That Shaped How I Interact with the World
Yesterday my friend Derek Magill asked the Praxis community, “What books have had the most impact on your career/education?” I love this question. Notice the use of the word impact. He isn’t asking for your favorite books, the books you recommend on a specific subject, or the books you agree with the most. He is…
How to Get Your GitHub Profile Ready For Job Applications
If you are going out for a development job or any sort of technical job, especially if you don’t have a lot of professional experience in the field, the best thing you can do is put some of your work on display. GitHub is the most popular place to do that. Here are the guidelines…
How to Get Work Done: A Primer
Here are the three pillars of getting work done. If you are having trouble with staying on top of your work, chances are that it comes back to one of these three main areas. This is common advice for our participants as they complete their challenging apprenticeships at growing startups. 1. Know what you need to…
Three Recent Participant Projects I Love
Only two things matter in the market: The ability to create value for others. The ability to persuade others of your value creation potential. We teach both of these things at Praxis via projects. We put projects in two categories, which map to the two items above: Learning projects – Projects designed to help you…
Compared to What?
One of our favorite questions around the Praxis office is Compared to what?. People often compare actual things with imagined, perfect, idealized alternatives. This is called the Nirvana Fallacy. This creates a false dichotomy that pits real options against ideal ones, even if the ideal option is completely implausible. Ideal options always seem better than…
Free Charting Tools for Your Next Article
One of the key elements of the Praxis curriculum is that we push participants to create. Over the course of they bootcamp, they create multiple portfolio projects to showcase their skills, write every day for 30 days, submit articles to third party publications, and document their learning and professional growth along the way. A great…
Guidelines for Putting Your Projects on Display
We emphasize the importance of working out loud throughout our curriculum. Each of our participants make portfolio sections on their websites where they collect projects they’ve built. How you package and present your projects matter as much as the projects themselves! Here are some general guidelines for what makes a good project write up. Not…
Turn Your Defeat Into a Growth Story
Here is a question I came across last week on Reddit: I was recently fired from a part-time bookkeeping job and replaced by someone with more experience who can do the job faster than I could. I graduated and am now looking for a full-time job in accounting. What do I say about this previous…
10 Steps to Becoming a Manager
I recently saw this question on Reddit: I recently graduated with a degree in business management, but I’m having a hard time finding a management job. I’m not getting any interviews because I have no experience. What can I do? The tough reality is that degrees don’t land you jobs nearly as much as they…