Building Something New

January is normally the time of year where I get most inspired to actually start a new project. Sure it doesn’t always stick, but I still do enjoy riding the wave of inspiration.

The Motivation

Around 2025 I noticed that many of my peers and friends were having more difficultures finding jobs. Of course this is mostly due to the german tech market being shit at the moment.

People blame AI a lot - and that is certainly a factor - but in my opinion we are simply in complicated socio-economical times. Germany is basically in a soft recession at the moment, the real repercussions of that will hit us sooner than later in my opinion.

Therefore tech departments, that are traditionally seen as cost or investment factors, are not expanded - they are much rather being reduced and outsourced at the moment.

This trend might reverse in the future, who knows.

Introducing CodingCareer

After a lot of CV reviews and interview coaching on my end, I realized: ‘Hey, this is something a lot of people actually need - maybe I could do this professionally?’ => Introducing CodingCareer

My main motivation is actually helping people show their potential and get they job they are shooting for.

Common Problems

I am by no means an excellent coder. Sure I have scored the top-performer rankign at my current companies multiple times and I’ve won multiple hackathons and gamejams - but I attribute this mostly to my communication skills, more so than my actual coding skills.

What I am good at, is talking and presenting myself.

And it pains me to see how many fellow peers struggle at that extremely vital skill.

I have friends who I would hire in a heartbeat - who have struggled for months or years even, sitting at their current deadend job, almost scared of applying anywhere else due to past interview experiences.

That really bums me out.

I genuinely wanna help.

Success Stories

And I did help!

I’ve motivated a close friend of mine to get his ass out of his comfort-zone and start applying - and he did! He is currently earning the big bucks (at least for german developers)! Getting the job was 100% his achievement and he deserves it!

But getting him motivated - that’s on me!

And in the last weeks promoting CodingCareer, I’ve reviewed a lot of CVs and I already received some testimonials.

Genuinely helping people has been incredibly rewarding!

Adrian D. (Product Owner)

“My CV had the right experience but wasn’t landing interviews. Codingcareer helped me restructure the bullets with clearer impact and adapt the format for the German market. The feedback was specific and actionable - I implemented everything in one evening.”

Nishargo N. (IT Specialist)

“Codingcareer hat mir ein ausführliches Feedback zu meinem Lebenslauf gegeben. Ich war von der proaktiven Herangehensweise und der freundlichen Art sehr beeindruckt. Das hat mir sehr geholfen zu verstehen, wo ich möglicherweise Fehler mache und was ich verbessern kann.”

Dude on reddit (Data Scientist)

“This was insanely helpful thank you! It’s my first CV so I didn’t know what to do but I totally see what you mean now, and the point about HR only skimming over it is also something I will keep in mind from now on, seriously thank you for taking the time!”

Why charge for it

Well sure I could go around helping people for free - but my time is extremely limited. As my wife and I are also expecting at the moment I simply do not see myself being able to put consitent time and effort into this project if I were to do everything by myself all the time!

And if I don’t want to do everything by myself - I need to hire people and that simply costs money.

Ali Abdaal once talked about this in one of his videos or podcasts. It might go against your initial instinct but you can actually do more good by charging.

Also I might be good at interviews but I am certainly not the best out there. If I charge, I can hire people who are better at it than me :)

Open Source Tools

I truly love using open-source stuff and Coolify makes it so easy to try stuff out!

Just this weekend I wanted to create a newsletter for CodingCareer and sure, I could have used substack or any other newsletter tool. But I wanted to be in control of the data and I didn’t want to use some dubious service to handle that stuff for me. Therefore I am using Listmonk. It wasn’t easy to customize properly, but it works now :)

I am also explaining all the tools I’m using briefly here

Lots of questions and only so little time

Currently it is a very exciting time to be building things. There is an insane amount of options out there and I am not nearly experienced enough in marketing and entrepreneurial thinking, to know what works and what doesn’t.

So I am experimenting a lot and trying to answer all those little questions that come up.

It’s a fun journey so far and I hope it will continue to be one in the foreseeable future!

Stay tuned!