Back in June, I hosted a workshop with an awesome bootcamp called Hackbright Academy. As a woman in tech, I love any opportunity to support fellow womxn in exploring the world of development and working with bootcamps like Hackbright Academy isn’t work; it’s personal. At the conclusion of our two-day workshop showing current and former Hackbright alums how they can use Velo to build their own personal dynamic portfolio, we hosted a contest to have them put their skills to the test.

When we first started our partnership with Hackbright, we had no idea how critical having an online persona would be. Now, as we continue to remain in our homes to stay safe, the only way to meet recruiters and have them meet you is online! While LinkedIn is great for connecting, you need a channel to highlight your work and tailor it to the roles you are looking for. For example, it’s important to highlight your Node.JS projects, not necessarily your Python ones, when applying for a role requiring Node.JS experience.

Working with Velo, you are able to build a dynamic resume that allows recruiters to filter down your projects to the ones matching the skills they are looking for, and find links to the working versions and GitHub repos so they can really dig into your work. But at the same time, we don’t want this to be time consuming for you, being just another project you need to babysit. We want to empower those looking for work to focus on preparing for interviews, not monitoring their site for performance issues or worrying if their domain is connected.

We reached out to our contest winners to learn more about their experience building with Velo and how it speeds up their dev velocity. I had a chance to hear first hand from one of our winners, Anjelica Silva, about her experience learning Velo, building a website, and what some of her favorite features are.

Let’s start with the workshop. Overall, what did you think about it?

This was Anjelica’s first time working with Wix and Velo, so everything was quite new. She described it as a fun and rewarding experience where she learned a lot about the features Velo has to offer. One of her favorite parts was working with the QR code API and using Wix Fetch to easily incorporate a dynamic QR code to her LinkedIn page, as she is actively job seeking :).

She also mentioned how much she enjoyed the “fun, challenging, yet easy-to-follow-along workshop” that I hosted.

What about Velos features? Which ones did you use and what are your thoughts about them?

“One of my favorite features of Velo is that it allows you to install approved npm packages in your site. I’ve used Twilio in a previous project and thought text messages would be a great communication tool for those who would like to connect with me promptly.”

Anjelica said she also enjoyed playing around with prebuilt third party solutions, which enabled her to easily add custom links to her GitHub and LinkedIn. With the databases integrated into Velo, she was able to quickly add some new tables to collect comments on her projects, and the control permission of who can read and write to the table. The Velo APIs for the UI enabled her to dynamically update the comments section as new comments flowed in on her projects.

What are your overall thoughts on building web applications with Velo?

Anjelica found the built in IDE intuitive to work with, with pop-up icons and auto-complete suggestions, though she wishes she could have installed her own plugins for the IDE. Overall she said she would agree that Velo is an open development platform, with serverless computing and hassle-free coding. As a bootcamp graduate with almost a year of experience, she found Velo to be powerful while still being easy to use.

She closed out by saying: “Usually website builders provide limitations as to what you can create, but Velo has definitely changed the game both for developers and non-developers alike! Would highly recommend for all to try!”

I want to thank Anjelica for sharing her experience with me! Along with the rest of the Velo team, we’re excited to bring Velo to the developer job seeking community to help them stand out in the candidate pool.

Anjelica is excited to find her first Software Engineering role, so if you are hiring, check out Anjelica’s awesome online resume built on Velo by Wix! And if you haven’t already, give Velo a try for yourself.