It is a job fair for engineers where the tables are turned -- literally. Each engineer or developer has a booth to demonstrate his work to prospective hiring companies. Recruiting companies can shop for talent as they walk the aisles. Employers gain a unique insight into a candidates talents and skills that a resume could never provide.

The focus right now is on companies from around the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Stay tuned to the Who's Coming Page for a list of names as we add them.

The Tech Talent Fair is not a programming contest. Prepare a simple demo. There are going to be a lot of companies, and you won't have time to explain complex concepts or demonstrate really cool features which require more than a couple sentence explanation. An trendy feature is not necessary to achieve credibility.

You can assume part of your audience will be at a hands-on engineering director level but a large number of participants will be HR staff who are identifying candidates for further contact. They have a list of job needs which you can determine ahead of time by going to their websites.

Here some examples of what some people are presenting and how to make the preparation easy:

"I developed a search engine using Lucene, JS for the front end, and many many hours of cleaning data; reducing the dataset from 1Tb to approximately 5Gb. The goal is not to demonstrate the entire project trying to explain the technical architecture and merits of design decisions in the system, nor is it a competition to try to show anyone I am a genius programmer, which I definitely am not."

"I am going to demonstrate a simple extJS FE for reviewing emails, nothing fancy, about the same level of difficulty one would expect to see in a homework assignment. I developed this in a day and am using this for a demo. It demonstrates I understand the core Javascript programming idioms like event handlers, cross browser compatibility, css style rules, some cross site scripting issues and some server programming."

"This is meant to show I have some competence with javascript. It doesn't mean I am an extJS or javascript expert, I have maybe 2 weeks of experience with this library; but I am willing to show I can get something done quickly and am open to questions about javascript in general."

Candidate registration for the Tech Talent Fair is free for developers who bring a project.

Each company must buy a ticket. One recruiter ticket is good to let in one hiring/engineer pair. Tickets will be $250 until April 7th, and continue to rise in price as the fair approaches.

Saturday, April 21, 2012 from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM (PT). Engineers come at 9am to start setting up your booth. Companies will start arriving around 11am. There will be a party afterwards.

Bring your laptop and be ready to show off your code and projects. We made this event so you could show off what you do best.

Here's a great article on how to write a resume.

Feel free to use Citizen Space to work on your own project after the job fair is over. Set up a structure to help accomplish your goals. Feel free to come to Citizen Space to take or teach a class. Partner with someone else to help spread the workload.

If you are a student looking for an internship, take the class project from your favorite class or in the field of interest closest to what you want to work in and present that! You can create a poster board (get one from Staples ~$15), make some PowerPoint slides and tape them on there. You can explain what your part was if it was a group project or you can show one you did yourself. The key is to explain the scope of what you did and make clear to your interviewer that you understand the scope of what you did.

This is all about being on your game, being prepared ahead of time and being engaging, and maybe even, as Guy Kawasaki would put it, being enchanting.

Important things

• Whatever you need to demo your project

• Your awesome project(s)

• Contact info you can hand out - Note: If you register on the Candidate Registration Page, you will get a QR code to post on your booth. This will help passing-by potential employers contact you while you are presenting your project to another prospective employer.

Optional things

• Business cards
• Display
• Extra monitor
• Extra project
• Extra energy and charm

Remember guys, you need to bring something, and you need to stay with your project the whole time. No sniping people away from other stations! If you want to approach a company, do it at the party afterwards.

About 4 foot by 4 foot - give or take, depending on total applicants.

There's plenty of open source projects to hack on and plenty of time to build a feature for them, here's a short list:

• Mozilla Foundation has some great ones
• Fork a GitHub repo, make a ton of changes, and show how you improved the project
• If all else fails, contact Carl - using the contact page - and you can help build out the Tech Talent Fair app features.

• Vistaprint is a good option for cheap. But go for fast(er) shipping.
• Overnight Prints works if you can design your own card. Slightly long lead time.
• PsPrint is great if you want to go local and save money. You can order online and then pick up your cards at their plant near the Bay Bridge.

Our application provides the option of staying anonymous. The name field is completely voluntary, and it is not a required field. Once you're at the event, just be careful of whom you give your resume to.

We'll make sure recruiters have name tags (with company visable).

That is OK! That is why each ticket also lets one engineer/technical person in.

Sure thing, but you need to get tickets for them. Contact us if you have an uneven number of recruiters and engineers.