> On Jul 24, 7:17 pm, Brian Piercy <[email protected]> wrote: >> I've been playing with RoR for about 2 years. Bought all the books, >> built prototypes for at least a dozen apps, follow the online >> discussions, and have a good basic understanding of things. >> >> The challenge is that SW design hasn't been my full time occupation >> for several years. I'm thinking about making the jump, but would like >> to find a way of certifying that I can be a productive member of the >> community. It's a risk for a company to hire a programmer without a >> portfolio. Any suggestions? > > Well first off, as long as you can show that you're generally a smart > guy with the right mindset that may be enough (that's been the usual > way in which the company I work for hires people). > > That said any or all of: > > - contributions to relevant open source projects (existing (eg rails) > or you own > - write your own apps. Scratch that itch you've always had
+1. Even if the app you want to write has already been done it can be a great way to showcase what you can do (code style, tests, documentation, etc.) I wrote an app like that partly to scratch an itch, but more so that I'd have a full working site that (technical) clients could look at in it's entirety. Saves the whole "well i did all this work, but I can't show you cause I was under NDA"... Another option is to find a rails plugin that is complicated and build a demo around it. Maybe one of the search engines (solr, sphinx, etc). I did that with http://facebooker.pjkh.com -- partly to get a sense of the facebooker plugin and partly because if I'm asking questions so are others and maybe it will help those folks. > - track record of speaking at conferences, local user groups etc > - writing articles (whether on your own blog or elsewhere) about > relevant topics (doesn't need to be 'how to prove the four colour > theorem' - showing that you can effectively communicate even basic > skills shows a decent mastery of the topic) > - (I'm sure others will think of things to fill this space) - Make a point of answering questions on this mailing list. Answer the ones you know, see if you can answer the ones you don't know by figuring it out. Many times it's 10 minutes of digging through the Rails source code and you'll learn something along the way. I doubt it will get you hired, but it's nice to be able to tell a potential client search for '[email protected]' on google groups. Shows a nice long history of answering questions (and hopefully your competency :) - Search the open Rails bugs and see if you can fix them. Yet another point you can show potential clients. Good luck! -philip --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
