> On 21 Jan 2015, at 13:38, Emma Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > > I was wondering if anyone could offer me any advice. I am a London based > Junior Developer-mostly Ruby and Rails and now looking at learning > JavaScript. I attended a bootcamp course in London last year which i was able > to do after crowdfunding the fees. Since graduating i worked for a startup on > a top social accelerator in London. The company have since closed and i am > seeking new opportunities. Although i am currently London based I would be > happy to relocate and therefore just wondered what sort of opportunities may > be out there!
Hi Emma, Some thoughts. Regarding location London is going to have the most jobs with I think Manchester second and other places tailing out after that, but if you can move that's no big deal. I suspect you’ll find it hard to get remote work, especially 100%, at this point in your career, but you might get lucky. - Expand your README’s. They are the first impression of any repo anyone will see, and as a programmer the repos are your best CV (that, and not being a jerk). Screenshots are great, but not the most useful information someone recruiting a programmer has. Consider adding setup and usage instructions and other details, code metrics (http://blog.codeclimate.com/blog/2013/08/07/deciphering-ruby-code-metrics/), CI results (https://travis-ci.org/) and perhaps pulling out some highlights of the project? What was good, what area were you concentrating on? Here’s one of Tom PW’s and some of mine for comparison. There are probably more out there that are better, and they’re not entirely related to the README of a rails app, but they show more depth: https://github.com/toml-lang/toml https://github.com/wjessop/typo_safe https://github.com/wjessop/em-campfire https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp https://github.com/wjessop/fuzzy_version_matcher - Don't let anyone tell you tabs are wrong They are the most correct form of indentation in the world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sln-gJaURzk#t=1735) - Consider remote At some point. Check out https://weworkremotely.com/ (shameless plug), and in general keep your ears open. When you are remote you can often work from anywhere, A veranda in Italy, a coffee shop in Spain, a bin in Manchester, wherever. London or US wages in Manchester, Seville, or Berlin is totally possible. - US wages can be good and a fair number of the decent companies you’d want to work for will accept remote workers, but it helps to get involved in the community to find out when jobs are available. - Get involved in the community Go to LRUG, NWRUG, other meetups, Conferences etc. Talk to people, get to know people, and do it again. Build relationships that will sustain you in the medium to long term, and it’s fun* :) * I think it’s fun. (Get out and meet people, Go to start up events are two takeaways from Desi McAdam’s talk at Hybridconf “How to get hired” which I recommend: http://vimeo.com/76469682) There’s a #nwrug irc channel on irc.freenode.net if you have time to idle and talk bollocks. - Get involved in Open source It’s a great way to get known and meet people, and to show your skills. If you’re not confident perhaps try and find a mentor. There might be sites that will help match you, or you can just ask. This is going to take up your personal time, so you have to be committed. - Don’t be afraid to move Don’t be convinced by anyone that jumping to a new company after 18 months will reflect badly on you. In this industry it doesn’t, as long as when you were working somewhere you provided adequate value. Sometimes it can be the best, if not only, way to progress to either something you want to be doing more, or better wage. - Keep coding Stay current and show it. - No recruiters This is actually from Desi’s talk, and experience, and it’s mostly true*, except perhaps for LouisRoR (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/louisbeardsley) who actually seems to be pretty reasonable, at least that’s the general opinion round here. * I don’t know about the London recruiter scene, extrapolating from Manchester they’re all jerks. - Don’t get screwed on wages Your skills are valuable and in-demand. Be careful taking work at web/design agencies where their profit is linearly linked to their costs (ie. wages). Ask other people what reasonable wages are. There have been a few discussions of this on the mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/nwrug-members) before but I can’t find the exact URLs. Good luck! Will. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NWRUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nwrug-members. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
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