Career Advice

Jul 12, 2014

Something that comes up quite often on IRC is the question: “How do I get a job programming Ruby?”, usually from people new to programming. I decided to post my response.

  1. Get a github account.
  2. Contribute to open source projects on github.
  3. Build a portfolio on your github account:
    • Project contributions
    • Your own projects
    • Use Github Pages to show what you are learning
    • Use gists liberally to show snippets of work, scripts, one-liners, etc
  4. Attend local events, network with people you want to work with.
  5. Help out at local events. If there are no events local to you start one.
  6. Do informational interviews.
  7. Attend conferences , help out at conferences.
  8. Help people on IRC, StackOverflow, etc.

IOW: Build a solid reputation that sells you.

AND: don’t say “I can’t” to these, the main thing about becoming a programmer is solving problems. This is just another kind of problem, figure out how to solve it.