Career Advice
Jul 12, 2014Something 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.
- Get a github account.
- Contribute to open source projects on github.
- 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
- Attend local events, network with people you want to work with.
- Help out at local events. If there are no events local to you start one.
- Do informational interviews.
- Attend conferences , help out at conferences.
- 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.