As a recent college graduate, job hunting sucks. Wading through thousands of messages in a week looking for entry level software positions is a pain, and praying to get a reply is even worse, especially when you are as crappy a developer as me. As I now cross the 3 months past graduation threshold, I am now beginning to look into just internships to get something going, because after a couple InterviewStreet codesprints that turned up nothing, and a couple of emails of cover letters + resumes (have no fear, mine is pretty sparse, if you are a prospective employer reading this at some later date.. ).
It is mostly my own indecsiveness that causes it. I like many different languages, and prefer using the right-task-for-the-job approach instead of focusing on one platform, but then I can't really write down that I am an Android / Django / JS / Jquery / etc developer because I haven't made anything tangible for any of those platforms. And knowing all the languages in the world is meaningless if you have no large projects to show for it. The best code sample I even have at this point is my sophomore year game development tower defence game written in Swing without any gaming libraries or GPU rendering. That will definitely turn some heads.
The greatest hilarity is how I keep hearing stories of these programmers who can't do fizz-buzz or simple string operations getting 80k a year jobs and ruining development teams. Or projects without source control, any documentation, or any testing. I feel like I could help there, but whenever I read through a few dozen job ads a day, they all want these technologies I have never worked in, so I am hopeless in endevouring. The only skills I really have are MPI / Cuda / OMP / Swing and Windows Forms. I fortunately know a lot of languages and concepts from C / C++ / Java / C# / JS / Python, but all those concepts are meaningless without tangible showmanship.
So hopefully this blog can help. I am going to develop something for some platform that will help me get my foot in the door somewhere. It will be open source, of course, because I am one of those neckbeards (even though I am clean shaven) that think proprietary software is unethical because it is like giving someone a car with the engine carriage soldered shut. I will probably end up writing such software because I need to eat, but until that happens I will keep my condescension above my pay grade. That would be a nice rant for another day.
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