Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks. I've been interviewing and code-testing and otherwise rushing back and forth like a headless chicken...
But it's all paid off, and I have myself a new job, starting Monday. I'll be working at a company in Crows Nest that specialises in software for the employment industry.
I'll be coming in at a senior level as lead developer, building one of their four main products, assisting Registered Training Organisations keep track of their students and courses.
So, after a trip to Thailand, I'm finally back home in Oz and ready to look for a new role. Here's a quick overview of what I'm looking for, and what I've done - get in touch if we match up
I prefer building meaty applications solving interesting problems. I'm not interested in building cookie-cutter brochure-ware. I prefer greenfields development to maintenance work.
I like to work with agile teams - sprints and kanban is good. I do not enjoy pair-programming, so if that's your style... maybe not for me.
I prefer a relaxed and friendly culture. "enterprisey" corporations need not apply!
I tend to find that the "standard" recruiting tool of the Word-doc resume does not accurately reflect my skills, so here's a list of my work and my presence online in the technical sphere. Go have a look for yourself.
LinkedIn has the closest thing to a resume. This is my profile page on LinkedIn
You're currently *looking* at my technical blog - showing my howtos and code snippets etc
I have a WorkingWithRails profile.
I have a StackOverflow profile.
I have a github account.
There's no recent work in github as I've been traveling a lot this past year, but you can see the patches I submitted to rails core (for Rails 3) - which centred around my work on the HyperActive Resource gem, which I was converting to the core Active Resource code.
I led a team building a startup website (called Matchfounders) back in Sep 2010 over a hackday weekend (called Launch48).
After the weekend, I took the prototype (in PHP) and rewrote it in Rails 3 (adding such trivialities as a test suite and actual security measures)... then developed it a *little* bit more. It's not currently under development but go have a look to see what I can do in about a week's worth of work.
Not immediately evident from the above, but I was active in the RoR oceania community in Sydney before I left Sydney, as well as SLUG - where I gave a howto talk on Rails about four years ago.
When I went to London I was active in LRUG (the London Ruby Users Group), also giving a couple of talks, one of which is online here: Rubyprof and kcachegrind
I briefly featured on a peepcode podcast, interviewed by Geoffrey Grosenbach about my work on HyperActive Resource... but I'll admit I was somewhat overawed and didn't come off sounding particularly clever.
Last and most definitely least I have a website... but it is the neglected poor cousin of all my other sites and is not worth looking at
(*cough* not updated since I left Sydney three years ago *cough*)
I'm an experienced senior Ruby Developer in Sydney - looking for a position in a solid company doing cool things. Drop me an email at this email address
A follow-on from my negative experience with headhunters. I've begun receiving exactly the sort of "job offers" that I was fearing. I've got offers (from all over the world, mind) asking me if I'd like to work as (for example) a junior developer on an embedded-kernel contract in Belgium... which'd be nice and useful if I were interested in that sort of thing instead of having only 6 months non-commercial experience (at uni) doing this stuff as a elective subject... or at least held a work-permit that allowed me to work in Belgium.
The end result makes it fairly obvious that their recruiters are just too damn lazy to do more than a quick search on the db... followed by spamming all the results. They've ripped out the db-friendly data (ie my naked skillset) and divorced it from the important stuff (ie what sort of job I'm actually interested in). Leaving me to be spammed by every idiot with a contract to push.
If I were a junior developer, desperate for any job I could get, I'd probably just have to suck it up... but I'm not - and they're alienating an in-demand developer with lots of experience. This doesn't make me feel like responding positively to any of their future offers... even if they do suit my requirements.
What gets me is that it'd be so easy to make this system work. Even if they had a few extra fields in their db for "what type of job is the candidate looking for", they could run these as a filter over their resultset and turn that spam into much-less-despised targetted advertising.
I'd even be interested (possibly even grateful) to receive such a service - instead of so annoyed that I've blogged about it twice.
Wow, getting an ABN as a sole-trader was much easier than I expected. I have this left-over memory of having to scramble for random and bizarre information from when I applied for Renaissance Fence's ABN - but I guess it was because I didn't know all of Rick's vital statistics then.
For future reference, apply online here If you are on a mozilla-browser (eg Firefox) - ignore their "we don't support your browser" warnings. Their "you don't have scripting turned on" warning is equally useless. Luckily they have provided a "continue if you are sure" link or I'd get really mad.
Their password security is borken - 5-8 characters only? They actually stop you from typing a longer password! They have some other wierd restrictions too (eg letters can't be doubled... but I found out that digits can); that don't *really* add that much more security to them... <sigh>
Their html forms are ugly-as - requiring only a bit of human eyeballing to tell them that, for eg, date field do not need to stretch across half the page - whereas an email field would probably do better with more than only ten characters visible.
Otherwise it's all pretty straightforward. You can even save and return to it later if you need to go find your TFN (I had that handy, this time around).
So... after a few years working in the bog-standard IT job I've decided to venture out into the big, bad world of contracting. The stomach fills with butterflies just thinking about it. I am ever mindful of the market situation that surrounded my first IT job. The bubble was bursting and belts were cinched ever tighter in a last, desperate bid to grasp at whatever straws were on offer.
Is the market so different now?
The net is filled with buzz over the new "(r)evolution" of Web 2.0TM and I have happily upskilled into that area. Ruby-on-Rails is indeed a dream-come-true compared with the outmoded efforts of only a few years back. It provides a heady mix of powerful scripting with whizz-bang AJAX GUI effects that can turn the average online business into something really special.
But is that enough? I have the tech-skills, my micro-business has given me customer-service and admin skills. But I'll admit I've never left the protective support-system that the average tech-company provides.
Sticking my head outside the womb is a scary thing! The first breath of cold, sharp air will be a painful shock. I am, however, reminded of that quote:"Life wasn't meant to be easy, but take courage, child, for sometimes it can be pure delight"
So all I can say is that I've just begun. I don't know how I'll go, but I plan on having a hell of a ride while I'm here!
