Sunday, June 03, 2012

I appear to have drained the Adelaide PHP jobs pool momentarily

A week on, and my resume is certainly out there. I believe I've put in for every darned PHP job in the Adelaide market. I've had two or three good interviews, but I'm finding I'm not quite the right fit.

For example, one firm I started talking to forgot it was a PHP CMS customisation job in question when I asked about the other work they did in Java/C++ - the senior tech chap started interviewing me for that mid way through.
I could talk happily enough about OO concepts and quite strongly about business focused development topics (I'm language focused, not maths focused when I program); but the moment I said "I wouldn't have a clue, I'd hop on google and go find a relevant extract of The Art of Computer Programming if I ever needed to work that out" a great divide opened up between the interviewer and I.
You know what they say, there are 10 types of programmers - those that think binary jokes are clever/funny and the rest of us...

I think it's time to widen my approach a little more - Business Analysis is actually a pretty decent skill of mine, so this week's focus will be on that in addition to pure software development roles. Also, contracting is really quite appealing - I think I have enough of a polymath outlook on life to drop in and kick behind in a lot of different scenarios.

The hacking is going better. You can see me wading my way through python, and (less progress than I expected), a bit of tinkering with ruby.

I'm trying not to flit from thing to thing at the moment, but it's tricky not to. So many shiny things, so little time!

Priorities this week:

  1. Job hunt
  2. Getfridged
  3. FixMyStreet AU - there's already an open project on github and the ACT picked up the content, even if we did lose It's Buggered Mate, there's a bit of progress here.
    This one is driving me nuts, as there's a bus stop near my house which is destroyed. At best I can ring a number to verbally report the damage - the last time I tried this no one would answer it. Where's this in Australia?
    I know Open Australia were looking at it, but that was 2009 - it needs more, it needs an iphone/android app, and it needs to be here yesterday.

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