Hey guys,
I’m well into a career track that I don’t find personally fulfilling. It is computer programming adjacent and I’ve wanted to make the jump for years but have been a little gun shy.
I’ve been doing self-study with Elixir since 2018. I have worked through a lot of books and online courses. I believe that I’m proficient in both programming and theory, but can’t really know that until I have a chance to work on a project in production.
I’m also comfortable with with JS and Python.
I’ve recently started out on my own as a consultant and have been really fortunate to be able to pay all the bills working about 20 hours a week.
I’d love to be matched with a company as an intern and I don’t need to get paid.
I don’t think you need to settle for an unpaid internship. Especially if you have your own consulting work and/or contributing to open source.
Ignore me if you already tried and it didn’t work. Just want to say I don’t think you should settle for unpaid unless you absolutely have no other choice.
In my opinion, picking a library and trying to solve one of the issues in their issue tracker would be more helpful than running credo. It will force you to dive into an unfamiliar codebase and figure out how things work. This is an indispensable skill.
Man, @dimitarvp has the right idea here. The thing that helped me the most in my career has been learning to sell. If you’re going onto job boards and sending a resume into the void, you’re going to lose, plain and simple. You need to be comfortable playing the role of the door-to-door salesperson and stand yourself up, right in front the rejection.
I’m not saying experience isn’t important. However, learning to write cold emails and talk the talk will get you further in life than any amount of open source PRs.
Learning this will get you interviews with people who wouldn’t even make eye contact with you across the bar. I did exactly that when my resume was complete dogshit(still isn’t great btw) and people started noticing me for the first time ever in my professional life.
If you have any questions feel free to ping me, I actually like coaching people on this shit.
I just want to add that I come from a place of severe social anxiety. Couldn’t look people in the eye or talk on the phone until I was in my early twenties. If I can do it, so can anyone else.
You can check Glific as an open source project build on elixir (backend) and react (frontend). We are focussed primarily in the developing world that have a large WhatsApp user base (currently India). Our team is in India, and we could use additional help.
Some interesting projects and problems to be solved there. Ping me if interested, You can also check out our GitHub repo to get a sense of the codebase: Glific · GitHub
If you have been involved with programming in one way or another for almost 4 years now and have some projects you can talk about, just go out there and find job postings for junior engineers. You’ll learn so much more, so much faster by being part of a team. You might even find that you know more than you think and transition to a position as a mid-level engineer in just a year. Not only that, any real life work experience is better than none.
If you don’t have any projects to talk about, you should probably create a project from scratch. Build it up, start to finish, get it running in production, and get some real live users. This will be worth so much more than random contributions to any open source projects. The users can be your friends and family, the project can be fun or kind of silly. But there’s no substitution for creating something. No amount of books and courses can replace this.
I’ve been interviewing devs for many years, @BradS2S, and tend to view this as a very good signal. Modern software development is much more about communication and collaboration than churning out a project solo. OSS demonstrates those softer skills way more effectively than any resume, interview, or whiteboard puzzle.
