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Really great idea Jennifer! This is the kind of initiative and creativity that will surely land you multiple job opportunities. It reminds me of the steps whic

Really great idea Jennifer! This is the kind of initiative and creativity that will surely land you multiple job opportunities. It reminds me of the steps which I took to transition into working on software professionally full time. I came to programming relatively late in life when I was 26 and found out that my wife was expecting a baby. The sudden change facing my wife and I made me take a hard look at my skill set to decide how quickly I could provide for us. I decided that my interest in setting up wordpress installs as well as tinkering with Photoshop/Illustrator was the surest, safest, and quickest path to a successful career and decided then and there that within 6 months I would have a job as a junior web developer. To help accelerate this I signed up at my local community college for courses related to getting a web design certificate. Ultimately I took 2 semesters (1 of which was a compressed summer semester) of classes including CS-1, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, InDesign, HTML/CSS, PHP/MySQL. Soon I began to get the feeling that school was moving too slowly. I had joined the W3C HTML5 Working Group and was also participating in the WHATWG and started to realize that I was learning much more by hacking on code in the evenings than I was in class. During this time I started to create a portfolio showcasing new HTML5 APIs as they would become available across different browsers. Mostly I did this out of my own passion for web standards and wanting to understand the most cutting edge APIs as soon as they dropped. However this portfolio soon became incredibly valuable with regards to landing a job. During the second semester I got the chance to interview for a local android dev shop (this is in Santa Cruz, CA). I got the job but didn't find Java to be a good fit for my skills at the time and after a couple of months transitioned to another local dev shop. This company was a rails shop building an app for Walmart's internal network. I got the job based on my HTML5 knowledge and soon found myself learning rails. Around this time I made the decision to quit going to school and to focus full time on my job. I was at this job for about a year until the company unfortunately went out of business. Since I left that job I've spent a year and a half at trulia.com where I was on the mobile team building m.trulia.com, Trulia's native windows 8 app, and the suite of webservices powering Trulia's native iOS/Android/Windows apps. Currently I'm at cardfree.com where I'm working with ruby on rails. The reason I posted this tale is to encourage you to continue what you're doing! When I look back at my short but exciting career I notice that though I feel fortunate to have gotten a couple of semesters of training at a junior college it was mostly always the projects and initiatives which I undertook in my personal and spare time which ended up being the most valuable for me. There is so much opportunity and demand in the consumer web and electronics space right now that showing this initiative and creating such a strong portfolio will surely land you multiple job offers if that's what you are looking for. Either way excellent work and I wish you the best of luck going forward!

bluedino 13y ago
> I got the chance to interview for a local android dev shop (this is in Santa Cruz, CA) > There is so much opportunity and demand in the consumer web and electronics space right now Very true - but your location is a huge benefit to someone who's in say, the middle of Iowa or Kentucky.
- cgcardona 13y ago
  [edit spelling and formatting] Yes there's no denying that there's much more opportunity in the San Francisco Bay Area than most anywhere else in the nation but that doesn't change how much opportuniy is also available everywhere else currently. And as telecommuting gets easier opportunity is more afforded to everyone with a web connection. Each morning I tell myself 'There is more opportunity today than there was yesterday' and this is why: Every day there are over 1 million Android devices activated. There are also over 1 million iOS devices activated. Each of these devices is activated by people who are potentially new to the digital experience. They are going to need new apps to get the maximum value out of their device. They are actively looking for new experiences and services. Open source hardware like the Arduino as well as wearable computers like Google Glass are beginning to point to a future of smart everything. The Arduino hall of the Maker Fair makes me feel like what it must have been like to be at the Homebrew Computer Club. You just get a sense that once again Moore's Law has made a host of new things possible. Crowdsourcing sites like KickStarter and IndieGogo allow markets to form, signal purchasing intent, and even shell out the cash for projects before the entrepreneur has even begun production. Incubators like YCombinator are in place to find and cultivate the best and brightest entreprenuers as well as being there to add rocket fuel to the spacecraft and participate in the countdown to launch. Even in small towns every company that is serious needs a web and/or mobile presence. They need someone to design it and create the assets. They need someonde to build and maintain it. They need someone to scale it out and add new features. They need someone to keep it secure. The gamut of opportunity in the consumer mobile, web, and electronics space is so wide and varied that it's only limited by your imagination, passion, and focus.
zange 13y ago
Are you still based in Santa Cruz? I'm also starting up programming slightly later on while going to a community college (possibly the same one that you went to??), as I first started tinkering with some PHP around a year ago (my age now is 22), then tried a bit of RoR but they ended up being false starts. I've in the last few months started back up with Python (primarily Flask) and JavaScript (mainly AngularJS), and deployed a couple toy web apps in the last month. I don't know too many people in town, so I'm wondering is Santa Cruz still a viable place to get into the professional world? Might you have any specific advice for getting started here? Thanks!

bluedino 13y ago

> I got the chance to interview for a local android dev shop (this is in Santa Cruz, CA) > There is so much opportunity and demand in the consumer web and electronics space right now Very true - but your location is a huge benefit to someone who's in say, the middle of Iowa or Kentucky.

cgcardona 13y ago
[edit spelling and formatting] Yes there's no denying that there's much more opportunity in the San Francisco Bay Area than most anywhere else in the nation but that doesn't change how much opportuniy is also available everywhere else currently. And as telecommuting gets easier opportunity is more afforded to everyone with a web connection. Each morning I tell myself 'There is more opportunity today than there was yesterday' and this is why: Every day there are over 1 million Android devices activated. There are also over 1 million iOS devices activated. Each of these devices is activated by people who are potentially new to the digital experience. They are going to need new apps to get the maximum value out of their device. They are actively looking for new experiences and services. Open source hardware like the Arduino as well as wearable computers like Google Glass are beginning to point to a future of smart everything. The Arduino hall of the Maker Fair makes me feel like what it must have been like to be at the Homebrew Computer Club. You just get a sense that once again Moore's Law has made a host of new things possible. Crowdsourcing sites like KickStarter and IndieGogo allow markets to form, signal purchasing intent, and even shell out the cash for projects before the entrepreneur has even begun production. Incubators like YCombinator are in place to find and cultivate the best and brightest entreprenuers as well as being there to add rocket fuel to the spacecraft and participate in the countdown to launch. Even in small towns every company that is serious needs a web and/or mobile presence. They need someone to design it and create the assets. They need someonde to build and maintain it. They need someone to scale it out and add new features. They need someone to keep it secure. The gamut of opportunity in the consumer mobile, web, and electronics space is so wide and varied that it's only limited by your imagination, passion, and focus.

zange 13y ago

Are you still based in Santa Cruz? I'm also starting up programming slightly later on while going to a community college (possibly the same one that you went to??), as I first started tinkering with some PHP around a year ago (my age now is 22), then tried a bit of RoR but they ended up being false starts. I've in the last few months started back up with Python (primarily Flask) and JavaScript (mainly AngularJS), and deployed a couple toy web apps in the last month. I don't know too many people in town, so I'm wondering is Santa Cruz still a viable place to get into the professional world? Might you have any specific advice for getting started here? Thanks!