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Ask HN: Advice for a newly graduated Rails dev

3 points by Lockyy ↗ HN
The two posts earlier today asking for advice made me realise that I could do with some myself.

I graduate from university this week and have been looking for a job for the past few months. During uni I did contract work and am now trying to find something permanent. I've gotten through multiple rounds of interviews with several companies and coding tests have never been an issue for me, despite this I've been unsuccessful so far.

It'd be good to hear stories of how people got their first jobs whether at startups or not.

1 comment

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frostmatthew
When I was interviewing for my first developer job (about three years ago) I found most employers/interviewers were far more interested in side projects I had been doing for fun than anything I did for/at school.

If you already have some side stuff you do on your own try to highlight those during the interview process, if you don't you might want to consider starting one. Ideally open source these (on GitHub or similar) so they can see the quality of the code you write in "real life" (i.e. as opposed to whiteboarding during an interview).

Learning other languages can also be helpful, even if you're only interested in Ruby stuff. Each language you learn will make you a better programmer, and it demonstrates to potential employers a desire to learn (very important in our industry).