Job Search Update
I’ve been searching heavily for a web app job in the Seattle/Tacoma area for the last month, and despite the fact that I’ve probably applied to 200+ jobs, I’ve only ever spoken to someone about maybe 40 of those jobs, and I haven’t yet found someone who will give me an in-person interview (I even state up-front that I’ll pay for all my travel costs for an interview).
Since Rice’s CS curriculum really pushes OO Design in Dr. Nguyen and Dr. Wong courses, I feel like I have a more-solid-than-most command of OOD and (some) design patterns. Combine that with my 6 years of writing web apps in PHP, and I feel like I’m a pretty strong candidate for all entry-level PHP dev jobs, and probaly most mid-level ones. Good fundamentals, experience and samples to back it up. And most of all, I am very confident in my ability to tackle a design problem in PHP.
But obviously that’s not good enough, and I need to do more to grab hiring managers’ attentions. I’ve recently been trying to bolster my portfolio with an impressive app build on the industry’s latest and greatest technologies. Right now I’m working on my “car identification” site, WhatTheCar, and I’ve been building it using as much prewritten good code as possible: CodeIgniter PHP RAD Framework, FancyUpload (used by Flickr) by digitarald which uses the MooTools js library, reCAPTCHA (used by fb and craigslist), the Template library by Collin Williams, the Redux Authentication Library, base styles from BlueprintCSS, and prototype and scriptaculous js libraries for effects. Integrating all these different components into WhatTheCar will at least give me more experience in engineering complete application systems from an existing codebase.
But I have no idea how long this site is going to take, and I need a job now. So I’ve decided I need to maximize my immediate future in getting noticed. And one of the ways I think that I can do that is by getting Zend Certified for PHP5.
So over the next few days I’ll go over the study guide for the certification exam to get a better idea of what certification entails. And then if I get certified I can use the certification as an extra testament to my php experience.
Cheers.