How to find a job in technology

This blog post is intended for those who have a computer science degree or similar, but it may also apply to everyone else, to some extent.

When you come out from school you start wondering who is going to hire you, when I started my job hunt, I wasn’t even out of the school (I took my bachelor’s degree in Mexico), competition is hard, finding a job is hard …

Sure is, if you don’t know what to do to improve yourself.

One of the most common complains when you are a freshmen is the vicious cycle of  “experience = job = experience”, if you don’t have experience you don’t get a job, but you can’t get a job, since you don’t have any experience…

How many times we have heard that?, when internet was being adopted, it was harder to find resources, tutorials, or information about something you wanted to start. It was never hard, c’mon! you have to know how to search.

In today’s job world, is really important to show off what you can do, do you have enough time in your hands to look for a job? are you 8 hours a day outside knocking on doors? of course not; Why don’t you spend your time enhancing your resume doing actual work?

As with anything that is worth in life you have to start investing something (this is for your growth) so start thinking of spending some dollars a year for a hosting place, do some work, publish it, get involved in open source projects, create a blog, find user groups, assist and learn.

The era of the no experience no job, is easier to overcome this days.

You just have to leave your couch and start coding.

Samples?

Create an online resume builder, create an android application to create lists of tasks, create a grocery shopping list .. even a calculator will help .. do as many as you can, you can get the experience from there, expose the work you have done, publish it for free, the more they talk about it the better, accept all critics, there is a saying “Don’t criticize your enemies, they may learn something”  (don’t know who said it)

And one more suggestion, use several technologies in your project, make them interact with each other.

The grocery list, create a web application on asp.net, create an android client for the phone, manage the web services with Azure or Amazon Cloud services, synchronize the information with a windows 8 app, etc. (I omit the IPhone, IPad and junk, since its not as easy to start on it as it is with windows/java/android)

Also, you have to manage your online reputation, some of the things you may need:

• Blog
• Twitter account
• Google+ identity
• Linked in
• About me
• Leverage any other social sites (empireavenue.com, klout.com, etc.)

I don’t include Facebook, unless you think is worth it, as for me, I keep it as private as possible, all else is open.

As with everything, you have to start somewhere, and even if you are bad, as you continue working on it you will improve.

Tutorials? information?

bing.com, google.com, yahoo.com, are good places to start (SEARCH!)

There are so many free tools to use and also you can learn so much for free, for example you can start with:

• Learning Web Sites
  • http://www.asp.net/
  • www.w3schools.com
  • http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/
• Editors
  • http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
  • http://www.microsoft.com/express
• Databases
  • http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
  • http://www.microsoft.com/express

And many more…

Is amazing the kind of things you can do, when you spend your time where you are supposed to.

Feel free to tweet me your questions, I may be able to help out

Developing on Windows Phone – Set the environment

As I mentioned in a previous post you can setup your development environment pretty much for free.

If you are starting your development right out from school you can take advantage of https://www.dreamspark.com/ it will provide the tools for you to be successful building windows applications, its free and is really useful, I wish I that program had existed when I was studying in Mexico.

Now, you are no longer a student you can use the : BizSpark in a similar way, start ups and small business get some love from Microsoft too, if you register your company you can access lots of useful resources (and software) to be able to reach that dream you are pursuing.

So, back to the environment.

As lots of people did before me, there are tons of blog posts about how to setup your environment and where to get all the tools, perhaps after this link you will stop reading, don’t blame you, is a lot of things to know to do this (but is really worth it, at least so far it has been for me) without further adieu here is the link

Now after you install all the goodies that you can find in that location what to do?

Well you can start developing,

But how do I do that? Well, I can’t provide all the answers, right? right (well not that much, I will be adding more posts about it as I go along), so for that we have more resources so you can get training on how to do stuff for the windows phone here (training) and some more information here

now for some questions:

• And what about the device you got for free?
• How do you use it?
• Where can I get one?

About the device I got for free, I posted it earlier today here

How do you use it? I will get to that in an additional post later.

Where can you get one? uhm, this is a tough question since there are lots of options and you will only get it if you really want it.

What you can do: follow @DanielEgan, @UserCommunity, also try this URL: http://www.30tolaunch.com/ (free phones are being offered now for  contest)

and finally try all the user groups in your area you can find try this

http://windows-phone.meetup.com/

You should be able to find one or two near you

So, I will be posting more information on the setup for the Windows Hub Account and some hurdles you may have to jump over.

(BTW.. I really dislike my Android now, so unstable.. cool platform but the OEM just messes up with the core a lot)

Update –

Just as I was installing the Azure framework, more dependencies showed up, well, there is a lot of utilities there that will definitely save me some time later on.

So on to the next post

Get your Phone Dev on!

I’m a developer, as the world is moving forward I decided to start building apps for mobile devices, there are so many things you can do and there are so many things now possible thanks to the power of the smartphones.

While making the decision of which platform to use as my first development area I reviewed Android and Windows Phone platforms, and due to the abundance of tools and information on how to develop for windows phone I decided to use that as my launch pad.

The first thing you have to do is get a phone, or so I thought, since I need a place where I can test all the things I will be building, therefore the first step was to get the hardware.

Fortunately here in California Daniel Egan (@DanielEgan) is the Evangelist that is in charge of that, and he happened to be giving away some windows phones for free, (well, you have to be a developer and must be doing something for the platform), so I reached out to him after seeing this tweet:

And after a couple of emails describing the apps I want to build, he sent me the phone, pretty cool!

So I was in my merry way ready to deploy a test application I created, but for to do that you have to have an App Hub account.

More on that coming up in some posts.

BTW, this is my phone:

Posting from W8

Hey, After a while I was able to load windows 8 on a virtualized environment but with full hardware environment.

Trying to use Virtual Box, VMware, Virtual PC (or XPMode in windows 7), proved to be not the best (at least at this time, since the O.S. is really, really new).

So I went back to something I found after the Build conference, a post from Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) with really good instructions on how to set all this up.

The original blog post is: http://j.mp/pxHUKa

Once the application is installed you can see how the dual boot section is enabled in the computer, so with a simple click you can choose to use the Dev Preview and your previous operating system. (please read the original post for the details of how to do this, is WOMB certified –works in my box)

After the initial setup you can find all the goodies for Windows 8, in fact the loading time is just amazing, I love the startup is really fast, (I will time it next time)

The computer I am using is a XPS 15”, pretty nice laptop. Even though the machine detects my multi-touch screen the missing drivers do not allow it to work fully, but I have touch input.

Running the OS with the full hardware  is totally awesome, and knowing that my main OS is untouched is priceless.

(live writer just exploded!, but I got my changes back!, woah! where is that save button again?)

The developer preview I obtained has already visual studio 11 in it, but I also happen to have the developer preview which I will try to install and use for all the next posts.

you can mount an ISO directly that is really good if you want to get things done quickly without 3rd party tools

As an ending note. I need to find a better editor for the blog.. the CSS, is messy and I cannot edit it with this crappy HTML editor live writer has. Well on to look for one it is, In the mean time, Visual Studio is installing 😀
also
I want to like IE9 and IE10, but they are still behind on several settings, after I saw the videos on Build related to desktop sync. I hope they can really put it up to par to what I can do with Google chrome.

I mean, I just downloaded chrome, went to the settings, hit the sync button and I have all the stuff I use in my real computer.

I need to get a hold of one windows phone, to be able to test the integration.

Visual Studio 11 – Windows 8 Installation and road blocks

I wanted to write about the entity framework as I am getting ready for my exam, but #Build happened and lots of goodies where thrown out to us developers.

I found windows 8 Installation quite easy, and the interface is nice, though I am a fan of the look and feel, I don’t quite like it yet, I will need to work a lot more with it to be able to figure out all the things I can currently do with Windows 7.

For the time being, a nice small screen shot of VS installation

And .. while I was writing this post and waiting for VS 11 to complete installing, kaboom! I got a nice run time error on VMware.

Uhm, more research is needed, I believe I will have to split my strategy of installation in two different areas, windows 8 and Visual Studio 2011, so, at this time I will let it be as it is, with an error, I will try Virtual Box again and see if I get better results while installing the developer preview.

After the crash..  the virtual hard drive with Windows 8 has the handle open and cannot open the VM again, well… off to reboot, better yet, to shutdown and sleep.

Entity Series

{EAV_BLOG_VER:9d070902d972ae49}

The purpose of my blog post is not to be so detailed on how the code I’m posting works, there are several assumptions on your knowledge, my goal is to provide you with a quick “win” to implement a far more complex solution.

I will work on a small application that will have clients with different approaches, each time the same application can be built independently of each other, but the main goal is to have one single application that will have different views.

I will detail the application to be built in a different blog post.

* hint, with this app you will be able to showcase your abilities

Setting the Developer Environment

Quick Summary

Originally found: vs2010wallpapers.com

When we start coding as any developer we need to have a way to control all we
do correctly and undo all our mistakes.
Usually in a corporate environment a solution is in place for that a source
control is at our disposal and we align to a series of rules and the world moves
without a problem.

I’ve decided to do my own stuff, where do I start?

But what happens when you start to find some cool apps around there, and you
find yourself inspired to create some yourself (for profiit, fun or both)

The first things that come to mind is what should I use to keep track of my code
changes? What if my team is my buddy and me and we want to code at our own pace
at home?

If happen to have some thousand dollars available you may buy a server, and some
licences for software and set your environment, but what if you have a limited
budget?
Open source source control applications are handy, you can do research on SVN to
find several solutions and proposals,

for the purpose of the applications I want to create I found that
Visual SVN does the trick for me

I am a windows user, and developer (.NET is king in my world, but I also code with Java) so that will work for me.

The setup is pretty simple, find a folder, install, create folders, done!

So, to make this post short and to cut directly to the case, these are the tools
I recommend you to install to start developing .NET applications:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2010
• Visual SVN Server
• Visual SVN Plugin for Visual Studio
• Tortoise SVN
• Notepad2 (don’t forget to donate)
• 7-zip opens most of those compressed files, and is free (don’t forget to donate)
• Productivity Power Tools (Visual Studio)
• SQL Server Express
• Almost all the Visual Studio tools you need in one humongous download pretty useful site by the way

Recommendations:

• If you have a spare computer laying around install it and configure it as a Server (you can get home server edition for windows cheap from 50-100 bucks)
• On that computer set up an account on http://www.mimedia.com or DropBox (recommended, use my link to get some extra space) or SkyDrive or MiMedia (7GB free) to backup your repository online (you never know)
• If you want to create a domain on the internet from your computer for cheap (so you avoid hosting fees) use DNS2go, I’ve used it in the past and works wonders
• Don’t feed your gremlin after midnight or get it wet (ever) I’m serious.

As I wanted to keep it short, I failed to talk about Virtualization, let me know if you need detailed instructions of how to setup your development environment.
I can add some other blog posts about it
I will be posting mini code snippets on different things, Windows Phone 7, Entity Framework, SQL Server Denali, Jquery, HTML 5, etc. things I use for my daily work,
some of those things I am learning as well, the main idea is post what you learn so that others can take advantage of it.

Please don’t forget to add your comments!

You can follow me on twitter @icon_g or Google plus.