Blogs

This is a recent email correspondence I think some newbies might find useful:

Hi, I just recently decided I wanted to try and get into web development and I discovered and listened to your podcast. It was wonderful and I was disappointed to discover that it appears to be discontinued. Do you plan on picking up where you left off? Also, would you recommend any good podcasts that start from the ground up? I really like the linux reality one you recommended so far.

I read online about colleges/universities that offer certification programs in different areas of web development; do employers hire these people? Or is it a waste of time and better to get a 4 year degree? Mostly I just want to learn for my own growth, but maybe someday in the future I would like to make a career of this.

Over the past few months I've applied to 200+ jobs in web development, had ~20 phone interviews and 7 in-person interviews.  I've spoken with a lot of recruiters and technical managers, which has given me a good idea of the skillsets and #years required, location hot-spots, and other resources associated with positions in web development.  In this blog, I'll discuss those job-hunting bites, starting with resources and ending with technologies/locations.

Regarding the web, it's often said that every language has it's time and place.  

1. PHP for the quick-n-dirties,
2. Ruby on Rails / Django for the medium-sized projects
3. Java / .NET for the enterprise applications. 

Web Developers are the new restaurant waiters -- they're a dime a dozen (if you don't believe me, check out odesk, elance, and rentacoder), and they're the fall-back job if your degree proves useless.  Because web dev gigs are so easy to land, and because a portfolio speaks louder than credentials, why get a degree at all?

For starters, it's the difference between ~$65k and ~$80k mid-range (in San Francisco) , with faster career advancement if you have a degree.  Second, it's the difference between a serious career and odd-job one-offs.  While I personally would rather an $80k career, it's not for everyone.  There are many who don't want to devote their careers to programming, but may need some extra cash or what have you -- and $65k is still attractive, better than what waiters make.  So I'll put it this way: if you're planning on programming for the rest of your life, get the degree.  If not, then check out web dev opportunities in LAMP, AJAX, and especially CMSs (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress) at gig-boards like odesk and elance.  These gigs usually get you $15-$30 hrly, which aint bad.

There's a slew of Drupal signup modules which enable event-registration (including paying for, email notifications, etc). Here are a number of reasons I'd rather event-registration to be handled by Ubercart, rather than a host of standalone modules.

My new fillpdf.module is a complete replacement of webform_pdf.module. From the project page's description:

I keep promising to add new episodes to my podcast, and I apologize to those of you who are waiting. My podcast is about introductory web development, geared towards beginners who don't know where to start. With that in mind, I listen to a lot of podcasts and found a few to be especially valuable in the "introductory" space (rather than some of those newsy ones). So for those of you looking for how-to, beginner information on web development (and to keep you busy while I work up some more of my own episodes), here are a list of podcasts that got me started.

I hate researching the current de-facto method of building a common Drupal solution. A few examples of what I'm talking about are CCK profiles, image galleries, podcasting, and google maps. Take image galleries -- there are a million ways to build an image gallery in Drupal, but there are really only a handful of methods that are commonly used, and it's these methods I want to stick to unless I know that I need some edge-case solution. I frequently find myself installing a handful of modules to build, say an image gallery, only to find that I chose the wrong handful.

My second Drupal contrib module! From the summary on the project page:

Recently I've had to do some work applying effects to tabular data using jQuery. Turns out jQuery's not too good at applying effects (sliding, fading, etc) to table rows (discussion about this problem here). Frustrated, I decided to have a go at jQuery's dreaded competitor frameworks (I'm one of those Drupal/jQuery-fits-all kinda guys).