

Ask HN: how to get commercial experience - wannabe

I'm a self taught ruby developer. For several months I've been trying to get freelance rails/ruby work but I keep getting told I lack experience.  I made several small but significant contributions to open source in order to gain experience but now I get told they want someone with experience developing a full app and not just libraries or gems.<p>There are already several excellent open source apps that do everything I need. I don't want to reinvent the wheel.  I've also contacted people hiring ruby devs &#38; offered to work for free in order to gain experience but I rarely get a response.<p>This seems like catch 22. On the one hand I hear how in demand ruby devs are but at the same time I can't seem to give away my services. What is a wannabe dev to do?<p>P.s posting anonymously so people don't interpret it as an advert
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gtani
My 2 cents:

do you have expertise at individual layers of the stack:

\- MySQL/postgres database design/tuning,

\- Jquery, HTML5, etc

\- firewalling/logging, load balancing.

