

Ask HN: Advice for a newly graduated Rails dev - Lockyy

The two posts earlier today asking for advice made me realise that I could do with some myself.<p>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&#x27;ve gotten through multiple rounds of interviews with several companies and coding tests have never been an issue for me, despite this I&#x27;ve been unsuccessful so far.<p>It&#x27;d be good to hear stories of how people got their first jobs whether at startups or not.
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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).

