

Questioning my future.  Anyone need a programmer? - Stymie

Hello HNers,<p>I've been around here long enough to notice that this community is capable of great things and, to be brief, I'm writing here to see if anyone needs/would like to outsource some work or sub-contract me.<p>A little about me:<p>I'm a young, ambitious British developer taking a gap year from university to focus on some web development with friends.  Unfortunately for me, they lacked the work ethic required to make real progress. Having quit my waiter job, I need to find a way to sustain my living expenses (mainly food and apartment) whilst also contributing to the Experience section of my portfolio.  I feel at this stage I'm unable to go entirely independent as I lack the necessary experience to do so. I do however posses a talent in a variety of programming languages, with my specialty being PHP.<p>I have recently developed a custom set of forums that rival the performance of the existing forums out there.  It was built in its entirety upon my own framework and utilises technologies such as memcached and mysql.
In addition to the Forums and Framework I've done some work for a dutch GPT site, created my own Paypal Library which integrates nicely with the PayPal API (for a failed project), and a custom gaming panel for a relatively popular private game sever.<p>My web skills: PHP, SQL, Memcached, javascript, html5, and css3.
My non-web skills: OOP, C++, C# and more recently some objective-c with my beloved iPhone. 
I'm also actively interested in broadening my skill-set.<p>Thanks
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TomK32
Go for London, someone with "a variety of programming languages" is always
welcome there, especially if you also program on weekends just for fun. But I
doubt PHP programmers are getting well-paid, at least I never did (ok, that
was still during uni) but I was able to ask and get more money once I switched
over to Ruby (or take Python, doesn't really matter as long as it's not so
mainstreamy as PHP; frameworks are a must, stop writing your own, contribute
to existing open source instead!).

If you don't mind going abroad, Berlin is hip and there are plenty of older,
well-funded startups who don't require German skills from you.

If you are mad enough to work on your own apps during this year, make sure to
release every app within a month, maximum. You'd only waste time and
motivation if you wouldn't.

~~~
Stymie
Thanks for the comment, definitely things to consider. Unfortunately I'm not
ready to move away yet which sort of rules out both options for now although I
would love to travel. Writing my own framework was a learning curve and I've
created something bespoke which does exactly what I want, and does it well
resulting in a fraction of the overhead again giving me a really good level of
performance. The idea about setting deadlines is great and I wish I'd done
that thus far.

Taking up rails has actually been a goal of mine this year, I'm fairly
competent with Python already -- but for immediate work PHP is the most viable
option since I feel I have a lot of knowledge to offer.

Thanks again for your comment!

~~~
TomK32
Writing things from scratch that work as you want is not as difficult task, be
able to understand and apply someone else's work (and in Open Source we must
do this every day) is a much more valuable skill.

When you don't want to travel for longer time, at least travel to conferences
( (e.g. RubyManor will happen again this year or January in London) or larger
User Group meetings. Those are great opportunities to learn about the newest
stuff and directly talk with someone about this. That's very much different to
just reading it in the internets.

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Shalduga
Hi, My name is Sergiy and I live in Canada. I need a programmer with your set
of skills to add some functionalities and fix some bugs for my site. If you're
interested, please, contact me at shalduga at yahoo dot com. Thanks.

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amac
I may have a need for some Paypal expertise, shoot me an email (in my profile,
I'm also UK based) if you want to discuss.

~~~
Stymie
Sent you a mail! Thanks

