
Protips for Aspiring Developers - devongovett
http://blog.meltingice.net/social-media/protips-aspiring-developers/
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jbarham
Bitbucket is in many ways a better option than GitHub for code hosting. In
particular, Bitbucket gives you the choice of Mercurial or Git, allows private
repos on the free plan (so you can start developing in private then switch the
access to public when the code is ready), and only charges you for the number
of users who can access your private repos vs. number of repos. And Bitbucket
is much cheaper than GitHub.

See <https://bitbucket.org/plans> to <https://github.com/settings/billing> for
details.

(FWIW, I'm not affiliated w/ Bitbucket, but use it every day in my job and am
quite happy w/ it. I also have a GitHub account.)

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justinlau
I disagree with the push for newbies to overshare on Github. Some of the code
I wrote when I was learning how to program in middle school was completely
awful. I'm pretty happy that it's not used as a representative sample of what
I am capable of today.

It's one thing for a recruiter to say "hey, I saw you have a GitHub
account..." It's quite another when the recruiter forwards your profile to a
seasoned engineer and they make a DailyWTF post out of your code!

Also - you've received offers out of the blue, do you mean offers to
interview, or offers to just join the company w/o interviewing?

~~~
MaxGabriel
You can delete repos of poor code

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justinlau
It's not the old code that I'm talking about, it's more like newbie
programmers not being fully aware of their limitations. They might put up code
that they think is hot shit but is actually laughable to experienced people.

Or maybe that's a good thing - it helps prevent potentially bad hiring
situations from happening?

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mburney
Good advice, but I don't understand why writing a book is the "quickest way to
get ridiculed". If a developer wrote a book that provides value, is accurate,
and contained very useful code samples, I can't see how that wouldn't increase
opportunities.

EDIT: Totally misunderstood that the OP meant it figuratively. Apologies.

~~~
sc68cal
I think he means the expression "Don't write a book" - meaning keep it short
and to the point.

~~~
meltingice
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. If you wrote an actual book on programming,
then that's pretty awesome. Writing a book for a résumé, however, is not.

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njharman
I've done almost none of that and have had a long successful career.

Just saying there is more than one way to skin a cat.

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danso
Had a fellow developer not pushed me to just get on Twitter and install
TweetDeck, I'm not ever sure I would've ever "gotten" it. Just like I
hesitated trying Facebook because it seemed like a fancier MySpace, which
itself wasn't (conceptually, to a non-user) different than when we built our
own homepages by hand.

I'm glad I did get on it, though...I don't get as much utility socializing on
it as some of my colleagues do, but it's been a great way to connect to random
people whom I likely never would've reached/been reached by. It's also taught
me the lesson to "just try it" for every promising service. Pinterest doesn't
seem like anything much different than Tumblr + the masonry.js plugin, but the
details in its implementation are worth appreciating, and only noticeable when
maintaining your own account.

