[Cialug] Cialug Beginnings

Wed Jul 20 11:38:40 CDT 2011

0) Hiring managers want to hear about personal projects if they're good ones.  I have many great discussions about my Trouble-Maker project because I can demonstrate business value.  I once recommended against hiring someone whose project was to put up a caching server at his school to reduce the bandwidth that students were using to steal music and movies.

1) Certifications are important, but they are not equally important.  Their value also goes down as your experience goes up.  Their individual value also goes down the more you have.  They are not the magic "door openers" that a lot of entry-level people seem to think.

2) Coding certifications specifically are generally not worth your time.  Don't pursue a C certification, join a C-based open source project and contribute.  This will make you more searchable and help to address #0 above.

Josh More | Senior Security Consultant - CISSP, GIAC-GSLC Gold, GIAC-GCIH
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________________________________
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [cialug-bounces at cialug.org] on behalf of Pawel [pdarowski at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2011 11:38
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Cialug Beginnings

So a hiring manager would like to hear about some personal projects? Perhaps one good example of an overcome challenge? I guess it would paint a decent picture of the applicant's self-motivation and ability to seek answers.

Thanks for all your input. I'm beginning to see that the biggest challenge of development [in my eyes] is having a vision or finding that interesting problem that needs solving. Once it's found, the rest is research and determination.

Two more quick question while I still have the floor! :) How important are certifications in the real world? And please, what is the "industry standard" for C certificates? I'm having an impossible time finding a C cert... And my instructors don't really know of any.

See you around,

Pawel Darowski
PDarowski at gmail.com<mailto:PDarowski at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Matthew Nuzum <newz at bearfruit.org<mailto:newz at bearfruit.org>> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Pawel <pdarowski at gmail.com<mailto:pdarowski at gmail.com>> wrote:

Since I cannot attend meetings for quite some time, perhaps the IRC channel would be a good place to start taking advantage of the knowledge that already exists in this group. My question is: how did some of you start your careers as Linux professionals? My goal is to use Linux in my professional life from Day 1.

I too am usually unable to make it to the meetings. I do about one per year. However I still feel reasonably involved with the group by participating on the list.

Any tips, stories, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,

The common thread among the people I've met through this group is that we're tinkerers. Find some fascinating problem or challenge and dig into it. Back in "the day" the most interesting linux problem was figuring out how to get it to actually install. This one has been pretty soundly dealt with now though. :-)

(in my case I owned only about 5 working floppies and lived off campus at ISU (near towers) and had to ride my bike to Durham to download 5 slackware disks, then ride back home to complete the next phase of the install - which, btw, is slower than a 14.4k modem)

Some people are financially motivated - they want to run PHP or Ruby or a server and make websites for money. A huge number of people I've dealt with are into Games and want to make their own. You'll not find a more diverse set of development tools than is available in Linux (check out PyGame). Yet others are into robotics or hardware hacking which is yet again very well suited for Linux. A few people use Linux to hook up to their TV to record and watch TV shows.

By the way, this kind of activity looks great to potential employers. They really like to see people who are problem solves and are self-motivated to learn new skills and explore new ways of doing things.

I will say that there are three trends to keep in mind as you're looking for interesting challenges:

 1. We're in an increasingly heterogeneous environment - windows, mac os, linux, ipads and more all need to talk to each other
 2. The web is either the most important application deployment platform now, or is right up there (this ties into the prev point)
 3. Mobile is huge (and the number one mobile platform in the world runs Linux)

(You asked for opinions...)

--
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫

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