Roaming around the apartment complex I grew up, in with friends and a link cable meeting new kids and trading Pokemon were some of the best times of my life.
I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.
Consider yourself blessed, the one place in my neighborhood where I get one bar on LTE is the same place I once was repairing my car. Awful experience but the rest of the subdivision is fine.
Location: East Coast (DC/Philly), willing to work remote in most any time zone
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: AWS, Python (love Django), JavaScript/TypeScript (love React), Docker, PowerShell, Postgres
Resume: Available on request
Email: [email protected]
Seeking: Ideally looking for junior/associate roles
The Paul Graham advice of "build things you and your friends would use" alongside Python -- which was my first language, getting back to coding for the first time since 9th grade -- is basically the carrot I've offered to a few people wanting to get into coding.
I'm lucky in the sense that what got me back into coding was a very specific set of personal needs that drove me mad in the best way with passion. I'm not a technical wizard, but coding and growing over the last few years has to count for something.
Yes, but I've never been an employed programmer -- I lost my job over a year ago, and basically, because I still have the chance to upskill and live with my parents, I've used the last year to work part-time and flesh out some projects and become more employable overall.
I'll be starting a job next month, because at this point I probably gotta get back on the hamster wheel and work into some professional progress, but I'm hoping this is my last non-programming job. The last 13 months have absolutely been worth the price of admission.
I believe this is part of the problem/perception -- Indian immigration via policies like H-1B and whatever Canada does disproportionately offers people from a handful of Indian states (and the highest castes) the chance to be North American tech workers. Even if you say "well, the Indian tech industry is centered on a few states" it in essence is the same problem or perceived problem.
Specific to North America, most people actually like the idea of someone coming from halfway around the world to try to be a citizen of their nation. They do not exactly like the idea of being "carpetbagged" or being "flooded with people who do not integrate" and those perceptions exist not wholly out of imagination.
No expert on this, but in my estimation the nature of the law and process makes it hard to sue unless you're a one-to-one match with the job posting or invented part of the tech stack being used. Companies across various industries pass up on qualified people every day.
It's not just H1-Bs from those cultures, either. I'll give everybody a fair shot but if your cultural mores are extreme deference to authority I'd like to be far away from you when doing anything serious. I'd argue that a certain level of distrust of authority is not only good but inherently American. And no, I'm not saying "Americans take criticism well."
I've always found that journaling without an intended structure (a few sentences about a baseball game, or some coding paradigm, or a good memory) helps me to relax. If I task myself to "write about my day" like my parents taught me to as a kid I'd have a grand total of about 12 journal entries in my life.
I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.