Why Twitter?
Imho he should apply for jobs, apply more and even apply more. Having studied literature, I have jumped ships from publishing to tourism (marketing analyst) to being a full time data analyst via doing the work and having a resume to show it.
Having an application, that differentiates one from the competition did maybe help a little bit.
If @brokedev would like, he could shoot me a mail and I would show him, what I had for an application. Helped me get a lot of interviews - in the end I could choose between jobs.
[edit on] Have just updated my profile - seems to be cached. In some minutes my email should show there. [edit off]
I'm very curious how you managed to shift to data analysis.
I've made a successful shift to marketing, but technical work still eludes me.
So when the chance arose, I first started doing some web analytics. As the data grew more and more (esp. in our internal tools) I needed more then excel. So I tried to learn a little bit of (in my case) python to help crunch bigger numbers.
From there I got to manage the technical side of an ad server, did a lot of project management and via a gig in online marketing as a "pure" web analyst I came to work in a digital agency as a so called data analyst. Most work is "classic" web analytics, some is work on bigger datasets (growing part of my work).
So basically I had a knack for math, science, empirical stuff, statistics and tried some programming (bad code, but code non the less) and that way I was able to jump ships. One day I will try to incorporate my love for literature/texts into the mix - maybe NLP or some things like that might be fun. We'll see.
whenever you scale to Germany, please shoot me a line. What you are building seems to me the ideal service to use. So many use cases shooting through my head...
Greetings from the old world Sven
I was a music major in university (and planning on an English lit or creative writing minor) -- then I took an intro compsci course halfway through, and had a bit of a shock; it was an entirely new thing for me, but I really had a knack for it, and enjoyed it as well. It was a bit late to change my major... but I just fit in as much compsci as I could, and also just starting building things outside of coursework. I managed to get a software dev job right out of college based on a bunch of interactive online drills I wrote for the music department, plus I had very solid communication skills and academic recognition.
The software dev job was doing custom dev on lots of different kinds of projects (that was good), and in my spare time I turned the interactive music stuff into a site that's still a side income stream. It's languishing somewhat these days, because 5 years ago I started as a developer at a UK-based startup (working remotely from France; long story) and gradually became the CTO -- mostly just from looking for the hardest, riskiest problems we had and chasing them down one at a time, and being easy to work with.
It's hard to abstract any of this to general advice -- maybe just that mastering anything requires a good deal of focus and just time. If you want to do technical work (huge range there) you need to be doing it -- making mistakes, finding your way to solutions (good ones and bad), paying close attention to what's hard and why. It's probably worthwhile building something other people use, and can look at, etc. -- plus (whatever your focus is), mastering the context of working with customers, colleagues, competitors is valuable. If you build and support something all on your own, you're forced to learn a lot about all that.
But maybe I just wasn't able to find the right strategy.
With that being said, Dev communities tend to be quite different on twitter.
I'll have to take the plunge as well, so I'm speaking to myself as much as I'm speaking to you, make an account _solely_ for your developer persona.
I like your suggestion about my "developer persona". Do you have suggestions for tools or tactics for making sure the signal to noise stays high?
That's essentially why I don't use the service in a nutshell, and find it in its entirety much ado about nothing.
However, I mentioned I need to follow this advice as well because I often meet developers from other companies, and many in my local area are involved with each other on Twitter. Particularly, the UX and RoR communities of my area are both quite strong on Twitter (I'm a C#/Python guy, but it still applies). In sum, They are much better aware of what's going on and where to find a new job, should they need one.
I'm in the same boat as you - in order to further develop myself I'll inevitably have to cave and make a Twitter account.
> Do you just use it to follow things and post replies to people looking for help?
In a nutshell, yes. Or dev jokes, or your current project(s), or really anything that builds up your following. The metrics are available....use them! "Retweeting" other developers you follow should help as well.
> I'm worried that maintaining my feed (?) would be a huge time sink. > Do you have suggestions for tools or tactics for making sure the signal to noise stays high?
It is a huge time sink. But unfortunately the "powers that be" place a premium on having both an online presence, and online "clout." While a Github profile and personal website is certainly more important for reputation as a developer, your Twitter serves as a mouthpiece for your work and is (again, unfortunately) ultimately the first _and_ last thing looked at.
Maintaining your feed, I guess, would be easy as a developer. You have normal user level things - ie: only follow the accounts in your developer sphere - and you can also use management systems and third party software to filter out more of the noise. Hell, you could even write your own and use that same tool to build up your following! I believe most of the timesink in that aspect would be front-loaded - once you're up and running, you don't need to put much more work in.
This has the added benefit of being able to look stuff up if I forget about it.
[/sarcasm]
I really love this passive aggressiveness.
You don't need to be a 140-char Shakespeare, just follow some influences and projects you're interested in, re-tweet things you find useful and if you have anything of substance you've created (github, blog post etc) post it.
It's not so much showing off as it is showing you're on-top of new ideas and trends in your field.