How did you break into the programming industry?
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IRC and mailing lists are good places to hang out if you do the open source thing -- every job I've ever gotten has been via IRC. (This probably works only if you are an active participant in a smallish community. I wouldn't join #java on Freenode and ask for a job, or expect someone to offer one.)
Actually, I'm wrong -- presenting at local user groups (and conferences) is also a good idea. That is how I got started teaching training classes (and writing).
How I "broke in": started programming age 9. After university (physics degree), in a dead market (2002), the best option that I found was to start working as a Java programmer for a large consultancy's software engineering arm.
How I broke out of that, into consulting: quickly realised that being just a programmer wasn't enough to satisfy me, so tried to transfer to the consulting arm of that corporation. Was told it was impossible. Did it anyway, through a combination of doing awesome work and convincing the right senior people to be on my side.
How I broke out of consulting: worked my bollocks off to start my first business - 9 months of waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning, working till 7, napping for an hour, then off to work for a long (and challenging) day of consulting work.
What happened next: First business slowly tanked for a number of reasons (main one detailed at http://danieltenner.com/posts/0005-starting-up-with-a-friend...), but I managed to hop onto the second one (http://www.woobius.com), which is going great for the moment.
Don't try to break into the programming industry. You might find it's not so easy to break back out of it...
At 19, I found a posting on a local college bulletin board for a full-time web developer position. The pay was low for a web developer, but good enough for a 19-year old. I have been absorbing knowledge from peers and internet sources ever since. I learned Coldfusion, ASP, SQL, PHP, regular expressions, server administration, AS2, C# .NET and AS3 through the 8 years I've been there. I have since advanced to Senior Web Developer and my salary has too. I am now focused on learning Python/Django and Cocoa/Objective C for iPhone development.
I just skimmed your article and your portfolio. I was, in fact, very much like you. I am not saying you should not go to college, if you have the ability. But college is not necessarily a requirement to get into a programming job. I learned a ton once I was in a professional atmosphere.
Two recommendations, take them or leave them: (I am not a professional resume writer) Remove your age from your portfolio, I think some companies may shy away from hiring someone so young (just from reactions I've gotten when I've told people my age). And remove "one day" in the line about where you want to become a programmer. You want it, right? If your are a senior, you must be graduating within a month or so. Start looking.
Go check your local college's bulletin board (the real one in the commons). You might get the opportunity to get your foot in the door. Never stop learning.
To be honest, I worked for next to nothing. When I was in college my parents nagged me to death about getting a job. I didn’t want just any job, and I kept getting rejected from the lowest of the low end positions. I stumbled across an ad at my university looking for web developers at a small company called Cloudspace. I shot them an email with my resume and had an interview that week. The interview was with the owner, and he just asked me to brush up on my PHP and MySQL and come in for a quick test the next week. I crammed my head full of PHP and MySQL tutorials and went in the following week. I had to write a simple page that would query out data for a select box with option groups, each with its own set of options. The task was to select out the data with one query, allow the user to select an option and send a message to the database. I finished it all in about an hour, but hadn’t thought about SQL injection. One single quote and a press of enter and I was done, but they let me take the job anyways. I met the other candidate on the first day we started, and we worked together pretty closely. He had an edge on me, as he knew quite a bit more, but I caught up in the following month.
About 2 years passed, and I had went from making minimum wage to making $10 an hour. It wasn’t great, but the experience was well worth it. I left Cloudspace and took on my own contract job. From there, I graduated and went to work at another small company writing ColdFusion (and 12 other things), and from there on to where I work now at one of the largest defense contractors in the world.
Years ago, began hacking on home computer (not a PC, but something called a C64, for the curious). Went to college, wrong major, quit . . . bounced around, bad jobs. Started doing some db hacking in Excel (don't ask).
Decided to make more than $8 an hour, went back to college, got a BS in comp sci. Loved undergrad this time around, jumped into internships and co-ops with companies as an undergrad.
Finished undergrad with a good GPA and did well on GREs, realized I could go to grad school via research assistantship. Cool. Hung out with really smart hackers there. Finished year 1 with absolutely zero interest in staying for PhD (never found really good research/advisor match, would probably do differently now). Finished 2nd year, got a job out in the IT industry, escaping grad school with a MS in comp sci.
Almost all my really relevant experience in breaking into the industry came about by internships or deep project work at the undergrad/grad level (usually not classes, but research efforts on the side). These days, I get the impression you can get all the same experience without college. Beware that some big industry players will hold the lack of a CS degree against you (this seems mainly to be a "getting in the door" problem).
Mainly, I got into industry by really enjoying coding and grabbing every opportunity to do so where someone was willing to pay me for it. Everything else was a means to that end.
This question is worded strangely. The "programming industry" is not like the "movie industry" or the "music industry." Just start coding. It'll be easier to get a job with a CS degree, but plenty of developers can get jobs without it if they are good enough.
Things like iPhone apps, Facebook apps, etc. have made it allot easier, in my opinion, for a developer to bootstrap their own business, but I would focus on writing something you're passionate about because you won't require the financial motivation (which is unpredictable) to keep at it.
If you truly desire the results of your own work, nothing (including any classical definition failure) should be able to stop you from completing it.
The owner of the college asked me if I could code PHP. I had done a PHP tutorial a week before, so I told him that I could.
I worked for them in my final year of high school and got a full time position the day after I matriculated. I've been programming ever since.