I love this story (and have read his book), but this sure isn't happening in the Valley or San Francisco.

As someone who's a similar skill level to Josh and applied to tons of jobs here in the Valley, I've found that this is an isolated story on the other coast. In SV/SF you have 5/6 developer bootcamps cranking out developers each month applying for a handful of junior jobs. I'm sure the blogging helped, but I doubt any companies would have offered the same salary here (60-80k) when they could have had their pick of developers that just worked 80 hours a week for 12 weeks.