How to land your first Ruby on Rails Job

The classic chicken-egg problem

When company are looking for new hire they want people with experience. But how do you get the experience if you’ve never had one?

I am going to tell you what to do once you’ve learned ruby and rails and you need to land your first gig. This chicken-egg problem is the same problem newly-graduated student deal with on the job market. So they might find this advice useful as well. Everyone get to their first gig differently, but there is something that all newly hired developer have in common. I will soon explain you what it is but before that I want to show you how the path I took helped me landing my first gig.

The path that took me to rails was the entrepreneur path. I wanted to have a job security and learn skills that would allow me to build things on my own. As I was learning rails I was hit by many ideas and I would always try to build them for fun. I built more than 30 applications with various API and features. So I had to use a lot of gems, I ran into many bugs and deal with various issues. I would often try to replicate apps I admired to figure out how to build similar feature on my own application. One of the first app I released publicly was “Help Me Date You” an app where guys and girls would share advices, I also helped a friend build an app where people…