Trust yourself over others

Lately I've been shutting myself off from the world a bit. Or rather, from social media and instant messaging. I'm still in the mood for producing, which is why I'm still doing this blog and an occasional tweet as well. It's the consuming part that bores me. Maybe later I'll pick up an interest in it again. But not now.

I've been focusing on two things: working on a website project as a hobby and looking for jobs. The job search isn't going well, but that's because I'm not looking very hard. If I lowered my standards a little I could probably find a job sooner, but since I'm not in any particular hurry I've decided to try and make the most of it. On that note, my opinion of recruiters is dropping every day. They all contact you full of enthusiasm, promising you 10 interviews within the week, but most of them didn't even call me back after the first call. The ones that did were divided into two groups. One group was genuinely enthusiastic and technically well informed, but as time passed they either stopped contacting me or presented me with lame jobs that didn't match my skills at all. The second group did that from the beginning. Some of the company names presented to me by recruiters were high profile, some weren't, but they all had one thing in common: the job description was boring. Maybe recruiting works better for people in sales or some other non-technical field, but so far I would suggest looking for opportunities yourself if you want a good tech job. It seems I'm not the only one who came to this conclusion.

During the jobquest I happened to come across an ad for Django developer that looked genuinely interesting. Quite unlike the dozens of Java ads I've seen for the past month, which all looked alike. I decided to try applying for it, and figured it would be a good idea to have my current hobby project online as a reference. Which meant a lot of work in getting it presentable. For the past week or so I've been spending a lot of time on it, both in the back-end and in the front-end. The website is now near minimum-viable-product so I thought I'd talk about it a bit more. I've been using the internal name 'MediaList' for the project, but decided to rename the project after finding out that all domainnames similar to that were taken already... As the saying goes, girls are like domain names: the good ones are already taken. (But you can still get one from a strange country).

As I was developing the site, strange thoughts entered my head: of fame and fortune, wealth and riches. I would place ads on the site, introduce a paid subscription service so money would flow in and I would never have to work again. As I mentioned before, hanging around in teh startup-frenzied internetz tends to put happy thoughts into your head. I have since repented and forced myself to face the reality, which is that I'll probably never get more than 10000 users, and most of those users won't be willing to pay. Since the whole reason for the site's existence is to fix a pet peeve of mine (well, and to flex my developmental muscles a bit) I've decided not to take any action towards monetizing it. If ever the hosting costs become too high I'll think about it again, but for now it's just a happy hobby project.

At this point I was getting ready to launch into a full explanation of the site, but I realized that that might be a bit much, especially before I have something I can show you. Instead, I'll ask you all to wait a bit longer as I solve the last big issues before release. This week should be it :)

Posted in Tech , Thoughts

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