On Recruiters and Referrals

Every once in a while, I get a recruiter sending me an e-mail or pinging me on Skype. I turn most of them down simply because they fail at reading; it shouldn’t be hard to understand the simple sentence “I am only available for contractual or part-time work”.

But what irks me the most is how they follow up the inquiry:

Do you know of anyone who is available that you can refer for recruitment?

At this point, I politely respond that everyone I know is busy with their own work and hopefully the conversation ends there.

—

Why am I so annoyed at random people asking me for referrals?

First of all, I’m not lying with my “polite” answer. In the cutthroat market today for senior developers, you probably won’t find an available developer. At least, not for cheap.

But the real reason is that my conscience cannot allow me to refer other people to a company whose culture and practices I am not familiar with.

I came from a company who milked me for what I was worth then fired me for insubordination. Even now I am still suffering from the psychological effects of the whole ordeal.

So why would I risk dooming someone I know to a similar fate?

—

In short, if I am not familiar with you or your company, don’t expect any referrals from me anytime soon.

Baguhan Biyernes: Pag Natanggap sa Trabaho

Congratulations, natanggap ka na sa una mong trabaho! Pwede ka nang mamahinga at makakuha ng limpak-limpak na salapi mula sa iyong pinagtatrabahuhan!

Sa kasawiangpalad, hindi nagtatapos ang kwento mo sa pagtapos ng kolehiyo at pagkakuha ng trabaho. Marami ka pang kailangang gawin (at bigas na kakainin) bago ka maging isang ganap na software developer.

Continue reading “Baguhan Biyernes: Pag Natanggap sa Trabaho”

Producers and Consumers

Last week, a tweet from @webgeekph got me thinking about the current state of local “tach” scene:

Please don't send us press releases that talks about Telcos, Mobile Phones & Gadgets. We're a bit different to other tech blogs :D

Looking at the top local technology blogs, you’ll see that almost all of them are geared towards Consumers i.e. they do previews and reviews of products, press releases, and events that showcase products. This is not unexpected, when you write about things that people want to buy, your visitor count will be pretty high.

Unfortunately, we are not a nation of rich people. Focusing too much on consuming other countries’ products will not help us in the long run.

That said, we need to focus more on the Producers: the developers, designers, and business people. We need more coding and design-related blogs. We need sites and events that showcase the works of local talents. We need more groups like DevCon and WebGeek that promote and empower local developers. We need more events like Startup Weekend and Hack2Hatch to kickstart establishing a more dynamic local tech industry.

I’m just as excited as you when it comes to the latest games and gadgets, but until we shift some focus from Consumers to Producers, that mentality will only lead our country to lag further behind our neighbors.

Poignant Footnote

crushed melted cupcakes

My cupcakes served as a poignant footnote for yesterday’s event.

Don’t get me wrong, yesterday’s DevCup was on a different level compared to every local tech event so far. It had a very spacious yet air-conditioned venue with very fast (albeit unstable) internet access. There was an unbelievable amount of sponsors. The participants produced impressive output in such a short time frame, and they’re actually available online. And there’s no fucking irrelevant cosplay.

However, the glaring faults in the logistics left a bad taste in my mouth.

—

In my decade of organizing and criticizing events, I’ve come to learn two things that distinguish well-executed events from the rest:

  • Organizers that actively look for problems that need solving instead of merely solving problems as they are reported.

  • Organizers that focus only on managing the event and nothing else. I can even go as to say that they should not have fun until the event is over.

    If you want to have fun or mingle with random attendees, you should either implement a shifting work scheme or just not be part of the organizing team at all – some people hire event planners and coordinators so that they can just spend the event networking with the guests.

—

And what of the cupcakes?

We scraped the melted goo into a bowl and put it in the ref for dessert later.

Use Global .gitignore

Just a quick tip for those using Git and constantly keep on adding personalized settings to their project .gitignore: not everyone uses vim and have to worry about .swp files and not everyone uses a Mac and has Mac turds everywhere.

What every Git user should know is that there’s a way to set a global .gitignore file. According to the man page:

Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern. When deciding whether to ignore a path, git normally checks gitignore patterns from multiple sources, with the following order of precedence, from highest to lowest (within one level of precedence, the last matching pattern decides the outcome):

  • Patterns read from the command line for those commands that support them.

  • Patterns read from a .gitignore file in the same directory as the path, or in any parent directory, with patterns in the higher level files (up to the toplevel of the work tree) being overridden by those in lower level files down to the directory containing the file. These patterns match relative to the location of the .gitignore file. A project normally includes such .gitignore files in its repository, containing patterns for files generated as part of the project build.

  • Patterns read from $GIT_DIR/info/exclude.

  • Patterns read from the file specified by the configuration variable core.excludesfile.

GitHub’s help pages show how simple it is to set the global core.excludesfile setting:

Global .gitignore

A global .gitignore file can also be used by adding one to your global git config. For example, you might create the file ~/.gitignore_global and add some rules to it. To add this to your config, run git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global

To get you started, there’s an entire folder in GitHub’s .gitignore repository dedicated to global .gitignore entries where you can copy from.