How to get job

One of the wonderful things about DDD North yesterday was that a bunch of developers (and me) spent a big chunk of their lunch hour in a meeting with students telling them how get a job in this business. There was a lot of good discussion which I’ve boiled down into 10 points. I apologise if I’ve misquoted or misconstrued folks who were there - feel free to hit me in the comments…

• Employers hire people who “get stuff done”. So, get some stuff done and tell the world about it.

• Employers also hire people who they know about. So, get out there and meet them. Join user groups, go to conferences, contribute to open source. If you get it right, they call you before you call them.

• Keep your bio brief and to the point but put in things that differentiate you from the rest. Recruiters are busy people. Put your technical skills and project experience right at the front of your details to encourage them to read more.

• Don’t say “I can’t do that”. “I’ll find out more and get back to you tomorrow.” is a much better response. Then find out more and get back to them tomorrow.

• The recruitment process can be a snake pit. Be prepared for industrial scale rejection and duplicity.

• Get yourself into a situation where you can get lucky. And if you aren’t lucky try to take something from the experience and go on to the next one.

• Work with people who aren’t software developers and learn to see the world through their eyes. Solutions aren’t just built by coders, there are lots of other folks involved and you need to be able to work with them.

• Consider everything you do in terms of “how can I use this to promote my brand”. Even “train wreck” projects can be useful if you describe what you learned from them.

• Keep learning. Your knowledge has a half-life of a few years. It will start to decay in usefulness as soon as you’ve learned it. (Although you should also remember that there are universal constants in terms of how you work with people)

• Stay nice. I’ve found that nice people end up the happiest.

Making Stuff at DDD North

What a great ajudience looks likE…

Well, that’s the presentation over. It’s been a while since I took an audience picture. I took this at the end of the presentation too. And they were still smiling. Thanks for that.

I’ve put the slide deck for the presentation here. If you actually decide to make something it would be lovely to hear from you about it. And if you are in Hull you are welcome to come along to our Hardware Meetups. They take place every couple of weeks in Hull MakerSpace at the top of the Central Library. The next one is on Wednesday 5th of March starting at around 5:00pm.

You don’t have to bring any hardware to the meetup, although I like to take things along to talk about. If you are thinking of building something (or if you aren’t sure what to build) then it woudl be lovely to see you for a chat about it.

Thanks to Derek for the picture

Ready for DDD North tomorrow

I’ve got all of my gadgets together, and most of them working, for my session at DDD North tomorrow morning. I’m quite looking forward to it, which is probably more than the audience are…..

Pico Powered Camera Shutter Controller

Click the image to view the video. It’s only 30 seconds…

Sometimes things work in spite of what you do, rather than because of it. With this in mind I present my PICO Powered Camera Shutter Controller. It works. It has quite a few batteries inside. It makes interesting noises when it has to work hard. I’ll show you the insides if you come to my talk at DDD North in a couple of weeks.

Shutter Success

Well, all it took was a bigger servo and a battery pack. I’ve now got a computer controlled shutter. Now all I need to do is build the box, add the controls and find a two foot long cable release that works….

Levelled Up Servo

I really, really want to be able to control the shutter on my Polaroid camera. So I’m in the process of building an actuator which will push the plunger on the cable release. Version 1 was a bust. Almost literally. The shutter button on the camera hardly moved while the servo made some very unhappy noises.

You can see version 2 above. Considerably more beefy. This servo actually contains metal gears. I’ve done a quick test and it seems to work, which is nice. Next thing is to build a cable release holder and attach it to the actuator.

If you want to see it in action, sign up for DD North and come along to my session.

Remote Camera Control Fun at DDD North 2025

It would be lovely if it worked…

I want to take pictures of folks at my DDD North Session next month. And not just with any camera. I want to use my “self-fogging” Polaroid Camera. You’ll find out how to build your own if you come along. Snag is I don’t want to have to press the shutter button myself. I mean I could, but I really want to control the camera for a brief timed exposure (around half a second or so) for each shot and I’d love them all to be totally consistent.

I found a design for a remote controlled camera release which looked like a good starting point so last night I printed out the actuator and today I printed the box. I then put it all together, connected a microcontroller and fired it up.

It doesn’t work. Not a problem with the device itself, it can trigger the shutter on a lot of my cameras. But not on my “self-fogger”. The shutter on early Polaroid cameras is cocked as you press it. This makes the mechanism simpler and less prone to wear, but it means that you have to work quite hard to push the button down. Something which my little 9gm servo is just not equal to. So I’ve switched to a much beefier servo. We’ll see how it goes.

If you want to find out out how it all turns out, and maybe even get a ready fogged snap of yourself, make sure to sign up for DDD North on the 22nd February and come along to my session.