Job Hunting and More
A couple of weeks ago, I officially decided to get out of the Air Force. So that means I’m looking for a job. Right now I’m looking in Kentucky(but not closer than 100 miles from Cincinnati), Tennessee, and the Carolinas, with most of my energy focused on the Carolinas. I’m really hoping to find something in the Raleigh or Research Triangle Area of NC since it seems to be such a great place to live and work, though I’m not limiting myself at this point. One up side of being an IT guy is that I can pretty much work anywhere with computers, which is just about everywhere these days. I’d appreciate any advice, leads, or any help at all. My resume is here.
So far the biggest problem I’m finding is that while I feel I’m qualified for a great many jobs, I’m having trouble “proving it”, mostly when it comes to Linux admin jobs. I use Linux at home all the time, there aren’t even any Windows machines in my house, and have years of experience using it, but unfortunately my professional work in the Air Force has been almost all Windows. While I will work as a Windows admin(servers, I don’t really want to do PC support anymore), I would really like a shot at Linux. Just for my own purposes of brushing up on things in case I do get a Linux job, I’ll be setting up a new backup server this weekend, and I’m probably going with CentOS for no other reason that it being mostly Red Hat.
I’ve also pretty much decided to stop working on what will probably be a mostly worthless online degree. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to flex my long dormant programming muscles. I’ve got a few projects planned over the next few months. One that I’m most excited about kind of goes back to my beginnings. My first programing project was a picture view written in Visual Basic. While it wasn’t much to look at, I was still proud of it. This new project will go just above picture viewer into some organizing territory, and this time it will be written in Python/GTK+ and targeted at Linux. While I’m writing it as more of a programming exercise and am not aiming for anything close to iPhoto or Picasa right away, I do hope I stick with it as a long term project.
That will cover some Python and desktop programming warm ups, but another area that I’m not as rusty in, but still need some refreshing is web development. What I want to do with this is just a little recipe database for use inside my home network. With it I’ll be brushing up on my PHP, HTML, JavaScript(maybe some AJAXy stuff), and especially MySQL(I really need to work on my database programming). If I get right to it and don’t get too distracted, this could easily be a weekend project, but I don’t see myself getting that much free time.
Finally, I plan to branch out into something new, mobile development. This one is the most distant, and most subject to being forgotten about. I don’t even know exactly what type of program I want to write yet, but I do want to do a little bit of Android programming. I also need the Java practice since it’s one of those things I’ve learned in school, but never actually put into practice outside of the assignments in class. Overall I think they are some solid projects and small enough in scale to make them quite attainable, assuming I can just find the spare time.
