You might think that promoting yourself means being a big egomaniac and bullshitting people into hiring you. Some people get jobs this way, true enough, but they don’t get to keep them. The really good people are the ones who know their skills and can communicate those skills in a comprehensive way.

Here are some tips I’ve given to people in the past.

Do more than course work
There’s a lot to be said for getting good marks in school and having that great GPA. However, if you come to a job with only course work, you’ll be seen as someone who’s green and inexperienced. As much as the faculty like to pretend they are giving students real-world experiences, they are not. In class, if you make a mistake, you might lose some points or fail the test but in the real world, people lose their homes, their insurance, their medication, their life savings, or their lives.

Get experience doing some consulting. There are lots of opportunities for you out there if you just look for them. You can learn things on your own and then go get a freelance job.

Join an Open-Source project
When you go to an interview, wouldn’t it be nice to show people that your name is out there? It is for me. When I talk with people, I can reference articles I’ve written, patches I’ve submitted, and mailing list questions I’ve answered.

Internships suck
I hire students at the university. Most of them who have left me for the summer to go on internships say the same thing over and over… “I learned more here than I did on my internship… it was so easy. All I did was sit around.” Internships often provide a chance for a job, but don’t count on learning anything useful there. You might end up working on legacy VB 4 code like one guy I know, or just copying documents all day. Neither of these guys got jobs at the place they interned. They did get jobs elsewhere, but they got them because of the experience they earned working for me and going above and beyond the call of duty on their own.

Close your Facebook and Myspace accounts
Employers look at these to see what kind of a person you are. Are you a potential liability to them? Do you get drunk and stoned after work? Do you have political beliefs that clash with those of your supervisor? All of these are factors when job hunting because it’s part of a background check.

Oh, employers also look at your friends’ pages too. They might find some dirt on you on a friend’s blog.

Now, I’m not telling you that you can’t drink, get high, or vote Libertarian or Democrat or Republican… I’m just saying that you might want to watch what you have up there about you out there on the Internets.

Keep your skills sharp
The thing that’s paying your bills right now won’t always pay the bills later. While you’re the master Java guru, someone else is learning Ruby. While you’re making table-based web sites, someone else is doing things with CSS and Ajax. You simply cannot allow yourself to rest on your laurels for any time. Your job does not end when you leave work. You have an obligation to yourself to keep up on the new technologies or you will find yourself outsourced. In the eyes of your managers, an Indian programmer can write better code than you because he can write it faster for less pay. What are you going to do to keep your job?

Be innovative
Think of the most innovative thing you can do to sell yourself to a potential employer. Think about how much effort software companies put into marketing their products and do the same for yourself. Make some color copies of screens you’ve made or websites you’ve built. Think about “personal brand identity.”

If you want a job, you have to earn it. Everyone else is graduating with coursework under their belt. What sets you apart from them? Just because you’ve gone through a degree program doesn’t mean anyone owes you a job. Go get yours.

Now that I’ve depresed you a bit, here are some job hunting resources.

Top IT Organizations

http://technology.monster.com/articles/topit

Seven Tips for Social Networking Online

http://technology.monster.com/articles/socialnetworks/

Social Software and You: The Virtual Handshake

http://technology.monster.com/articles/virtualhandshake/

Resume Tips for Technology Professionals

http://technology.monster.com/articles/restips/

Show Your Skills on Your IT Resume

http://technology.monster.com/articles/techreshowto/

Showcase ROI on Your Resume

http://resume.monster.com/articles/resumeroi/

10 Tech Interview Errors

http://interview.monster.com/articles/techerrors/

Tips for Technical Job Interviews

http://technology.monster.com/articles/interviewing/

Are You More Than Just a Techie?

http://technology.monster.com/articles/notjust/

You must also not be running KDE when you do this. At the graphical log-in screen, press CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a prompt.

Install YUM. If you don’t have this installed, place the 4th CD in the drive. Look for the file ‘yum-2.2.0-0.fc3.rpm’ and copy it to your home folder. Once copied, install it using the standard rmp -ivh ~/yum-2.2.0-0.fc3.rpm

Add the repository to your /etc/yum.conf file.

[kde-redhat-kde-stable]
name=kde-redhat.org (kde-stable)
baseurl=http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/whitebox/el4/i386/stable

[kde-redhat-kde-stable-all]
name=kde-redhat.org (kde-stable-all)
baseurl=http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/all/stable

Get and install the public key. At the prompt, type

Finally, make a script file that you can use to actually call the update command. That way, you can just run the script instead of the long command.

#! /bin/sh

sudo yum update kde qt arts kdelibs kdebase gtk+ gtk2 redhat-artwork

The process takes a little while, and you will be prompted before any files are downloaded. To make it interactive, use the -y switch (see the yum –help command).

Log out of your session, press CTRL+ALT+F7 to return to the graphical login screen, and then log in to a KDE session. You should now see the new version number appear, complete with Redhat artwork!

If you want a fun toy to play with for developing web pages and PHP apps, install KDE Webdev which is a collection of tools including Quanta which is now part of KDE. To install it, simply type yum install kdewebdev as root.

Comments are welcome. Since I’m a relatively new Linux user, maybe you might have a better way of doing this. Let me know.

• CTRL+T (Control + T) opens a new blank tab.
• Instead of clicking the Back or Forward buttons, hold down the Shift key and turn the scroll wheel to back or forward. You can also use
  alt+left for back and alt+right for forward.
• Use the scroll wheel button to click on the Back or Forward buttons to open the previous or next page in a new tab
• Use the scroll wheel button to close a tab.
  • Type about:config and filter for middle and set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false on Linux or this won’t work!
• By default, Firefox uses “I’m Feeling Lucky” for non-URLs typed into its address bar. You can change the behavior by going to about:config and setting keyword.URL to the appropriate URL
  • I’m Feeling Lucky http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&btnI=&q=
  • Browse By Name http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
  • -Google search http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=
• If you’re on a webpage which has URLs on it that aren’t links, you can highlight them and drag them straight onto the Tab Bar to open them.

However, you may want to enable this service temporarily to share some files. Here’s a quick script I wrote to let you do just that.

@echo off
sc.exe config lanmanserver start= auto
sc.exe start lanmanserver
ipconfig
echo Server service is ready to go.
pause
sc.exe stop lanmanserver
sc.exe config lanmanserver start= disabled

Type “about:config” in the adress bar (no quotation marks).

Find these options, double click each one and change to below values:.

.

network.http.max-connections: 48.

network.http.max-connections-per-server: 24.

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy: 12.

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 6.

network.http.pipelining: true.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 32.

network.http.proxy.pipelining: true.

.

Close Firefox and enjoy the faster browsing.