Caydel’s SEO Blog

So, today begins my ‘official’ job hunt.

I will be graduating in a few months with my B.Sc. in Computer Science, with a Minor in Mathematics, with a good chunk of Physics in there. I am hoping to get a job either as an SEO, or as a programmer utilizing my talents in Java (SE or EE) or Ruby on Rails. I think I have a lot to offer employers, so we will see how it goes.

So far, I have a Monster.ca account created with my resume on it, and I have applied to a few jobs through it. I’ve even fired off a request to the Canadian Forces to see if they have anything suited to my education. There don’t seem to be tons of openings so far for entry-level jobs though - most listings I am finding on job sites require a minimum of 3-5+ years of experience.

The main problem I am trying to overcome is a lack of professional related job experience - since I am fresh out of school, I only have a coop and a consulting gig to place on my resume. While I have held a number of other jobs over the summers while I was in school, none of them are related. Should I put them on my resume?

Most of my resume information is available on my as well. If anyone knows of any openings that could use a bright, talented, and flexible CS grad with a good knowledge of a bunch of different disciplines (SEO, Programming, Web Design, heck… beekeeping, treeplanting, cabinet making, construction and more!), or can suggest any other places to look for jobs, feel free to pass on the information to me, either by commenting or emailing me at . (remove random underscores :p).

Since this is my first serious job hunt, I really appreciate any and all help and tips! I would really appreciate hearing from any recruiters about any suggestions they could make!

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So, today I learned about RJS for Rails… RJS, or Remote Javascript, is a method which allows you to write complex AJAX scripts using Ruby syntax etc. Using RJS templates, it is possible to create extensive effects.

Now Rails has for a long time naturally includes some built-in functionality for AJAX, via the PrototypeHelper and ScriptaculousHelper libraries. Unfortunately, these two helpers would only allow one element in the DOM to be updated in an AJAX operation. That did not suit for what I wanted to do. Luckily, since Rails 1.0, RJS has been including. In addition to providing a simpler way to write AJAX functionality into your project, it also allows you to modify as many parts of the DOM as you wish per AJAX operation.

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any good tutorials concerning RJS on the Internet. After looking for a while, RyanB from the Rails Forum suggested purchasing RJS Templates for Rails from O’Reilly. This is a great book - it comes as a PDF, and is only 60 pages or so, but is jam-packed with information on RJS, with code examples, and everything.

Because of this, I have been able to start implementing some AJAX functionality on a project for my employer. The visual effects from script.aculo.us are pretty cool, but the real benefits come from the increase of useability for the end-user. No longer does a user have to wait for page reloads etc. everytime he changes a vaue on the page. Plus, it is simple to link the AJAX pieces into your database, yielding an extremely ‘live’ page.
So, the moral of the story is, if you utilize Rails together with AJAX in any way, look into RJS - it can and will save you tons of time and energy, while vastly improcing your site design and useability!

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Ok, well, Rails is cool, as you can see in my previous post.

The only issue is, there doesn’t seem to be any decent editors which allow you to program in it quite fluently. I mean there are enough IDEs out there that handle Ruby, but none seem to handle it well - as fluently as anyone would want.

What I mean is, there are no IDEs which handle Ruby the way Eclipse handles Java. Is there anyone out there who has found such a thing?

Too bad TextMate isn’t available on Windows and/or Linux. From what I’ve seen of the screencasts at http://www.rubyonrails.com , Textmate seems to be the editor of choice. That almost tempts me to get a Mac as my Ruby development machine.

To be honest, I’ve been considering that for a bit now. Unfortunately, I don’t want to leave behond the priveleges of my Linux system. I am just too familiar with Linux to just dump it. And I am required to use Windows at work, since much of the software we use here isn’t compatible with Mac or Linux.

Too Bad!

Anyways, I guess I will just keep trying to hack it with SCite and the command line. That seems to be the most efficient path at this point.

*groan*

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Hello, and welcome to the initial post on the InfoHatter Blog.

So, I am a Computer Science Major at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. Currently I am on a coop assignment at All Cover Portable Systems doing some programming/web design for them.

Anyways, I’ve just gotten started with the Ruby programming language, well, Ruby on Rails actually. I won’t tell too much about th elanguage - you can find out alot more on the link I posted. My initial impression of it is that it is really cool - I can quickly build functional skeletons for my programs that just really need some graphics and ‘niceties’ built onto them to become fully funtional. It seems quick and clean.

Apart from some difficulties initially understanding the Ruby associations, and how to arrange them properly with the database keys, foreign keys etc. I have picked up on it rather easily. Now it is just a matter of fleshing it out a bit. ie - I had the belongs_to :item and has_many :item lines mixed up - I had a few done the right way, a few done the wrong way.

Now, though, all my models are in good shape, Time to start making the views nice. At any rate, I am going to work on the base layout. I can’t find any good editor for .rhtml files, though. I tried setting up the RubyWeaver extension for Dreamweaver, but the site for that is down. I guess I will attempt it directly in RadRails or UltraEdit… There has to be a better way to do this.

I am building a small app for my employer. The goal is to keep track of job sites, and the operations performed at them in a convenient, easy to navigate, even-my-grandmother-could-use-this way. I may post the source when I am done, depending on my employer’s wishes, of course.

Anyways, I just want to give a recommendation for, ‘Ruby For Rails’ by David A. Black. I purchased this book to get me started on Rails. Now, I have heard that ‘Agile Web Development With Ruby on Rails’ is a better book, but so far I am happy with this one - I may pick up AWDWROR at a later date.

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