robinwarren

Last year I started thinking I might one day go freelancing, so started attending relevant meetups and trying to figure out who to connect with locally. It was partly that which lead me to build the http://jobstractor.com (shameless plug) to try and find who was hiring near me so I could connect with them on twitter and start getting myself known. I've not made the leap to freelancing as of yet but networking has I think got me in a far better position should I want to in future.

To the OP, I did find that a lot of people in the local freelancing community were strongly connected with each other. A little bit of networking could go a long way and in my experience there has always been people looking for good developers.

If these numbers stack up (see other comments) then any budding entrepreneurs out there could do worse than to get into some Android development. I appreciate the arguments about how iOS users purchase more apps but I think if android user numbers are growing then that balance will change as the demographics change.

Comparing the number of these tablets about with the amount of development work available should give some idea of how many apps are being developed currently. The stats here http://jobstractor.com/monthly-stats (my site) suggest android apps could still be relatively wide open.

http://jobstractor.com/#!/Washington has one Python job at the moment. Also worth checking on a regular basis (or sign up for the weekly email). For people looking for internships as one commenter was, I noticed a few in the current results as well.

The tweets in question were from the #Code2011 hash tag where devs were saying what languages they used in 2011 and from tweets collected by my site http://jobstractor.com which tries to find people hiring devs on Twitter. Hope that sounds a bit more sane :)

Internships occasionally turn up on my site, http://jobstractor.com/#!/santa%20cruz

Such as this one

http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=2364681&...

Don't know the location so well, so sorry if that's not exactly right

I was listening to http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ recently and they were talking about http://www.earthclassmail.com/ which sounds like a pretty cool service. I've no experience myself yet but considering putting my own home address down for my business in future.

I've come from a Java background to node.js and have enjoyed it. I'd tried a few Java frameworks for web development (Grails to a large extent and lift/spring to a small extent) but was never really happy with them. I dabbled with RoR but found it too alien. I've got no criticism to level at RoR it just didn't feel right to me, possibly if I'd continued I'd either have a strong opinion about why it's wrong or would have learned to love it. Eventually I picked up node and really enjoyed using it to develop my latest site and will probably continue to use it in future if I can and if it makes sense. I'd recommend it to any dev looking for something to new to try out.

thanks for the mention. I'm hoping to improve http://jobstractor.com in the new year so any feedback from HNers would be welcome.

not startup specific but I try to filter out jobs posted elsewhere (recruiters/jobs boards) so still a useful resource for job seekers.

http://jobstractor.com/

I'd suggest reading this if you want to be a technical co founder. There's more to running a successful web app than building it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Operations-Keeping-Data-Time/dp/...

Very nice. One suggestion, it'd be nice if the selection/options updated as you typed. ie typing 06 scrolled to show 06:00, 06:15 etc. or filtered the possible options to only show those matching /06/.

awesome

no problem, didn't assume it was criticism :)

I'm planing to start tagging each tweet with keywords, which in itself may help sift some spam out. But as you pointed out a number of them are very vague which is why I've held of allowing people to filter results for fear of them missing some which may be relevant to them. I'll probably just suggest a wider result set or search for them as appropriate.

I'm not following links at the moment, just pulling data out of the tweets themselves. I've had some success filterring spam out but intend to imropve that further as soon as I get a chance. There are some more fairly simple things I can do, but there's probably a limit to how good I can make that. As for the vagueness, I think that's in part down to the 140 char restriction, people choose to put the tweet out and hope people will click through to find out more. Hopefully if I start scraping the additional data it'll not turn the results upside down but just level most of them up.

very intersting, thanks. That'll be good to compare against for future updates to the stats.

I actually stripped wordpress out as a skillset as I wasn't 100% certain I could match it to PHP programming skills. It did crop up a fair amount though, along with drupal and there's certainly a lot of those jobs about.

yep, I map django to python and RoR or rails to ruby. With care taken not to double count in a single tweet of course.

not sure if I've got the data to work that out right now, but will consider it in future if I can work it out. Cheers, Robin.

very intersting point. It'll be interesting perhaps to try and test that by correlating freelance, contract, fulltime with certain skills. Something I'll add to the list for future investigations.

Thanks.

yeah... I figured it did represent something distinct in peoples hiring intentions so was worth splitting out. From a straight language POV you'd be right but I think it would miss some interesting subtelty in the stats. Also, from talking to people hiring android devs I know they'd rather they had adnroid development experience, not just any old java experience.

Maybe I should put a few different versions together to allow for a straight language shoot out and then also capture some of the other interesting comparrisons separately.

no idea I'm afraid, a whole lot of stufff is built in it. Glad you find it interesting, I'll be updating the stats each month so maybe we can see if PHP is on a down trend or just holding the top spot solidly.

interesting site. A bit noisy at first so I had to struggle to work out what was going on.

I'd suggest maybe defaulting to Deals or Events instead of everything. That way there's something more useful immediately for people landing on your site.

Best of luck, Robin

it'll be interesting to see the fate of flash over the coming months I think

I'm working to remove them, but it's all automated so some currently still sneak through.

Signed up for hackerjobs.co.uk just before I posted this actually, although it'd be nice to have a bit more info on that page about what it will be.

I was going to caveat things more in the description but wanted to avoid going off on a ramble. Didn't want to insult anyone, so sorry if I made you sad on a Friday. I know there are good guys out there and I've been lucky enough to deal with some of them. However there are sadly some recruiters giving the profession a bad name, but I think you know all about that.

Nice to see more company friendly/recruiter unfriendly job boards out there. My own effort http://jobstractor.com scrapes jobs from twitter, removing the jobs boards and recruiters is getting some traction.

Have you plans to improve the search on the site? I think that would be the biggest benefit to me. And are all the jobs on there still active? Ie some are quite old but do employers remove them once they're filled?

All the best with UseTheSource, Robin

Sorry for the irritation, as I say it's a work in progress including filtering some things which shouldn't be in there.

$$ hope no one has a problem with me mentioning my site

www.jobstractor.com

There's about 2000 jobs a week on there. I got an email today from soneone who has already found work through the site so it does work. It's still a work in progress, but improving all the time. Happy job hunting :)