Advice in your job search

Now, don't let me fool you into thinking that I am a professional; because I am not.  My only qualification for thinking that I have anything to share regarding the subject of job hunting is that I have always managed to find a job when I needed one.  So with that begin said let you give you a little background that will double as a disclaimer:  I am soon going to be graduating with a degree in a science field, I have a wife with a baby on the way.  I have lived in both urban cities and rural towns, and I am not the top of my class. I have interests in many areas, and consider myself handsome while not overly so.  Most of these things matter in a job search, if not to your employer they will to you.  Now...

1.  Be a charitable and giving person.  I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon.  A cute nickname coined for the scripture that we hold as canon:  The Book of Mormon, you can find more here.  We also believe in a little thing called tithing, which is a voluntary charitable donation to our church of one-tenth of my income.  I've always paid it and I always will because I know that I, nor my family will go hungry when I do.  It's not a matter of math though, it is a matter of faith.  As for those who belong to a faith of any kind, you may or may not agree with me but the scriptures are clear on this.  As for you that don't believe in this, then believe that by sharing what you have be it little or great, it will pay in dividends to do so.  Call it karma, the universe, or whatever:  By giving you will receive more in return.  I always intend to live this way and this is my first point of advice, is to be a charitable and giving person.

2.  Apply Everywhere.  Depending on your qualifications this may not be reasonable, but apply everywhere that you have even an inkling of qualifying.  Prioritize:  Apply to the places that interest you first, and then those places that sound like they could be something that you will enjoy, and then apply to those places that you are just qualified for (if you qualify, you at some point enjoyed doing what makes you so).  This is important as often it was the last place that I applied for that I got the job at.  Case in point:  When I got an internship at a local software company, it was in fact the last place that I qualified for that I was accepted at.

3.  Follow Up.  Call them, email them, thank them, sincerely.  Keep in contact with those people that you network with, check up on them, chat about whatever, talk about the jobs you applied for, let them know you are interested.  Another job I held for some time I was able to get because I called them every day or every other day asking them about how the interview and the hiring process was going.  Sometimes they may ask you not to call them, and generally it is a good idea to honor that:  irritating the HR people is akin to irritating the guards to the front door of the castle.  But by doing this (sincerely) you will indicate how interested you are in the job and your own confidence as a potential hire.

4.  Social Media.  Love it or hate it, it is here to stay.  Social media is an amazing medium to network and connect with people all over the world instantaneously.  It's amazingly powerful as both a tool and a means of destroying your future in any company.  Thankfully the world is still large, even if it is becoming more flat.  Get connected on every medium that you can reasonably keep up with:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Deviant Art, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc, etc.  Depending on your skill set and your audience, one may be more suited for you than another.  The key is to be involved in a positive way.  I am currently interviewing for a job after college because I kept my LinkedIn resume up-to-date and professional, the recruiters in fact found me.  The bottom line is that these are networking tools, a means of connecting you with people online and promoting relationships in real life.  They are not an end in themselves.  So if you suck at relationships in real life, chances are these tools will not help you in the same way that they help others with those skills.  Just something to keep in mind.

This post will be continued in a few days, just something to chew on for now.  

Watir Tutorial: Installation

This is actually the second tutorial that I have written for this, and I found that there were several things that I should have covered before trying to tackle text fields within a program, that if you are new at this, would be way beyond what you can do already anyways.  So let's start with something slightly easier, installation!

Really, this should be fairly easy to do, as Watir is well documented enough for installation as far as I can tell, but in case it isn't, I will go step by step through it here, for the benefit of those that come after (in memory of the pioneers). So let's start with Ruby installation then, in case you are completely new to this. 

A bit of history:  Ruby was developed in the mid 90's by Yukihiro Matsumoto, who goes by "Matz", and who also happens to be a member of the LDS Church.  Way to go!

In order to install Ruby on Windows, which if you are working with JD Edwards, I'm assuming you are using, go here.  This is the easiest way to do it, most people refer to it as the "one click installation" or something of the sort, making it pretty easy.

What this will do is put into your start menu a shortcut called "Start command prompt with ruby", pretty neat, huh? 

Now we need to update Ruby, and get the necessary "gems" (a fancy name for libraries, or pre-compiled and packaged bits of programs for our use), so that Watir will work correctly.

Go ahead and click on "Start command prompt with ruby", and follow the installation instructions here. 



Since we are concerned with using this for JD Edwards testing, we have a little bit more to do so that we can do everything that an end-user could and would do.  One of the problems I have encountered involved the menu-exits on the EnterpriseOne screen, and because of this we have to use a little work around for now, if I solve it later I will be sure to post about that, but for now we need to do a little bit more. 

Go ahead and click here to download a program called "AutoIt".  What this is used for is to emulate key strokes on the keyboard.  When using it, you have to put "require 'win32ole'" at the beginning of your script to load the correct library.  I will be going into it's use more later, in a different tutorial. 



The last thing we have to get, is a little program called TinyTDS.  Finding this little gem(literally and figuratively), took forever.  I want you, the reader, to appreciate just how much trouble this took me to find.  (Because obviously the finder has the harder task than the writer of the actual program).  We run our JDE databases off of SQL Server.  I've read just about every article and forum post out there about connecting ruby to the database and getting it to make some queries for testing.  Obviously I hadn't because I didn't find this program until I got a tip off about the creator of the SQL Server gem itself (@metaskills) whose website is here.  I found there the program that sounded like it would work, and lo and behold it did!

Now, I understand that not everyone out there, having trouble with their database playing nicely with Ruby will find a solution in this.  But maybe someone out there will.  Just remember to ask someone that knows better than you do, after you have done all you can.

TinyTDS has a great source of documentation, that takes a little decyphering but works like a charm, I will be detailing my findings here as well, but here is where to start. 

Remember to "require 'tiny_tds'" after you have executed "gem install tiny_tds" from the command prompt with ruby.