In my previous blog-post I mentioned, briefly, that I'd posted a couple of adverts on Reddit looking for work.

To give more detail I did three things:

• I made a brief blog-post on the Debian-Administration website, highlighting what I thought were interesting/useful/expected skills and experience I have.
• I updated the site to give that link a little prominance, because .. I can.
• I paid Reddit $10 to advertise links to that blog-post. ($5 being the minimum you could spend on any targetted advert.)

The advertisement was set to be shown in /r/edinburgh (where I live), and /r/sysadmin (where I thought some people might look if they were struggling for help).

The advertising on Reddit was painless to setup, and the traffic stats were interesting, but even though this worked out well I'm a little loathe to repeat the process - since the "non-sterling transaction fee" from my bank effectively doubled my budget.

I received a few (private) emails and comments, along with the expected grammar corrections. The end result was that I received contact from an American company founder who seemed interested.

He allowed me to write some code to solve a fun problem, appeared to enjoy the code I sent (Ruby code for dealing with (exim) email spam, that's as specific as I will be). The end result was a three month contract, which we obviously hope will lead to more permanent work.

Anyway I thought this was an atypical route to find a work, and was about a million times nicer than working with recruiters, so .. consider this documentation!

In other news it is now 10pm and I need to go to the gym and pub, in that order.

Tags: work | 2 comments