As previously mentioned, Perth is having it’s second BarCamp, and in true unconference style, I’m not going to organise a talk - you are going to do it for me.
I’m running a Q&A, on all things web, so if you have a burning question about PHP, Rails, JavaScript, CSS, Apache, whatever - save then up for Saturday the 10th of May, and see if you can stump me 
I was browsing through some ruby blogs and came across this crazy meme - shell command history distributions.
By running the following command in bash (zsh needs a -n 1000 after history apparently)
history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
and you’ll get the top ten most used shell commands. Mine are:
259 ENV=test
45 cd
36 vi
36 ls
34 svn
18 script/spec
12 rake
9 fg
8 cap
7 script/generate
I’ve obviously been doing a lot of testing on a project I’m working on (Alas, it’s PHP). Most of the other calls are pretty rails centric though
I wouldn’t mind seeing what the rest of the Perth Ruby developer’s histories look like
That’s right folks is time for some unconference goodness in the West - pencil (nay, ink) in 10 May 2008 for the second Perth BarCamp!
Go an check out the wiki for all the details, sign up to the newsletter and buy a t-shirt.
Oh, and if you think you might be interested in sponsoring this year’s BarCamp, send an email to events@webindustry.asn.au
Being an active member of the local web community, I’m often speaking to students at Port80 meetups, about the best way of getting work, and it isn’t an easy question to answer - and it seems that I’m not the only one - both Alex and Gary have recently blogged about apprenticeships, graduate programmes and internships.
The problem we seem to have at the moment, in Perth anyway, is the number of companies large enough to be able to take on interns and run graduate programmes is pretty small. I’ve seen this in the software industry - I remember vividly the last 6 weeks of final year, where every soon-to-be graduate was sending resumes to the big three software companies that ran graduate programmes - the numbers didn’t add up as there was many more applications, than positions. Of course, there is more than three software companies here - however many of them looked for people with some industry experience.
So the problem is a chicken and egg one - no experience means no job, and no job means no experience. I think the education institutions need to get a bit creative with how they are teaching. A perfect example of this is the Centre for Software Research at UWA run by my old honours supervisor and mentor, Dr. David Glance. I was lucky enough to be the first student to go through this system, and not only has it given me some great contacts, it gave me valuable experience. They take internal university projects, and get final year students and graduates to work on them. They also take on some external projects, the proceeds of which pay for the running of the centre - and the student wages. This is a win-win on so many levels.
Of course these programs aren’t a silver bullet, and take resources, but in my opinion they a big step forward from handing someone a certificate and then throwing them in the deep end of the real world.
Time for the second installment of Ruby on Rails Oceania - Perth Edition.
It’s once again at the Silicon Beach House:
Ruby on Rails User Group Perth second edition: 24 Apr 2008 at 5:30 until about 7:30 at the Level 2, 90 King St Perth WA
I think we should have some presentations this month, so bring you laptop and your speaking shoes. Oh, and if someone wants to put their hand up to buy a carton, that would be much appreciated.
See you then.