Since leaving behind the Law and choosing to reside in rural England I have struggled more than somewhat in finding a job. Shropshire is a lovely county which I adore and do not intend to leave save by the force of man or fate. However. IT is not a sector that exists in any meaningful way outside of London or a few other pockets of the UK: Brighton Cambridge Bristol being a few. Everywhere else it is dreary webshops and random companies sprinkled about thinly. In my area it is all c# or PHP. To say that I find these languages dull would be like saying “the Greeks have financial problems”.
My own programming love is Erlang but I despite the revelation that it underpinned the success of WhatsApp it is also a London only gig. Most Erlangistas seem to be grizzled of hacks who cut their teeth programming on punch cards. From what I can gather most Erlangers who’ve been only been coding in it for 3 or 4 years are regarded as n00bs. I’ve dabbled on and off for a couple of years but not completed anything: my code so far has just been incomplete fleshing out ideas for projects and learning my way. I’ve not used Dialyzer, packaged up code or used a remote shell to hot-code swap or any of those glamorous things that make Erlang so special. So clearly I’m not ready for a heavy duty Erlang role. Given there are no Erlang junior dev roles anywhere in the UK apparently it seems I can only crack on with hobby projects and release as open sores software on Github if I want credibility.
In the meantime I have to piss about with polishing up my old PHP skills in the hope of landing something tolerable. Yuch,
Writing Bugs For Fun and Profit 