Hi everyone.
I am an old school geek trying to get a foot in the door of the new school. I started programming in 1979. (yes you read that right). I majored in CS before the internet. I was a PC tech and LAN admin for 10 years from '94 to 2003. Spent 3 years doing some private IT work and managing a restaurant. I went back to Full-time IT (this time as a Full-stack developer) in 2006 Building a VB.NET database tool for a small company that also used extensive XML, SQL and was able to use and read SQLserever, Oracle, DB2, and MS Access. I did that for 6 years then rewrote the entire program (200,000+ lines) for the LAMP stack. However, being a lifelong windows guy I used WAMP server. So I spent 3 years learning and building the web version with JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, CSS, MySQL, XML, JSON, jQuery, AJAX and a little known suite of JS visual APIs called dHTMLx (for toolbars, trees, layouts, context menus, etc.). Then I got a job in a larger company working on a huge enterprise suite in VB.NET and learned Entity framework, Team foundation server, and the Agile/SCRUM method. I was laid off with 6 others after terrible sales last November.
Since then I have been retraining myself in ASP.NET MVC, C#, Bootstrap, more entity framework, Razor, etc. I now have a modern homepage in this technology hosted on Azure, as well as an apache website with my huge LAMP project. Check it out here: http://www.tomtekdev.com
All of that said, I still have no bites at all. I get phone interviews and do very well (recruiter’s feedback) but everyone wants 3-5 years ASP.NET/C# and I never get a second look.
So I guess I have 2 questions:
- Is there a new technology that is in demand, that I can getup to speed with and get a job, with only beginner experience as long as I can show those skills on a website.
- Would I be better off looking for individual gigs or contracts, because I also have my own computer consulting business, just no customers. If so, any good ideas as to how to go about getting customers, or where to look for individual contracts? (BTW freelancer sucks, everyone there is willing to do tons of work for essentially nothing.) I worked at home for 8 of the past 10 years, so my professional network is almost nothing.
As I said, I have 10 years Desktop, laptop, network support and Admin. and 10 years development in VB.NET windows Apps(7 years) and 3 years WAMP stack. (Also worked in SVN, Git, TFS and have a GitHub and an Azure cloud site).
Any and all advice is most appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Tom
http://www.tomtekdev.com