Resources for aspiring software developers in St. Louis
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We know St. Louis is not a hot (or cool) place as Seattle/Silicon Valley in terms of job opportunities for software engineers. But St. Louis area have plenty of opportunities from small to large organizations, with a diverse industries. There are also many resources for aspiring software developers who like to join the industry.
The No. 1 resource I recommend is LaunchCode. It was relatively new, but I personally knew 3 people got internship position through them, and 2 of them received full time offers, in last few years. They seemed really got the non-traditional students/newbies connected with the industry.
The No. 2 resource I like to mention is all these “user groups”, e.g., the old ones such as St. Louis Java User Group, St. Louis .Net User Group, St. Louis Unix User Group. They are mostly free and open to everyone, here is a list of monthly calendar compiled by the good folks at sluug. There are also some groups concentrate on newer technologies, such as iOS, Android, Angular JS Group, and functional and dynamic languages. Relate to the last one, there is also a conference on coding StrangeLoop which is considered good in the midwest (if not the US). I have been to most of the user group meetings and StrangeLoop conference (a while ago, when I’ve not got busy with 2 young kids), and I think they are good in terms of two aspects: 1) Learn new trends on the technology; 2) Get to know some of the people (they are not all nerds 🙂 Last but not least for user groups sometimes they have free food or door prizes: they are usually sponsored by the hosting companies or the recruiters who are looking for developers.
This is also my last bullet point. The recruiters. I know in this day of the age, we have a somewhat love/hate relationship with recruiters because they spam us on the phone, and on linkedIn. But looking at another way, for many openings esp. contractor positions are coming through recruiters. And also keep in mind not all recruiters are the same, there are some (if not a few) who are really good at finding positions and are also pleasant to work with. Not all are like car salesperson (for that matter, I think the perception on car salesperson is also rated unfairly). So my advice for aspiring developers is to establish something on LinkedIn, and start looking for a few good recruiters. I personally have worked with some very good recruiters, and my friend who found internship via LaunchCode worked with a recruiter at one time too (both out of necessity, sometimes companies can only hire contractor).
Will update this post as time goes.