1. Build your own website

Having your own website tells us a lot about you:

• You know about the Internet and how to use it – you know something about DNS records, and how to register and configure your own domain,
• You’ve already learnt a little about HTML and CSS – essential skills in a company like ours,
• You can show off a little by applying some funky, yet appropriate JavaScript,
• The actual content gives you an opportunity to impress us with further understanding of applying technology.

Most importantly, we’ll have a way to communicate with you.

2. Develop a website for someone else

Building a simple website for someone else shows an employer that you can understand their requirements, and translate those into something real. It shows that you can speak the language of the customer, and deliver a product that they are happy with.

Make sure you link to these projects from your personal website.

3. Contribute to an Open Source project

When hiring a new staff member, we are always keen to see some of their code. The kind of code that a person writes says a lot about them. Questions we’re looking to answer are:

1. Is it clean and tidy?
2. Is it well structured?
3. Does it demonstrate an understanding?
4. Have they over-complicated a simple problem?
5. Is the implementation a bit too “smarty-pants” where it’s difficult to understand?

There is plenty of opportunity these days to contribute to many different open source projects. Obviously GitHub is a natural starting point.

4. Participate in the community

Become involved in the local tech scene. We’re involved with many local groups such as WellRailed, WellingtonJS, Open Government Data Day, Summer of Tech and more.

Join online communities such as StackOverflow and participate. Become involved in open source projects that you’re interested in, and contribute. A starting point might be to write tests or documentation for one of your favourite projects.

Participating in the community raises your profile, and makes you stand out of the crowd. You’ll be noticed and valued as a person who gives back to the community.

5. Give Ruby on Rails a go

It should be pretty obvious from our website that we think Ruby on Rails is pretty sweet. Many of us have come from backgrounds in Enterprise IT and it’s use of tech such as Java and .Net. We made a strategic decision in 2005 to move away from technologies that were inefficient when compared to modern languages such as Ruby. In hindsight, this was an incredibly important move – and exactly the right choice.

So, we’re sold on Rails. You should give it a go. In fact, if you’ve given it a go – and can demonstrate a running Rails app that does something of use – then we’d love to hear from you.

There are a few ways that you can try out Ruby on Rails for free. Heroku offer a free plan where you can host an app at no cost. Other option is prgmr.com for dirt-cheap VPS hosting.

6. Enrol in Summer of Tech

We’ll be making our shortlist mostly from candidates from the Summer of Tech website. We will be at most of the events that Summer of Tech organise, such as the Bootcamps, Hackfests and obviously the Meet n Greet.

7. Make contact with us

We’d love to meet you, and to hear about what you’re doing. Come and chat with our people at the events we attend. Make it easy for us to choose you by talking to us. Also, chat to Cameron Fowler who is in his final year at Vic about his experiences with us last year.

If you are wanting to land a summer internship with us then these seven steps give you the inside running on things we will be looking at when considering applicants. So good luck! And we look forward to meeting you at the upcoming Summer of Tech events.

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The steps and requirements seem to change over time, so this seems to be correct as of March 2011.
For setting your build properties and getting your image sizes correct – read BuildTimeConfiguration.

Complete the following excellent checklist:
http://www.idev101.com/code/Distribution/checklist.html

You will need to remove the status bar from your iPhone images. I found this awesome tool called iPhoneScreenshotCropper. (http://www.chrisgummer.com/?p=128)

Make sure you have your build properties, and all your artwork, description, screenshots, icons etc ready and of the correct sizes.

Open the iTunes connect portal in the Apple Development Centre.
Add a new application, complete the details, and save your application.
A while later the link appeared to upload the binary. When i went to upload the binary, it indicated that I needed to use the Application Loader utility. Start the Loader utility – and upload your compressed app file!

Then wait……

BTW… The app took about 8 days to be approved.

1. Sessions

To get the most out of the sessions, it really pays to have read and planned which of the optional sessions you will attend. In previous Webstocks, I have had to make somewhat rushed decisions when I suddenly realise that I have to made a decision on a session that is about to begin.

Have a good read up of the programme. When we have a particular specialist capability (eg: GIS stuff), going along to an entry-level GIS talk may be of little value. I’d suggest taking a look at some of the non-technical sessions too, as they may have material that is quite interesting.

2. Networking

There are going to be plenty of old colleagues / acquaintances at Webstock. It’s a good opportunity to re-establish connections.

Take along your business cards, and hand them out.

3. What to bring

In previous years, I have taken my laptop. Probably about half the people there will have them. I’ve also taken just my iPhone, and that’s worked fine too.

If you’re not bringing a laptop, you’ll want to take some notes. I believe the webstock bag has paper and pens, etc. Plus plenty of other “advertising material”

4. Registration

Register earlier in the week – don’t leave it till Thursday. There will likely be about 1000 people trying to get their Webstock goodies that morning. Also, the popular t-shirt sizes disappear pretty quickly.

5. Seating

There are more people than seats (downstairs). I suggest trying for a table near the front. Often you’ll end up on the same table for both days.

6. Other tips

There will likely be free ice creams (Kapiti) and free coffee (People’s).

The food is normally pretty good. Sometimes you get crazy queues though – one table will have 100 people queueing while another will have just a couple. It’s often quiet upstairs.

Keep an eye on Twitter with the #webstock hashtag. Also, there is a Google Document at webstock.waveadept.com which is likely to end up with many of the referenced websites, etc mentioned during the sessions.

About Mashblock

MashBlock is a tool to visualise demographic data from the 2006 Census for 66 Territorial Authorities, 2000 Area Units, and over 48000 Meshblocks.

This site is built to provide fast location-based queries utilising the Google Maps Geocoder, HTML 5 Geolocation and the AddressFinder autocomplete library to allow the user to find the Meshblock, Area Unit and Territorial Authority their search falls in.

The backend site is built with Ruby on Rails and a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS plugin. The frontend utilises the javascript libraries jQuery, Raphael and the Google Maps API to create the visualisations and user interaction.

All the data is sourced from Statistics New Zealand.