You might read up on http://www.appaftercare.com/, the guy who started it is named Einar Vollset. It's a similar idea (I think) and he has published a lot of material about getting started with it.
I've interviewed a handful of people for junior positions, so take this with a grain of salt. I usually look for:
* Basic coding ability -- maybe a couple simple whiteboard questions, or walk through some code
* Able to learn things -- talking about past projects, interesting things they've learned, ask them to explain their past work to me (doesn't have to be tech)
* Able to ask decent questions -- Unfortunately I don't have a good standard for this, but generally I like candidates that can form a straightforward question about the role, the company, the tech stack, really anything.
Basically for a junior position, I am not looking for someone who will deliver a lot of value on day 1. Instead I am looking for someone who is curious, learns quickly, and can learn the necessary skills to deliver value later. A quick learner will be great in a year, a slow learner or someone who doesn't care to learn will not.
I have an art degree -- sculpture. I graduated, couldn't find good work, and went to a community college to learn programming. I wouldn't say my art background has much application to my current job.
We are a video advertising monetization platform serving billions of requests a day. We're hiring for a variety of positions and levels of experience here in Denver / Westminster, and we need a QA person for our Belfast, Ireland office.
We mostly work with PHP, Angular, Java, and Hadoop. We stay busy and we're growing fast, but work-life balance is good and it's a great opportunity to work on problems at scale. I'm new to the company and it's been great.
Email me at smoore@spotxchange.com and I'll answer questions or route you to someone who knows the answer.
Quitting jobs and moving without having the next job lined up. I always figured I was a smart guy, I could land on my feet wherever I ended up. And that was true, but it took some time and effort to get a job that lined up with my career goals, and while that was happening I was pretty stressed out. I also feel like I've lost about a year of growth (and salary!), which is hard to let go of.
I realize that this isn't really a big revelation, but it didn't really hit home for me until I got into a real "career" -- it wasn't such a big deal when I worked retail jobs.
