First off let me give you some background on me. I'm currently 17, turning 18 in a month or so. I just graduated from high school and am currently looking for a university. I have very little in the way of computer related work experience, which is pretty much the point of this meditation. Anyways. To the point.

Recently I browsed through the various jobs listed at jobs.perl.com and as I read through them, I constantly thought to my self "Gee, I could do this". Most of the jobs called for perl + some sort of database / linux experience and a large percentage of those were internet application type jobs. I personally would consider my perl ability to be "fluent", as in, I know the majority of the language, understand the concepts and idioms, but I wouldn't consider my self qualified to write patches for it. I also have a moderate amount of experience with linux systems in general and using a database, specifically mysql. So in other words, I'm pretty sure I have the skill sets required for these jobs.

The real question of course, is how do I prove it to my potential employers? My first thought was some sort of open source project that would demonstrate my ability, but I was unsure if this was actually effective, and if so, what project?

In reply to Proving I have mad perl skillzzzlz by BUU

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.