Step 1: Find a meetup in your area for startups

Step 2: Begin Networking w/ Attendees

Step 3: Make it known to these people that you're a cheap coder and know Ruby and Javascript

Step 4: Offer to be an intern if you have to

It is good, TC!

Github's numbers are going to be biased towards programmers who use languages that are more progressive. .NET developers aren't using Github and neither are many older companies that are still using self-hosted SVN and CVS repos.

".NET developers aren't using Github" says who? I find about 80% of open source projects for .Net on Github. With the other 20% being split between codeplex, sourceforge, Google Code, and self-hosting/publishing

Open source is the keyword.

Most corporations would faint just with the idea of hosting their code outside premises.

Yep. My company is using a throw back gem(Visual Source Safe) to host our VB6 apps written in '98.

It's kind of hard to tell what exactly is going on around St. Louis, but it seems to imply a similarity with Chicago... which would be very wrong.

Seems about right to me. St. Louis has a distinct accent from the rest of the state of MO and I've usually noticed that they have a bit of a twang that reminds me of Chicago.

I think his point was just that you could hard-code your list of words into the code. It would be ugly, but it would work.

Isn't that the same as loading them from file on each request?

You would also want to install an opcode cache like APC, XCache, etc. That way the code is only compiled on the first page load.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PHP_accelerators

No, because you don't have additional IO overhead.

I think that overhead would be negligible, especially if the other examples are all based on micro-frameworks (i.e. loads of files).

Premature optimisation is the root of all evil, right?

Disk IO is a massive problem at scale. This obviously isn't "at scale", so it works fine here, but avoiding hitting the disk (edit: any slow IO, really) is Performance 101.

http://smash.ly -- In the about.me/flavors.me space where you create a profile, but in our case we integrate your content in a feed. The idea was spawned by the fact that so many of us have personal domain names that always get outdated, so we built something that uses content you're already creating to make your personal website looking fresh. Here are a couple sample profiles:

http://smash.ly/matt http://degroat.net/

email: chris --at-- degroat.net

This looks very neat! On my list!

Clear's network isn't great, but I really like the pay-as-you go aspect of this. Right now I'm paying $25 a month for an unlocked iSpot but I go weeks without using it.

Can you post a link to an example so i don't have to sign up to see it?

Also... Like the idea of customization, even if I have to pay for it.

Scroll down on the landing page to see some examples. Or here https://nickw.easybill.co/Donate-to-my-Worthy-Cause

As someone with experience hiring developers, my concerns about "older developers" were two-fold.

First, the cultural fit. If the company is all mid 20-somethings, would you fit in with the team. ?

Secondly, are you really set in your wise regarding your code and almost as important, what SDLC you're comfortable with (because we aren't using waterfall here!)

So I wouldn't ever not hire someone just for being old, but those are two concerns that I'd have with any candidate and they're a little more of an issue with older developers.

That said, regardless of your age, what is going to get your a job is networking. Start getting involved in the community now. Take on freelancing projects. Attend meetups. Get to know people.