Google Code, User Search & Gravatar! NerdAbility Updates - September 2012

At NerdAbility HQ we have had a busy month, launching some cool new upgrades to your profile! This includes Google Code project integration, StackOverflow Flair and Gravatar profiles pictures! Additionally you can now search other users based on their username or skill, giving you the results along side the users NerdScore.

We have also added new privacy options to allow you to hide your page to the public while you are getting things ready. Oh, and if you don't want to be included in our user search feature, you can easily opt-out on the privacy settings page.

Other small changes include more ways to share your profile with enhanced social sharing buttons. This makes it easier to share your's or others profiles and show off!

We are going to keep pushing out more features, so keep an eye on your profile and the blog for the latest news. Now a quick guide to some of the new features.......

Setting Up a Gravatar Profile Photo - Stand out!

First of all login to your profile at http://nerdability.com - then once you are directed to your page look to the right hand side, if your picture, then hey, you already have a Gravatar! If you don't see a picture, or want to change it then you can follow the link underneath and go sign up (it's really quick and easy too).

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NerdAbility - Setting Up a Gravatar Profile Photo

Signup to Gravatar or Login

Adding Google Code Projects to your Profile - Show off!

If you have a Google Code profile you can now have your projects shown on your NerdAbility profile! It's just as easy as adding any other integration, simply login to your profile at http://nerdability.com and look at the right-hand side of your profile for 'Get Connected', then click the 'Connect Google Code' and enter your Google Code profile URL (something like http://code.google.com/u/....). 

NerdAbility - Connect Google Code

Searching & Searching - Find Other Awesome Techies!

You can now search our users to find who has certain skills, and then pick who you want to check out based on their NerdScore! This makes it easy to say find users with Java skills and then check out the person with the highest NerdScore! To access the search go to the Users page and get searching...

NerdAbility User Search

Changing Your Privacy Settings - It's Under Your Control!

We now offer privacy options for your profile, as we know you may not want your profile to be searchable or you may want to go into hiding for awhile. You can mange this quickly and easily from your profile page, simply login and click on your name in the top right of the page. Then click 'Privacy & Settings' from the drop down.

NerdAbility Privacy & Settings 

Next you can choose the privacy settings for your profile (and if you want to sign up to our site email updates). Hopefully it will look like this...

Privacy Privacy Privacy!

And that's all for this month! Make sure to spread the word and check us out on Twitter @Nerd_Ability

NerdScore!? NerdAbility Updates - August 2012

NerdScore is Live!

So far this month we have launched the "NerdScore" on NerdAbility.com! This gives your profile a score based on the connections and details you have added to NerdAbility. To work out your score we use the super secret "NerdOrithm"!

You can now show off your high score via http://nerdability.com/user/yourprofile, and increase it by connecting and using sites like GitHub, Bitbucket, StackOverflow! Go check it out :)

Profile NerdScore!

Enhanced StackOverflow Integration

We have tapped up the StackOverflow API to add further integration to your NerdAbility profile, now showing a summary of your SO "Badges" and your answer "Accept Rate". Check it out on your profile now, and if you havn't integrated with StackOverflow give it a try :).

Now with Badges & Accept Rate

What's Coming Up?

Over the next few weeks we will be pushing out some more new features to the NerdAbility site. These are focused around improving the user experience and giving you more control of the privacy and contact preferences for your profile.

We are also working hard on allowing you to integrate even more of the cool stuff you do on-line in to your  NerdAbility dynamic resume / CV. This includes the tech meetups and events you go to, the coding / software engineering books you have been reading and the presentations you have published on-line. So keep your eyes peel for update emails and blog updates to be the first to hear when these features go live.

Also ... Hot Skills & How To's

We want to show you some of the technologies that we have been using (and we think are quite cool). So expect to see some how-to blogs, which will get you up and running. These will include the extending the Spring Social framework and integrating with Java / Spring app MailChimp (the email campaign app). All of these examples will come with sample projects on GitHub!

Once you have had a play and could tell someone else how to do it why not add it as a skill on your NerdAbility profile? Its easy - see how below:

1. Sign Up or Sign In 

NerdAbility Login

2. Add the Skill to your profile - click "Want To Add A Skill", then add the details and click "Add Skill". Done :) 

Add a Skill to NerdAbility

3. Or even better why not share the code you are working on on GitHub or Bitbucket. You can then link your account to your NerdAbility profile and we will automatically add the skill to your page, sweet right? Just click the connect GitHub or Bitbucket on the right hand side of your profile.

Connect your GitHub or BitBucket to NerdAbility

That's all for the August updates from the NerdAbility team!

Please get in touch with us on Twitter - @Nerd_Ability or comment below with any idea, feedback or questions.

6 Steps to Getting an Awesome Tech Job

So everyone wants an awesome coding job using the ’latest technologies’ at a amazing company right? And the competition for these jobs is tough! People from big corporations want in on the exciting world of start-ups, and well-seasoned start-up coders want to work on the next big thing. Previously you needed a great hand crafted CV and 100 years of experience building monolithic Java EE / C++ apps to get noticed. Now companies want to see you are up to speed with new school technologies like Node.js, Groovy & Grails, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and that you also actively contribute via Blogs, GitHub, BitBucket, StackOverflow etc.

How do you get one of these awesome jobs you ask? Follow NerdAbility’s fool proof 6 point plan!.....

1.  Create a tech blog! – Have you been trying to learn a new technology but found the documentation is a bit shady? Did you spend hours on forums and post multiple StackOverflow questions to finally get to a solution? Then write a blog about it! Document the problem, the steps you took to solve it and give some sample code or even put the project on online. Next make sure to share it back with the people and forums that helped along the way. This is a great way to get your solution out there and people checking out your blog (maybe even the CTO of your next employer). Sites like Blogger and Tumblr make it super easy to get started, so go make one today!

On Privacy

Online privacy is a serious thing. People take how much they reveal of themselves online very seriously, and quite rightly too.

Privacy is important to us at NerdAbility as well. From the start, we have been upfront with where we stand - your NerdAbility profile is a public profile to the world of just how awesome you are, its not somewhere where people will upload photos of compromising situations, or share trade secrets, its a place where people say, hey, I have my blog, and my StackOverflow profile, and my GitHub profile.. why can't i just bring them to one place, so rather than hoping a potential employer googles me, I can just say, check me out!

After all, NerdAbility doesn't expose anything that is already private on the web to anyone - it only shows already publicly accessible data (GitHub, StackOverflow, BitBucket, Blogs - all public data only).  When we recently rolled out the BitBucket integration, on first launch, we were alerted that private repositories were being displayed - this wasn't something we had done intentionally, it was actually because making anonymous, unauthenticated calls to the BB API returns private data too (we know, crazy right?) - but this is important to us, as well as to you guys, so as soon as we were alerted, we put in an emergency fix it and released within an hour.

So, why are we going on about all this stuff? The reason is, pretty soon we will be rolling out user search, making it much easier for people to discover just how awesome you are (searching by name or by skills) - so we just wanted to make sure we are all on the same page.

If you still have concerns, fear not, we know this is a hugely important and sensitive subject, so despite NerdAbility only showing publicly available data, we will also be adding a privacy option, allowing you to opt-out of the search results!

Why We're Not Worried About Facebook's Job Board

Not long after NerdAbility was released in to the wild in beta, Facebook announced that they were going to be creating a job board.

Hmm, Facebook seems like tough competition, after all, they already have millions of users, about whom they know pretty much everything, but, to be honest, we're really not that concerned.

Here's why..

1. We're techies, looking to deliver a service for techies - even if the Facebook job board becomes a massive success, how worthwhile will it be for them to build up the service to cater for tech folk, integrating GitHub commits and stuff like StackOverflow? I cannot see it being worthwhile for FB to do so.  NerdAbility is focusing entirely on tech recruitment, and all our efforts are in enhancing the site to make tech recruitment a wonderful thing!....