Looking at this site, I don't see much about this person. No resume, no examples of work, the contact form is broken. How do I know if I want to hire him? Even if I did know, how would I do it?
I, too, was laid off around April. For a couple days I just slept, then I spent every day coding. I added features to my hobby site ( http://yellownote.info ), I wrote a Rails plugin, taught myself Git, gave a presentation at a Rails user group. I got a job (at the company that hosted the user group) about a month later.
Even if it didn't help me find a job, doing all that made me a lot happier than just sitting around.
Why not write something handy and neat, and then say "I've been unemployed since April, if you found this useful, give me a couple bucks or look at my resume"?
I believe you are making the somewhat metaphysical error of applying your experiences and attendant worldview as a developer to everyone else's problems.
Who said this guy is capable of "writing" anything "neat," or producing any kind of online content? He is probably not. And the fact that he is not does not mean he is not employable in some capacity, just that he doesn't fit into the 2.0-ey electronic world that our demographic inhabits.
Well, he's obviously capable of producing online content, he made this site after all. Even if he can't produce code to show off, he can produce something. If I were going to hire someone in whatever field he's in, I'd be looking for the unemployed guy with the blog about doing it as a hobby, not the unemployed guy asking for a dollar.
Strange. I was "unemployed" for a few months, and the State of Illinois was happy to give me $1600 a month to do nothing. The $1600 was because I was previously in the highest income tier before "becoming unemployed".
(I didn't take their money, though, because I had already paid for flights to other countries and wouldn't have been around to cash the checks or make up some story about how I was looking for a job. But this person sounds like they could benefit.)
I gave him $20 for the ingenuity of producing a web site; it is clever enough to warrant it, and definitely represents action on his part, even if it's not action everyone necessarily countenances.
Looking at this site, I don't see much about this person. No resume, no examples of work, the contact form is broken. How do I know if I want to hire him? Even if I did know, how would I do it?
I, too, was laid off around April. For a couple days I just slept, then I spent every day coding. I added features to my hobby site ( http://yellownote.info ), I wrote a Rails plugin, taught myself Git, gave a presentation at a Rails user group. I got a job (at the company that hosted the user group) about a month later.
Even if it didn't help me find a job, doing all that made me a lot happier than just sitting around.
Why not write something handy and neat, and then say "I've been unemployed since April, if you found this useful, give me a couple bucks or look at my resume"?