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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? The Benefits or Not of Certification (was LPIC certification) Post 302886499 by Neo on Saturday 1st of February 2014 03:05:06 AM
Old 02-01-2014
Frankly speaking, I'm not very keen on certifications.

When I am in hiring mode and interviewing technical people, I have found that people with a lot of certifications on paper are less likely to be very good at the job than someone who has bone fide real project and application development experience.

I've seen candidates, in the past, with a resume full of certifications, and not a single verifiable project of any substance, ever completed. It's really annoying.

A few years ago I travelled to "a particular country" and interviewed folks for a technical position developing vBulletin mods for us using PHP. Many people had lots of certifications and listed vBulletin and PHP on their resume; but when I asked them to execute the most simplest task on the white board, all failed.

That is why the trend for years with busy hiring managers has not been "certifications" but verifiable contributions to significant projects, including open source projects.

I know many hiring managers that will not hire any new (not well experienced) developer or system admin who does not have strong contributions to open source or similar projects on their resume.


My experience is that certifications are nearly "worthless" on a resume; but having strong completed, verifiable projects in a portfolio, even if volunteer (free) open source contributions is very strong on a resume.

In other words, if you want to easily get a job in a technical field, get real hands on experience even it if means working for free as a volunteer for an open source or similar project. You will get a lot of good references (from your team members) and verifiable coding and admin experience. You will more-than-likely get your name on the code you help write. This is much, much more important that a resume full of "alphabet soup" certifications and acronyms.

Think of it like this:

You want to be a pro football player. First, you starting playing with your family when very young; and then you join your school teams. It's when you are playing for your "school teams" (or non-paid leagues) where you get your experience and develop your reputation. The best of these go on to be pro footballers.

The same thing is true for system admin and developers. Play on teams, especially volunteer teams, when you want to learn. Become experienced and you will have such a strong reputation, companies will beg to hire you as a pro. If you cannot produce as a volunteer, who is going to hire you as a pro? Furthermore, volunteerism shows you are generous, social and a contributor to society as a whole.

No one hires a pro football player who studied football and is "certified" as a footballer who has not played much. They hire winners with experience.

The same is true for strong technical professionals.
 

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PYKAR(6)																  PYKAR(6)

NAME
pykaraoke - free CDG/MIDI/MPEG karaoke player SYNOPSIS
pykar karfilename.kar OVERVIEW
pykaraoke is a free karaoke player for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. pykar is a MIDI/KAR karaoke player built using python. It was written for the PyKaraoke project but is in fact a general purpose KAR player that could be used in other python projects requiring a KAR player. The player uses the pygame library (www.pygame.org), and can therefore run on any operating system that runs pygame (currently Linux, FreeBDS, Windows and OSX). You can use this file as a standalone player, or together with PyKaraoke. PyKaraoke provides a graphical user interface, playlists, search- able song database etc. For those writing a media player or similar project who would like KAR support, this module has been designed to be easily incorporated into such projects and is released under the LGPL. To play the MIDI songs on Linux, Timidity++ is also required. USAGE
To start the player, pass the KAR filename/path on the command line: pykar /path/song.kar You can also incorporate a KAR player in your own projects by importing this module. The class midPlayer is exported by the module. You can import and start it as follows: import pykar player = pykar.midPlayer("/path/song.kar") player.Play() If you do this, you must also arrange to call pycdg.manager.Poll() from time to time, at least every 100 milliseconds or so, to allow the player to do its work. The class also exports Close(), Pause(), Rewind(), GetPos(). There are two optional parameters to the initialiser, errorNotifyCallback and doneCallback: errorNotifyCallback, if provided, will be used to print out any error messages (e.g. song file not found). This allows the module to fit together well with GUI playlist managers by utilising the same GUI's error popup window mechanism (or similar). If no callback is provided, errors are printed to stdout. errorNotifyCallback should take one parameter, the error string, e.g.: def errorPopup (ErrorString): msgBox (ErrorString) doneCallback can be used to register a callback so that the player calls you back when the song is finished playing. The callback should take no parameters, e.g.: def songFinishedCallback(): msgBox ("Song is finished") To register callbacks, pass the functions in to the initialiser: midPlayer ("/path/song.kar", errorPopup, songFinishedCallback) These parameters are optional and default to None. If the initialiser fails (e.g. the song file is not present), __init__ raises an exception. SEE ALSO
You can find PyKaraoke's home page at: http://www.kibosh.org/pykaraoke/ AUTHOR
PyKaraoke was written by Kelvin Lawson <kelvinl@users.sourceforge.net> and William Ferrell <willfe@gmail.com>. This manual page was written by Miriam Ruiz <little_miry@yahoo.es>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others). july 16, 2006 PYKAR(6)
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