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Really helps when you have kids too.
The convenience of hire cars and Uber covers a limited scope.
You need to grow up.
Saying something that weird will just make it seem like you don't care or you're weird.
The fact you say you 'find it best' suggests you get shouted at a lot or you are making this up. Either way, you shouldn't be dispensing this kind of nonsense advice to other people who may well follow it.
Sorry I don't have a github account or a blog but I was too busy making sure Google search actually works.
I hope your software is never taken seriously.
A hell of a lot of people are doing really good work with Java. I use Linux, Eclipse and Java at work and I know a lot of other people that do too.
Most of the contracting positions available in London (where I live) are only available to experienced professionals. There's no way anyone is going to hire a nobody for £500 per day. Good luck finding much work available below this level, I used to contract myself at £200 per day but this only because I personally knew the manager on the project and I had worked with him as an engineer as an intern one year previously.
Showing you have good ideas and that you get things done means NOTHING. The other guy applying for the same job who has 6 years of experience will beat you every time. Maybe things are different where ever you are from but where I am from you don't get to work on anything that anyone cares about unless you have solid experience.
If you want to land a role at some small web dev shop where you will be stuck working on crappy rails or other nonsense things then go make your portfolio out of $60 a day "contracts" and have a great life. This does not exist in the UK and when people say 'contracting' they mean real work earning real money.
The best thing you can do is get an awesome internship then leverage that to get a good perm role somewhere else. This is exactly what I did. I didn't return to the place where I did my internship as I landed a better package elsewhere.
If you can afford to work for $60 a day and you are lucky to live in the Valley or somewhere where these roles are available, then lucky you. I prefer something a little more rigorous where I'm not a slave working on crap.
Getting a programming job at a company that uses the technologies you want to work with will seriously help you move into another role in the near future. Even if the company is crap.
It's nice that some people will care about your personal projects but A LOT of good companies won't see these in the same light as real professional experience dealing with real production, team and stake holder issues.
Also, how can anyone support themselves for months whilst they wait for the perfect job which may never come because it gets harder to find a job the longer you are unemployed?
As for contracting; to land a good contracting role (I'm talking stuff outside of rent-a-coder) is very difficult. Most companies wouldn't even consider you as a contractor unless you have several years of solid experience. I can only assume you mean the kind of 'contracting' that happens at places like rentacoder.com. If you think anyone will care about this then you are mistaken, plus, it's a waste of your time as you'll get paid peanuts and end up providing free support to the idiots that gave you the work in the first place.
If you're fresh out of education and will not be landing a role with Google (or the likes of) and you're struggling to get work at a good company then you should take the first job that comes along that works with the technology you want to specialise in.
It's hard to say that the JVM is faster or slower than X because it usually comes down to the way in which the application is developed.
If C++ was ALWAYS faster then I wouldn't be using Java for our trading systems. Some of our competitors use C++ and some use Java. We have one of the fastest trading platforms in the world, the only firm to have faster than us are also using Java.
I used to work at a world leading investment bank who's entire low latency, high scalable trading platforms were built in Java.
Just about every large financial firm that I've worked at plus both telco firms and one management consultancy used Java to build large, fast and scalable applications.
You may have no use for Java in your small bubble of a world where you most probably work on insignificant, crappy pay and waste of time projects, but people who work on important stuff in the real world do. I'm sure other people can tell you why Java is important in ways that I cannot. I just get annoyed when I see people slag off a piece of technology just because they don't use it or like it.
edit: just noticed it has a secondary category as: "potentially damaging content"
I may have to work as hard as a start-up founder but at least I get a nice pay packet and none of this '6years out of college with no career or anything to show for my efforts'.
I don't get why people spend years coming up with crap start-up ideas, failing, then trying the same failed recipe again. I wouldn't try and take something to market unless it was really hot. Your average web 2.0(crap) is just a waste of everyone's time. You could have been working your ass at a big consultancy or trading firm as a technologist in that time and made yourself some good money whilst actually having a life that doesn't involve ramen noodles.