Yes. A good team will recognize that your love for programming means you'll improve rapidly, especially in an environment with constructive feedback from tolerant team members. And if you have other professional experience you can bring to bear (knowing how to work in a team, process & planning, customer support) the find a team that needs someone with that experience as well as programming ability.
If you can't find anyone willing to hire you because of your lack of professional experience, find a team you like and offer to work for them for free for three months. If you show promise, and you get along with the team, they'll want to hire you when the three months are up. And if not, you'll get feedback on your skills and learn what kind of teams to look for in the future.
* It abbreviates "US" in "US Citizen" but not "United States". I would expect both "United States Citizen" and "US" (country) to work too. It uses "British Citizen" vs. "United Kingdom". Both "United Kingdom Citizen" and "Britain" should work too.
* Using ISO 3166 country codes in the URLs would make them shorter.
It is a shame that the petition to pardon Swartz has 1/10th of the signatures that the petition to fire Ortiz has. Let's advocate for a government that forgives (alleged) crimes as strongly as we advocate for a government that punishes people like Ortiz.
Jython. It's an unfinished research project/toy/proof of concept that never should have been used in a production environment under any sort of load. Unfortunately my predecessors made the wrong choice and I inherited that technical debt.
It could be used as a static site generator, among other things. But it uses version-control style diffs and merges, instead of any structure or language, which has the advantage that there's no generation step, and you can just edit the files as pure HTML.
This is a bit too simplistic. The rule of three really should apply to similar patterns that emerge naturally in the course of implementation.
His example code consists of two four-line functions that share a common if-else control structure but call totally different functions. That's not copied-and-pasted code, and it's not enough similarity to warrant generalization even after three or four replications. (And it would be better modularized away completely using inheritance or delegation, instead of a state machine.)
When it comes to copying and pasting identical blocks of code that actually do something, even having two copies opens you up to copy-and-paste bugs. Waiting until you have a third copy is too late. Don't ever copy and paste.