Thank you for taking the time to learn a little bit about me. This page serves as a generic cover letter of sorts to make my case for why you should consider hiring me.
My work ethic is primary driven by a thirst for knowledge, solving hard problems, and a passion for quality. Despite my young career, I am typically very confident in my technical abilities and the solutions I propose. However, I also recognize where my skills are lacking and I almost always maintain an open mind and will accept competing ideas or viewpoints, especially if they are superior to my own.
I will thrive in an environment where I am surrounded by individuals sharing my passions and who offer an abundance of knowledge and talent from which to learn.
In my professional career, my role has often skirted the line between software and operations engineer. In my time at Tellme/Microsoft, I was privileged to work alongside an operations team that strived for 99.999% uptime in almost everything they managed. The lessons learned to achieve this lofty goal have carried forward and influence many of my decisions. Also at Tellme, I was exposed to a culture that placed paramount importance on user experience. I also find many of my decisions guided by asking myself how someone else will react to it. This applies not only to user interfaces, but also API design, code layout (readability, documentation, etc), and completeness of a solution (e.g. providing ready-to-use SDKs and documentation for public web services).
I believe one of my strongest skills is the ability to quickly learn new skills or systems and/or to assess their attributes. However, this sometimes manifests as a weakness where I become enamored with the latest/greatest technology. This has bitten me enough times that I am now more restrained. But, my curiosity does occasionally run wild.
As stated above, I have a pssion for quality. To me, this means spending time considering a problem before coding or actively solving it. It means working closely with the team requesting the product to ensure a solution meets the needs one year from now in addition to today. It means have a testing plan (and implementing them, if that is my role) so our users aren't the ones reporting problems and our test team can focus on more important test problems. In means having a thorough code review with technically proficient and honest people (who aren't afraid to grill my code - I like being humbled by my mistakes because it makes me better in the end). It means thorough documentation and striving for high readability. To me, this is all part of doing my job.