The Pitch

Here’s the standard pitch I use when hunting for a job. I’ve gone back and forth between super short: “Here’s my resume. Please review it and call me.” and fountains of jargon laden prose like this. I’m not really certain which works better; but I certainly prefer the longer version.

I have more than a decade of C++ development and eight years of software architecture experience. In addition, I have more than five years of technical leadership experience, including roles as Product/Development Manager, Project Manager, and Technical Lead. I am accustomed to delivering the nearly impossible on time and often under budget.

My development and architecture experience spans the gamut from embedded systems (a long, long time ago) and shrink wrapped software development to distributed object-oriented web-services running on Unix (Linux/Solaris) and Windows NT. My peers consider me to be an expert in C++, because I am not only experienced with, but comfortable with the most obscure and complicated features of the language. I lead the effort within one employer to convert their enterprise knowledge management application from a home-grown collection library to use the C++ Standard Library (aka STL). In addition, I have extensive experience developing modern web applications; and I am accustomed to using the latest features of HTML, Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets while retaining graceful degradation in legacy browsers.

When designing systems, I value elegance and correctness over expedience; but I am always keenly aware of the business needs behind every project. Therefore, sometimes elegance and correctness must give way to expedience; however, I am adamant that I will only deliver a quality product. As an early adherent to the design patterns methodology, I developed a sophisticated page layout engine for the Sierra MasterCook application. The simplicity and self documenting nature of my design offered considerable cost savings by making future development both easier and less time consuming.

My most recent experiences, at International Biometric Group, InfoSpace, Primus and iTango, have all been with n-tier systems running on Solaris/Linux or Windows NT. Prior to leaving Primus, I designed an n-tier XML web-service based architecture for their web products. One of the first components in this effort was a complete unit testing framework, because I believe thorough testing is not only the responsibility of the QA team. This system pioneered within Primus the separation of business and presentation logic. In addition, it directly addressed the scalability issues customers had been raising.

I’m open to suggestions for refinement. However, don’t just tell me how bad my grammar is (Bradley).