Professional Homepage

Intro

Salutations and welcome! This page is my unorthodox attempt at an alternative to a résumé, or perhaps a cover letter. Here I am attempting to explain who I am, what I'm about, how I got here, and generally why you would like to work with me. You will not find company names or specific tools-I-have-used here; this page is not designed to be scraped and processed by scripts or scanned by recruiters with a checklist. Instead, I mean to talk about who I am and what I want.

My History

When I was a teenager, I began my journey to programming by building fan pages for some of the popular entertainment of the day, quickly abandoning WYSIWYG editors for hand-coding. At about that point, I decided to start using Linux on my personal computer, and quickly sampled countless Linux distros and a couple of BSDs, discovering novel ways to break my bootloader and/or X configuration along the way. (Dual-booting Linux and MacOS X was not then, and I suspect still is not, for the faint of heart.) Inspired, I asked my mother to teach me how to program, and she handed me her first-edition Kernighan and Ritchie and left me to it.

I was hooked. I went on to study computer science, beginning with the inner workings of a CPU and expanding into the more usual data structures and algorithms. I delighted in the mathematical elegance of operations in binary and formal logic. I studied programming language paradigms and was fascinated by the way the same basic problem translated completely differently to a functional programming language versus a procedural one. I dreamed of building tools that would make people's lives easier and better, maybe help to fix the problems I was coming to realize society hadn't figured out.

I got my bachelor's degree with excellent grades and entered the tech industry full of hope. I found my first job in the storage industry, writing test suites for the software that operated on my employer's specialized flash devices. When that company was acquired, I left and found another storage job, this time managing test frameworks and infrastructure. I was enjoying the work, but I hadn't intended testing to be my sole function for the rest of my career, so I transferred to a product development team, working on expanding the range of hardware components supported by our systems.

After five years in industry, I decided to go back to school. I studied applied mathematics, particularly in the area of mathematical biology. I had just finished my master's dissertation (mathematically and computationally modeling the spread of infectious disease) and was taking a break while I decided whether to continue in academics when COVID 19 arrived.

I returned to the workforce in 2021, finding a DevOps gig (soon rebranded SRE) with a small SaaS company that was a subsidiary of a larger one. From the hardware-adjacent work I had done, where the software I helped ship ran on-prem, I jumped into the world of cloud-based abstractions, managing a wide array of services via infrastructure-as-code tooling. I did that for three years, and then, as was the fashion, my employer laid off a large percentage of its workforce, including me. Now here I am.

What I Like and Want

What I have learned thus far in my career is that I prefer to consider myself a generalist, someone who is constantly broadening and deepening my skillset. I like to try new things. I like to dive into an unfamiliar codebase and/or set of documentation and figure it out. I also really like refactoring and cleaning up technical debt; I find it incredibly satisfying to take a pain point that causes user and/or developer grief and make it go away (or at least get smaller). I like writing documentation and automating tedious manual processes and doing the sort of janitorial work that doesn't look glamorous but does make people happier, which has made me popular with my teammates over the years.  I still like the low-level puzzles, translating my will into computer-level logic or figuring out where that cryptic error is coming from, and I also like the much higher-level puzzles, translating a user need or want into a workable spec.

I'm no longer the idealistic kid who started this journey, but I still dream of using my affinity and love for computers to make the world a better place. I dream of finding a job where I'm working with a team of honorable, caring people to build/maintain something that will enrich customers' lives, not just shareholders' bank accounts.

Unfortunately, I do have a mortgage to pay, so I'm also open to jobs that are merely not particularly evil. I am not interested in GenAI, cryptocurrency, or adtech.

On location: I am based in a non-tech-hub city in the US. I'm not open to relocating within the US, though I would consider an international move to a country with better protections for transgender rights. I prefer remote work regardless.

TL;DR

Software Engineer with 9+ years of assorted professional experience seeks computer job, tech industry or other. Multiple job functions considered. Remote US or relocate to trans-friendly other country. Ethics a must.

Contact

Email: eternal@[this domain].