A Geek's Cover Letter
Who:
Kate Rhodes ( masukomi@masukomi.org )
What:
Web Developer, professionally since at least 1995. Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, whatever tool happens to be best for the job.
Why:
Because I've spent the last twelve years learning web development by doing web development. I know where the pitfalls are because I've already fallen in most of them. I've worked for myself. I've worked for others. I know when to do it right and when to do it fast, and when to ask the geeks who know more than me.
Why is this resume so damn long?
a) Because I've been doing this for 12 years.
b) Because my options for shortening it are to either:
Chop of a few years of work and thus raise the question of how I can claim to have done this for 12 years.
Or, remove any real indication of what I did at the various places I've worked, which would leave you with a list of names and dates that did you absolutely no good and what's the point of that?
Or, use a font so small you can't read it without squinting, and annoying potential employers is generally a bad plan.
But I'm never going to read all that...
That's fine, I don't expect that many people will. But, I wouldn't want to hire someone who gave me a resume that was either incomplete or useless so why should I expect you to?
Like most geeks I cringe at the code I wrote twelve years ago but it was still incredibly valuable training for the developer I have become, just like the jobs I performed back then.
Hey, this resume looks like she might actually be good for us...
Maybe, but to get a better idea of how I look at things have a geek I'd be working with read the following essay. But really, make sure it's a geek. It's opinionated, it's about code, and it's very much me.
Best Practices for Web Developers
http://www.masukomi.org/writings/best_practices.pdf
Kate Rhodes, (617) 308-9130
http://www.masukomi.org/