hi there! as you may have heard, I no longer have a source of rent money, so I’m looking for something new to spend my time doing during the week. here’s a brief summary of me, plus a list of my personal goals and non-goals for my next gig:
me, as a labor resource
- I have am a computer programmer with 5+ years of professional experience writing TypeScript (both in-browser and on Node), 5+ years of experience writing Ruby, 3.5 years writing C++, two years writing C#, and a year writing Java.
- most of my recent professional work has been operated through Kubernetes, and I have spent a lot of time working with it, but I don’t consider myself a Kubernetes guru.
- I think I’m getting pretty decent at designing and building large and complex pieces of software from scratch, and making existing pieces of software larger and more complex in the right ways.
- I have significant professional and research experience with a handful of specialties: natural language processing, 3D graphics, mobile development, and information security.
- for a variety of reasons I have been spending a lot of time outside work doing things which are not software for the web (again), and I am extremely motivated to undergo whatever formal training and credentialing I need to do that for a living (again).
non-goals
- the non-goals are first because they help contextualize the goals.
- there’s pretty much a trichotomy of business models in the industry that sells software as an end-user product: software supported by ad sales, software licensed under a subscription model, and software sold with perpetual licenses. I don’t really like the prospect of working at a company that produces any of them. ad-supported software is dying as everyone realizes ads are invasive, increasingly ineffective, and increasingly full of garbage. for-profit subscription-mandatory software is basically just rent extraction. perpetually-licensed software is in dire straits because ad-supported software slashed the high price point that made it feasible to have long product support cycles, so a lot of it is gradually becoming subscription software that you can keep using after your subscription lapses. this is admittedly better, but the prospects are dim for it in the future as the rate of profit continues to decline.
- I have been a web developer for the past decade, and while I don’t really mind the technologies themselves in general, or web sites that work like web sites, I am Done with consumer-facing web applications. while I was updating my resume, I found that Microsoft Word, a perfectly competent desktop word processor, has been completely obsoleted and replaced with Word 365, a piece of software that can’t lay out a page of text to a consistent length across its editing view and the print preview, and which costs me $10 a month to maintain the privilege of using. several pieces of software that cohost paid thousands of dollars for every year got crammed full of AI and/or cryptocurrency bullshit over the period we used them, in a desperate attempt to get us to buy another $100/year/seat upsell.
- when we decided to make cohost a social media site in 2020, we already didn’t really like where we saw social media headed. the rise of TikTok (and Short-Form Vertical Video in general); Elon Musk buying Twitter and flattening it into TikTok repost accounts and far-right propaganda; and a variety of Twitter clones which all avoid the design problems of Twitter by either pretending they don’t exist or (worse) doubling down on them, have left me very, very tired, and uninterested in ever touching social media again even as a frequent user, much less as a developer.
- I suspected I would not be a good people-manager coming into cohost, and I leave it knowing for sure that I am not a good people-manager.
- I do not want to work in the defense industry, or any parts of non-defense industries that are dual-use (space launch platform providers, geospatial intelligence, cloud computing services intended for government customers, etc.) on moral grounds.
goals
- ideally, I would like to write software that runs on a local device again, in a system programming language like C or C++ (I love Rust, but I only have a little experience writing it.) I’m a little out of practice, but I was a professional C++ developer early in my career (plus an open-source contributor and student writing C++ before that) and I am eager to catch up on the progress that has been made in the ecosystem.
- for the past couple years I have been spending a lot of time building little physical objects that move and blink lights and finding it deeply satisfying. I would love to get into embedded systems professionally, and am likely going to pursue a professional master’s degree in electrical engineering or robotics soon after I have a steady wage again.
- I would also be happy to work in software at an organization that makes its money in other ways: e.g. a content management service for a digital publisher, logistics software in a big enterprise, any sort of non-profit or open-source contractor, etc.
- if I do manage to get a job outside of the field of my recent experience, I am happy to take a step or more down the career ladder, even down to entry level. it will pay dividends in my mental health, and my last gig paid me 10% less than local scale wage for a new grad anyway.
thanks for reading all this way. if you made it down here, and you know of any openings that I might be interested in, I would love to get an e-mail from you at vogon@outlook.com. my resume is available over here.