Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? I'll give you £500 if you can find me a job that I take.
CV at http://www.aspden.com
I make my usual promise, which I have paid out on several times:
If,
within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one
month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the
first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who
provided the crucial introduction.
If there are a number of
people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And
if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me
at a shorter contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking,
then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.
And this
offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts whom I have
not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering
work, because why wouldn't it?
And obviously if I find one
through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is
generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own
blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin
my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.
I make the following boast:
I
know all styles of programming and many languages, and can use any
computer language you're likely to use as it was intended to be used.
I
have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of
all kinds. I can become very interested in almost any problem which is
hard enough that I can't solve it easily.
I have a deserved
reputation for being able to produce heavily optimised, but nevertheless
bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack together
sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is appropriate
when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.
I've
worked in telecoms, commercial research, banking, university research,
chip design, server virtualization, university teaching, sports physics,
a couple of startups, and occasionally completely alone.
I've
worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit
microcontrollers and gigantic servers, and once upon a time every IBM
machine in the Maths Department in Imperial College was running my
partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.
I'm
smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities
that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.
I
know what it means to understand a thing, and I know when I know
something. If I understand a thing then I can usually find a way to
communicate it to other people. If other people understand a thing even
vaguely I can usually extract the ideas from them and work out which
bits make sense.
