Resume

Introduction

I’m a software developer that hails from a small town in Eastern Washington. I’ve lived on both sides of the US, and am currently kind of in the middle.

I was most recently employed by a defense contractor in Virginia for two and a half years, where I worked on Information Assurance software for Navy submarines. As part of a small team with a large project, I wore many hats – creating custom Linux distributions, modernizing legacy C++ applications, and writing more bash scripts than I ever thought I would write in my entire life are just a few of the things I did. I also played a role in improving and modernizing my team’s workflows and development process, which included a lot of specialty devops work.

After leaving that position in 2020, I spent a few years traveling and trying out new things. I went on two road trips, exploring the country and visiting a number of national parks. I completely remodeled a log cabin with no prior experience, learning as I went along. I obtained a qualification in teaching English as a second language.

Now, in a much better place than I was in 2020, I’m ready and excited to get back into the software development industry.

Work History

Including non-programming jobs and payment information because I was inspired by this blog post.

• Farm(?) laborer
  • 2008
  • Harvested and braided sweetgrass, as well as did some other random tasks
  • Employed by a woman who claimed to be allergic to cell phone signals
  • Despite being in the sweetgrass business, was racist towards Native Americans
  • Hourly Pay: $8?
  • I worked for her probably a month, maybe two, before being hired at Walmart.
• Walmart, day stocker
  • 2008
  • Hourly Pay: $11?
  • Two months during the end-of-year holiday season, laid off after Christmas
• Colmac Coil, factory worker
  • 2013, then again in 2014
  • Summer jobs, both times
  • Factory work assembling industrial-sized refrigeration units, destined for food storage warehouses and the like
  • Hourly Pay: $12.50?
• Quality Support Inc.
  • Jan. 2018 to April 2020
  • Software Developer
  • Annual Salary
    • 60K for first six months while on contract
    • 64K when I was directly hired
    • 85K after I asked for a raise, a couple months before quitting
      • I think the only reason why I got the raise was that on the week I asked for it, a few coworkers quit, citing low pay as the reason

Skills

I’m very comfortable in a Linux environment, and wrote and maintained many bash scripts in my last job.

Professionally, the languages I have the most experience with are Java and Python, and consider myself a fairly advanced Pythonista. Personally, I’ve worked on a few projects in Rust and JavaScript.

I have written a bit of C and C++, but would not consider myself fluent.

There’s a number of technologies that I’ve dabbled in; the nature of my previous job required that I quickly learn new things in order to solve a problem, and then, more likely than not, never touch that particular technology again.

For example, early on in my employment I was handed a bunch of PostgreSQL queries and told to figure out why they were slow. I’d never done any database work before that, but managed to figure out the issue (a couple queries structured in a way that led to n^2 runtimes), fixed it, and never touched an SQL statement again the entire time I worked there.

I have above-average writing skills, and excel at written communication. I understand the importance of clarity and of avoiding ambiguity, especially in fully remote teams. In my last position, I wrote a substantial amount of documentation, including most of the onboarding documentation for new developers.