coder . cl

Reading resumes is — sometimes — a little bit fun. You can find very interesting ones, but others are wrong focused. Reading programmer resumes, now mostly called Software Engineers, can be more fun. The programmer market is focused to fit the needs on the local industry, so many resume readers, such as IT recruiters just pay attention to programmer certifications, educational grades, and some acquired experience, also a little of motivation and scope of the resume. Many times with a lack of a cover letter, and limited to certain number of technologies to cover the local industry needs. But no one asks for side projects or personal projects, they are not interested. Here is why I am only using the email address on this site (dmw at coder dot cl) from October 10th of 2009.

Usually a good programmer have some side project or personal project to show. A side project means that the programmer has creativity, he wants to contribute to the community and he has another perspective on how to solve problems. No matter if the project is a commercial product or a FOSS project, you can find them creating new products in their free time and probably helping the community on unsolved problems.

One example at my side, one example is pyxser, which solves the problem of circular and cross referenced serializations, that is not solved on .NET and Java XML serializations. I’m currently migrating that logic to .NET and Java, using the same model and algorithm, that will allow in the future a transparent communication between Python, .NET and Java platforms using XML serialized objects, probably under Web Services. Remember that .NET throws a InvalidOperationException exception with the error message “A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type” if it finds a circular or cross reference. This only shows a design problem in .NET and Java does the same.

Usually recruiters do not have any idea about that project, they do not think anything about it. No one has asked never about it. There is a lack of interest about what can you do. I have solved a software design problem, and recruiters when see my resume, they can see my side projects, and none of them asks about them. They are only focused on the experience related to the technologies that must fit the required profile. This is a lack of abstract thinking and problem solving. They just ask where have worked and what have you done in those companies, limiting your problem solving capacity to those concerns related to the company.

There are also exceptional cases, where recruiters keep asking about your interests and your perspective on software development. Companies like Google and Facebook will ask you about your FOSS projects, looking how interested are you on software development and challenging you the problem solving tasks. Is a fact that all those companies with very top technologies, will test your programming abilities.

At my side, I ask the reverse question: “what have done your company on software development that is causing interest from me?”. I do not work for any company directly, I’m only taking projects as freelancer, and it is working fine for me. The only way to contact me is though the email written in this page and the phone number in this page. I do not use emails from other companies from October 10th of 2009 and will not use other email address rather than the one linked to this site, until I find a company that realizes about a software design problem on a well known software, and has created the solution to that design problem as a proof of the lack of well done software design. I’m not interested in your speech, show me the code…