Ask HN: Please critique my (revised) cover letter
I posted an earlier attempt at a cover letter (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4422386). I've taken your feedback under consideration and here's the revised version:
Dear Xxxxxx -
I’m writing in regards to your Unix Systems Administrator job posting. I love to program. It is what I believe I was born to do - I started off doing it with QBasic in 8th grade and I haven’t looked back. High performance computing has been an interest of mine for a long time - unfortunately I don’t run into a ton of high-volume clusters in my day to day life, which is part of the reason why this position sounds so exciting to me. It doesn’t get much better than getting paid to learn about something that I’ve always wanted to investigate. I am more than willing to learn whatever it takes to be successful- if a problem gets stuck in my head (especially a performance one!) I can’t really let it go until I figure it out. I love Linux and Unix but I don’t have a problem programming or administering in Windows either. I program in whatever language I think will best solve the problem at hand - I have extensive experience doing so in Java and Javascript and more limited experience in Bash and Python, running on Windows, Linux (Ubuntu/Debian and Arch) and Unix (FreeBSD and OS X). I’ve written things from a cradle-to-grave web-application in J2EE (http://thegatewayproject.org/) to an x264 encoding script in Python (see code attached at the end of the document) to a flocking demonstration (surprisingly tricky to get running fast) using HTML5 and Javascript (also attached to my resume). I worked on campus in college for <> in the <> and would love to work on campus again. If you also think I would be a good fit for this position, please contact me at xxx-xxx-xxxx or at xxxxxx@xxxxxx.com.
Sincerely, <>