Aaah, feels like a good time for me to recycle an oldie but goodie from #245 here:
http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdfIf it worked for Leonardo da Vinci, maybe it could work for me. The next time I’m looking for a job, I’ll try
this:
“Most Illustrious Proprietor, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim
themselves skilled developers of applications of business, and that the invention and operation of the said
programs are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else,
to explain myself to your Company, showing your Management my secret, and then offering them to your
best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part,
shall be briefly noted below.
1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong functions and modules, adapted to be most easily ftp’d, and with
them you may pursue, and at any time combine them with others, secure and indestructible by standard mean
time to failure of hardware and denial of service, easy and convenient to compile and catalog. Also methods
of unzipping and storing the data of the customers.
2. I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors,
and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.
3. If, by reason of the volume of the data, or the structure of the btrees and its indexes, it is impossible, when
conducting a search, to avail oneself of sub-second response time, I have methods for benchmarking every
process or other function, even if it were interpreted, etc.
4. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data
almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great
detriment and confusion.
5. And if the processing should be on the desktop I have apps of many machines most efficient for data entry
and reporting; and utilities which will satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers and users and
consumers.
6. I have means by secret and tortuous scripts and modules, made without leaving tracks, to generate source
code, even if it were needed to run on a client or a server.
7. I will make secure firewalls, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the hackers with their utilities,
there is no body of crackers so great but they would break them. And behind these, software could run quite
unhurt and without any hindrance.
8. In case of need I will make big properties, methods, and collections and useful forms, out of the common
type.
9. Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other
parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the
variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of data entry, reporting, and storage.
10. In times of low revenue I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in
maintenance and the refactoring of code public and private; and in guiding data from one warehouse to
another.
11. I can carry out code in Javascript, PHP, or C, and also I can do in network administration whatever may be
done, as well as any other, be he who he may.
Again, the intranet app may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of all
your customers of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Google.
And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to
make the experiment in your data center, or in whatever place may please your Businessperson - to whom I
comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.”