If you are reading this, chances are that you are a recruiter and I have sent you a link as part of an initial exchange. Or you asked me in another capacity if I would be interested in working on something.
I want to start by to saying thank you for taking the time to read this. Making it this far sets you apart from the copy-paste-fire cohort who give recruiters a bad rep. I created this page to be able to deal with request volumes when they come in bursts - as they typically do.

What I have written below is a my candidate description. I hope it helps you save time when you can see all the important bits in one place to decide whether it is worth your time to engage with me. Rather than trying to uncover them piece-by-piece through conversations.
It also helps me: I reduce the times I need to repeat myself and the message is more consistent. I don’t run the risk of having forgotten something important. (Imagine four conversations later: “oh, btw. I’m only available for remote roles. Whoops, should’ve mentioned that earlier…”)

Some of this may sound a bit cocky, make me look overly picky, or full of myself. This honestly is not my intention. And I sure hope I’m not full of myself.
If I have expressed anything poorly, do not hesitate to contact me to let me know. You have my express permission to do so freely and I encourage you to be candid.

Candidate description

I am an experienced software engineer and architect with around 20 years of experience. I enjoy working with a lot of different programming languages.
The majority of my recent development experience was centered around Java, Node, and the AWS stack (e.g. lambdas, SQS, Dynamo et al.) on the backend. I know enough front-end code to be considered dangerous and have contributed using React and Typescript to a certain degree.
Beyond the recent ones, I’ve worked in a ton of other languages - I believe my LinkedIn profile has a more complete list somewhere in my history.

Projects I have worked on range from overnight batch jobs for banks, building content moderation tools, all the way to putting together chatbots to interface with various systems. Many of which centered around the idea of giving systems access to data of other ones.

After all these years, I still love working with code. I believe this is driven by my desire to understand the business problem(s) we are trying to solve, having a clear idea of what success looks like, and how we can measure progress sooner rather than later in the life of a project.
Bonus points for working on system integrations for which I seem to have “a knack” - some of my very best work has been done making distinct systems share information with each other rather than duplicating/funneling data around the ecosystem. And avoiding the resulting issues around keeping those in sync with each other.

Non-negiotiable requirements for a candidate company

• I can work remotely.

  Occasional travel to meet on-site is fine, but the primary mode of work has to be remote.

• I will not consider permanent, salaried roles. Contracting is a must.

• Assuming reasonable notice given, time off to work with other clients and/or my own products must not be an issue.

• Position must allow creative control of software product work.

  Decisions are open to discussion, but I reserve the right to make the final call on implementation details.

• For interviews, no brain-teasers or coding-up of algorithms from memory.

  See this video about interviewing anti-patterns. Particularly “The Riddler” (starts ~6:15) and “The Knuth Fanatic” (~12:50).

  The internet is a beautiful thing. Among other benefits, it means I do not need to remember the details of every single algorithm I came across in graduate classes.

  There are much better avenues to gauge whether I can actually code and solve problems. Code reviews, evaluating my public code (believe me, there’s enough dirt there waiting to be dug up), and/or having a brief pair programming exercize are much better avenues to get a pulse of whether I can actually code.

• No unnecessarily restrictive NDAs.

  If you need me to build your secret formula storage, sure I’ll sign one agreeing to not share it with your competitors. However, anything that prevents me from doing other freelance contracting work is a deal breaker.

Nice-to-haves

• The project at hand aims to integrate different systems.

  This is an area in which I have done some of the best, most interesting work in my career. For some reason, I seem to be very good at it.

• Open to considering arrangements of less than 5 days per week.

• Strong preference for fixed-price projects.

  I’d expect an in-depth conversation outlining the business problem(s) to be solved, what exactly “success” looks like, and how we would go about measuring success.

  If the above isn’t clear yet, I will gladly assist in exploring the status quo, and defining targeted outcomes - possibly as an opening project.

• I may consider daily-rate engagements. However, with caveats.

  Shorter periods (3 months or less) and/or part-time arrangements will be required for me to take such an option into consideration.

Credits

Credit where credit is due: This page was inspired by Erik Dietrich’s candidate description page.