I mean, it's a legitimate question. There are plenty of engineers on the market these days; while we don't have any trouble finding work, there are plenty of good engineers around if you know how to look. So why should someone hire me in particular?

Well, dear reader, let's look at what I can do-- I mean, I graduated from a relatively prestigious university, so surely I can do something. Much of what I bring to a company, though, doesn't come from coursework-- it comes from messing around with friends (student, faculty, or otherwise) late at night, trying to come up with cool stuff that works. At my last company, we supported SDKs in six languages. I was the only person who had shipped code (not just there-- indeed, mostly not there) in all six-- Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java, and Objective-C. I wrote the Perl SDK from scratch in just a couple of days, while helping a customer debug their OAuth stanzas (that they were using in lieu), and made sure it not only passed its own extensive unit test suite, but all the Perl "Kwalitee" measures as well. Having never done Android development, I got a basic AR system working in a day. The prettiest, however, of the random tasks I undertook, was a data visualization I did in just a few hours (of my own time, late one night) that got us a lot of good press.

SXSW Interactive Checkin Visualization on Vimeo.

It's in Processing, if you're curious. Another language I picked up on the side (also how I learned Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C).

That leads me to the corollary, then. I love technology, and I love hacking, but it's not all I do; in the last twelve months I've served as communications head for a political campaign, replaced bits of my house, played in a pretty good little orchestra (I've played violin for nearly 19 years), spoken at conferences, and generally led a fairly interesting life through circumstances best labeled "odd." All of these things make me a better hacker, in the most traditional sense; I get things done using whatever means necessary for the job at hand, and I'm not afraid of picking up a new skill or two if they're what would work the best.

And things do indeed get done well. When I commit to a deadline, it gets done, no matter what-- as a young intern at VeriSign, I once stayed overnight to finish integrating VeriSign's one-time password technology with the research project that would become http://pip.verisignlabs.com, rather than disappointing their head of research. (I was later given the favor of researching and submitting a security patch to the open source version, Apache Heraldry.) I've worked on old codebases and new, for huge, established corporations, the government, and tiny startups just trying to make their way in the world.

So, as Arlo Guthrie said: "the only reason I'm singing you this song now is that you may know someone in a similar situation-- or you may be in a similar situation-- and if you're in a situation like that, there's only one thing you can do:" ping me. (You could sing Alice's Restaurant, but as a hiring strategy, that might have a somewhat limited scope.) I want to work for groups who want to be the best, and who need someone to fill in their cracks with a breadth of experience, and an attention to detail that can bring companies to the top. If that sounds like you, my email address is bfo -at- ussjoin -dot- com, and my resume is-- as always-- at http://ussjoin.com/resume.html. Good hunting!

At extraordinarily long last, for those of you who've heard me talking about this for a month or two, I've completed the migration of my homesite away from the venerable Linode and over to this thing oddly known as "the cloud."

First of all, I should note that since "the cloud" is so poorly defined anyway, what I'm actually meaning by this is that I've removed the single point of failure for the http://ussjoin.com universe, by moving it away from Linode (which was a virtualized server-- which can also be called a cloud, depending on who you ask) and to, depending on what part one's looking at, one of two hot new places for sites: Google App Engine for http://ussjoin.com, and GitHub Pages for http://blog.ussjoin.com.

So why do this? For one thing, speed. Since Google is now using speed to alter PageRank, it's a good thing to have my site served by the fastest, most distributed clouds available. App Engine is, of course, Google's own, and it runs in all of their datacenters for nice geographic locality; GitHub is hosted in one datacenter, but it's a doozy-- RackSpace's Dulles datacenter, where GitHub itself lives. If that goes down, then there's going to be an awful lot of angry nerds.

Another reason, for me, is removing the bloat of my fairly aged Movable Type installation. Now, far be it from me to attack Movable Type-- I was an MT partisan even before I worked for Six Apart-- but it has a huge number of features that I just don't need for my one-man blog. The main reason I stayed with it this long was for Action Streams, Byrne Reese's incredible contribution to the Open Web.

Recreating Action Streams, then, is why not all of this site is on GitHub. I spent quite a lot of time playing with getting an Action Streams-like construct (that pulls all my activities from every website and collates them) to work under Jekyll, and indeed it did actually work. It did, however, require another computer just to run that (fairly large) cron job to create all the new posts every 15 minutes-- and ultimately I decided that was a waste. Running the new site in App Engine lets everything-- the datastore, the cron, the server, the works-- sit in the nice App Engine stack, and results in far less complexity-- which hopefully will also translate to less breakage.

Since I moved away from Movable Type, I naturally also left behind their MT Professional site design-- which gave me the opportunity to play with lots of different site design ideas. I've currently settled on this fairly minimalist design, but I'll be tweaking it over the next few weeks, and might well end up replacing it altogether.

So then: welcome to the new place. I've got lots of things to share in the next couple of days, so I'll be posting fairly frequently for a while (after my longest-ever hiatus, due partially to all the things that have been going on, and partially to an unwillingness to post new content to a site I was replacing). Good things are afoot!