Skeleton Cover Letter
This was my skeleton cover letter for my Jan-Mar 2014 job search. I've also written a load of hopefully useful words about this process.Hi there,
I'm a Ruby/Rails/Coffee/whatever-is-needed engineer, and I think that $COMPANY_NAME and I would go together like a really nice wine and another equally nice but different wine. I'm not good at metaphor. Here's a grab-bag of (IMO) interesting things I have done:
- I came 30th in the European U18 Chess Championship
- I founded and sold a clothing company that makes jumpers with pictures of fruit on them
- I taught C# and VB to classes of 16-30 year olds for a year
- I have a BA in Physics from Oxford (First Class) and an MS in Advanced Computing from Imperial College (Distinction, highest marks in the year)
- My blog (www.robertheaton.com) had 100,000 visitors last year and was Tweeted by DHH
- As far as Google is concerned I've written the seminal articles on the Padding Oracle Attack and the Rails secret_token (try Googling them!)
- I completely paid for university playing online poker
After getting my feet wet with Python and PHP, I became a fully fledged Ruby/Rails guy at the start of 2012 whilst going through 500 Startups with Bluefields.com, and built the alpha platform that saw them raise a cool million after demo day.
Since then I've spent most of my time building Copyin, where we tried to solve the problem of information leakage from corporate email. We built some really wonderful systems, parts of which were not a million miles away from Stripe's famous Google Groups setup. The part I'm most proud of is our MailRouter, that made it trivial to perform in-app actions by sending an email to a quasi-RESTful email address (I've started to share this with the world at https://github.com/robert/mailgun-email-routing). We were able to experiment with many different mail-to links in our outbound emails, that allowed users to interact with our application without leaving their inbox. We solved a tonne of our own problems, but were unable to create something that other people were desperate to use to solve their own problems.
$REASONS_WHY_COMPANY_IS_COOL. For these reasons, I would like in. I've attached my resume.
Best,
Rob
PS I'm based in London at the moment, but have an H1B space from last year (longish but lawyer-verified story) and am looking to move to SF ASAP. I'll be in SF from 9th Feb - 1st Mar, and am happy to do phone interviews before then.