On Monday, something strange happened. First, out of nowhere I got a 
call from somebody who had seen my CV on Monster. [Usually CVs are 
listed by date, so when you first upload one you get a flood of 
enquiries which then gradually tails off. Indeed, Monster recommend you 
periodically updating your CV to push it back to the top of the list! 
Mine hasn't been touched for months now...]

Even more unusually, the job he was talking about looked interesting. He 
sent me an email with the spec, I read it and replied back "yes please". 
And, as is customary, I never heard anything further. Oh well, I guess 
that's the end of that one then. :-P

By a surprising coincidence, on the exact same day, my dad noticed an 
advert in the local paper. Now this looks really, really promising. 
Unfortunately, despite repeated phone calls to the number indicated in 
the advert, I have yet to get anybody to answer the phone.

That being the case, I am currently filling out the application form 
that I managed to obtain from their website. I'm rather concious of the 
fact that I got this ad on Monday, and it's now Wednesday, and time is 
slipping away. The closing date isn't for a week or two yet, but that's 
not the point; if you're not the fifth or sixth person to reply, you 
essentially have no chance of your application even being read.

There are a number of problems, of course. They demand 3 references. Not 
one, not two, but three. The first one is required to be from your 
current employer; OK, that's easy. The other two... uh, yeah. 
Unfortunately nobody else actually knows me in a professional capacity. 
I mean, I could give them my dad, my girlfriend or my little sister, but 
that's not particularly relevant.

And then we come to my favourite section: "Please briefly describe your 
current position, or anything else that you believe is relevant. Please 
provide details and evidence of how you fit the job requirements."

So here's a question: How do you make yourself sound like a god without 
sounding like you're just wildly exaggerating the truth?

I mean let's face it, I *am* kinda special. I have no formal 
mathematical training, and yet I can hold a conversation about 
polynomial functions, complex arithmetic, vector and matrix algebra, 
differential and integral calculus, statistics, group theory, knot 
theory, graph theory, and so forth.

I have no formal training in computer science. (Don't let the title of 
my degree fool you - it's IT, not CS.) And in spite of that, I can 
happily chatter on about Turing machines, the lambda calculus, sorting 
and searching algorithms, complexity classes, parallel and concurrent 
processing, and on to more pointy things like artificial intelligence, 
digital signal processing, data compression, cryptology ( = cryptography 
+ cryptanalysis), digital circuit design, 3D computer graphics, and so 
forth.

I started programming computers when I was just 9 years old. Since then 
I have written *working* programs in BASIC, assembly language, machine 
code (!), C, Pascal, Java, JavaScript, C++, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Prolog, 
Haskell, Tcl and more, not even counting things like PostScript, SQL, 
XSLT, SVG, TeX, Makefiles and things that veer off into not being 
"programming languages". (Note also how we've got wildly different 
categories of language in there - machine-oriented, structured, 
object-oriented, imperative, functional, logical, relational...)

Working programs I've written have included all sorts of graphical 
things like fractal generators, mesh renderers, ray tracers and various 
function plotters. I've built sound synthesizers and particle 
simulations. I've written programs that implement data structures, 
compression algorithms and ciphers. I've built demonstrations for these, 
sometimes using the most unlikely techniques. (Interactive data 
compression using Huffman encoding implemented with JavaScript and DOM 
manipulations of XHTML, anyone?)

OK, so there's 4 thick, chunky paragraphs explaining just what a bad-ass 
I am. Are prospective employers going to care? Not really, no.

Hmm, writing applications is hard. >_<

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