Nik Kantar

Wednesday, October 21, 2020
4 min read

Hire Me! (v.2020.10)

Back on the job market again, so here’s my updated “dating profile”.

Update: I'm no longer looking. :) Everything below is for reference/posterity.


Me

TL;DR

I really like Python and someone ought to pay me to make things with it.

The Full Story

I wrote my first lines of code in the early 90s, when I was about 7. Don’t let this fool you, though—what followed was a cool decade and a half of not doing anything noteworthy with computers, until my first real computer-related job in 2006.

At that time I was in early college, rediscovering programming, and I started writing PHP and maintaining Linux servers part-time. Shortly thereafter I went off to get a design degree before going back to programming in 2011.

I then did more PHP than I ever really wanted to, until discovering Python sometime in 2014 or so. I immediately fell in love and dove into it pretty heavily. Ever since, I’ve thought of myself as a Python programmer first and foremost. Much of that time I’ve spent wrangling Django and Flask backed by PostgreSQL, deployed either on Heroku or plain ol’ Linux boxes. Lately I’ve been building systems comprised by smaller services and deployed on AWS, thus relying not on web frameworks but the glue available in that ecosystem.

A notable part of the last few years has involved working with an entirely different stack. It’s been a bit more of a stack du jour, based primarily on TypeScript, with accompaniment consisting of DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, and AWS Lambda, and the whole symphony managed by Terraform.

While the learning experience has been fascinating and valuable, I frankly miss working primarily with Python. Ideally, I’d like to work on projects which are predominantly or at least largely reliant on it. Not a whole lot of serious software is single-language these days, but this preference is still important to me.

If you’re looking for my résumé, you can find it here.

You

You’re probably a small company, or a fairly independent team in a larger one. You use something resembling a sane methodology for producing quality software, and it’s shown itself to work well in this instance (or you’re open to change). You don’t like pointless meetings and are happy to reconsider any that are thought of as such by team members.

You use Python pretty heavily—if not exclusively—and plan on continuing to do so in the foreseeable future. Its role in the organization isn’t tied exclusively to data science/engineering, ops, or light scripting. You probably use it for something web related, be it good ol’ page loading web apps or APIs powering external clients.

If I’m lucky, you’re heavily invested into open source in some manner. Maybe your main product is open, or you share some ancillary tools with the world. Dare I dream about your developers being allowed (or even encouraged) to contribute back to the software they use for their work?

You support your staff in attending conferences, and perhaps even sponsor some as a way to give back to the community. Ditto for relevant meetups and other local events.

You believe in work-life balance, or however you refer to the idea that happy, well rested employees live better lives and do better work.

You’re not an adtech company and your products and services aren’t primarily harmful to anyone. You don’t have contracts with law enforcement agencies, nor plans to enter any.

You’re currently fully remote and plan on being remote-only or at least remote-first if and when it’s at all safe to go back to the office. Asynchronous work is either the norm or a possibility.

Us

If the above sections have you feeling like it might be a match, you can email me at nik+hireme@nkantar.com. Do us both a favor and mention this post in the email, so I know you’re not entirely random. ;)

Note to recruiters: I’m not opposed to working with independent recruiters, but I tend to be very selective. If you choose to get in touch, please make sure what you send me makes sense based on the above. If you respect my time, I will respect yours, and quite likely remember you in the future for doing so.


Tags: hire me

Thanks for reading! You can keep up with my writing via the feed or newsletter, or you can get in touch via email or Mastodon.


Older:
Introducing Autohook
Newer:
Goals for 2020 in Review