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A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

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Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#41

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

amckenna wrote: post #40

For those wondering what the program does: TL;DR - The program writes a Brainfuck program that writes the text you inputted. Pretty neat First copy the text of the letter (excluding the x86 interpreter in hex on the right, or in the case of the gist, at the bottom) and run it through an online Brainfuck interpreter. Supply ASCII text input such as "A" and run the program. It will output another Brainfuck program. If…

Hmm...

It would be interesting to do something similar, but optimizing for output code size.

For example, I'm pretty sure that the following is one of the shortest representations of "A" in BF, although it doesn't clean up after itself.

    -[+>+]>+.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#43

Post by sytelus »

SonOfLilit wrote: post #31
SonOfLilit wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so much of a special case at the time that they would do that anyway. I needed to take a gambit that would have some probability of failing at the gatekeeper, but would yield rewards proportional to risk. And of course _I didn't send it to an HR person_. I don't understand why would a programmer ever send his CV to an HR person. My CV always gets passed to a programmer who can read it and see my value, he passe…

In fact, two weeks ago I had to take a similar gambit. Here is what I sent this time (to a large group of alumni of the unit I served in). I got a few offers, but I'm still open to propositions: My CV in one sentence: "Ask anyone in 8200." I'm busy with my venture (spreading code literacy as wide as literacy), so I can only help you at 30% capacity or for a short period. I'm looking for the project where my experienc…

One line CVs are good but it would help if you also mention your current location and related preference (are you willing to move/commute-on-demand/telecommute-only and preference to work abroad as well as any work permits you might need). Are you open to full time positions or just contracting? Lot of big projects either requires full time commitments or long term contract. From career perspective I would also highly recommend not to shoehorn yourself as "cryptography" or security developer - unless that's what you want to genuinely only thing focus on. Typically people's expertise are mere coincidence of jobs they managed to get first time and it's generally good thing to develop skills in other fields such as computer vision or machine learning and stuff.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#44

Post by SonOfLilit »

sytelus wrote: post #43
SonOfLilit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, two weeks ago I had to take a similar gambit. Here is what I sent this time (to a large group of alumni of the unit I served in). I got a few offers, but I'm still open to propositions: My CV in one sentence: "Ask anyone in 8200." I'm busy with my venture (spreading code literacy as wide as literacy), so I can only help you at 30% capacity or for a short period. I'm looking for the project where my experienc…

One line CVs are good but it would help if you also mention your current location and related preference (are you willing to move/commute-on-demand/telecommute-only and preference to work abroad as well as any work permits you might need). Are you open to full time positions or just contracting? Lot of big projects either requires full time commitments or long term contract. From career perspective I would also highl…

> your current location and related preference

Irrelevant in Israel. We're that small. Since this is now posted internationally I should mention I'm willing to work remotely.

> Are you open to full time positions or just contracting?

"I can only help you at 30% capacity or for a short period."

> Lot of big projects either requires full time commitments or long term contract.

Indeed, which is why I had to take this gambit. It worked, I got very interesting offers.

> not to shoehorn yourself as "cryptography" or security developer

"Hire me to prototype your new product, automate your workflow, refactor your MVP into a maintainable architecture, research new technology, fix the bug you gave up on, mentor your juniors, or just join your team."

The cover letter was written years ago for a specific security/crypto position. This "one line CV" is much more general.

> Typically people's expertise are mere coincidence of jobs

Indeed, never understood that. I always loved so many different things...

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#47

Post by unwind »

SonOfLilit wrote: post #25

Author here. Due to popular request, I extracted the text from the PDF, it's in a gist at the bottom. A funny (on my account) story: After three days with little sleep, the last half-day spent finding just one more byte to remove so it fits in a nice rectangle[1], I was finally done. I sent the complete .asm to Oded Margalit, an IBM researcher who organizes the CodeGuru programming competitions in Israel, and he imme…

I love it how the OS does the obviously right thing (at least to my eyes, returning from the application's main() function equivalent makes 100% perfect sense), but people who have obviously spent a b*ttload of time with these things are still surprised. Not sure if it's irony, or just tragic. Good story though, thanks!

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#48

Post by SonOfLilit »

unwind wrote: post #47
SonOfLilit wrote: post #25

Author here. Due to popular request, I extracted the text from the PDF, it's in a gist at the bottom. A funny (on my account) story: After three days with little sleep, the last half-day spent finding just one more byte to remove so it fits in a nice rectangle[1], I was finally done. I sent the complete .asm to Oded Margalit, an IBM researcher who organizes the CodeGuru programming competitions in Israel, and he imme…

I love it how the OS does the obviously right thing (at least to my eyes, returning from the application's main() function equivalent makes 100% perfect sense), but people who have obviously spent a b*ttload of time with these things are still surprised. Not sure if it's irony, or just tragic. Good story though, thanks!

It's maybe the right thing, but not the obvious thing.

In the context of DOS assembly language programming, the only obvious thing is "nothing". DOS is barely an OS, it's mostly a library of function calls. DOS does nothing most of the time, so you expect it to do nothing all the time.

At the time I didn't yet spend a lot of time doing DOS assembly language programming, but since then I did, and had I heard about this for the first time today, I would be really surprised.

Re: A Cover Letter in Brainfuck

#49

Post by ryanjshaw »

unwind wrote: post #47
SonOfLilit wrote: post #25

Author here. Due to popular request, I extracted the text from the PDF, it's in a gist at the bottom. A funny (on my account) story: After three days with little sleep, the last half-day spent finding just one more byte to remove so it fits in a nice rectangle[1], I was finally done. I sent the complete .asm to Oded Margalit, an IBM researcher who organizes the CodeGuru programming competitions in Israel, and he imme…

I love it how the OS does the obviously right thing (at least to my eyes, returning from the application's main() function equivalent makes 100% perfect sense), but people who have obviously spent a b*ttload of time with these things are still surprised. Not sure if it's irony, or just tragic. Good story though, thanks!

The first x86 assembly program I wrote ran almost perfectly the first time. That was over 15 years ago and I don't remember what it actually did, but I remember being impressed with myself.

Then the screen filled with junk and my P133 rebooted. When it happened a second time I resigned myself to actually read the assembly manual section about DOS programs properly (i.e. not stop after the part which said .COM files are the simplest way to get started).

The idea of asking the OS to unload my application wasn't obvious to me at all :) At the same time, realising why not asking the OS to unload my application produced the results it did was a lightbulb moment.

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