[PLUG] Interested in employment

[Lynn Bradshaw via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

Hello out there. I've been attending the Jitsi meetings that have been
taking place this month and expressed interest in employment in the
area. For those of you who've already heard my spiel, you can probably
skip most of the message but I'll give out the info for those not
familiar.

The long and short of it is that I've had health problems that tend to
militate strongly against being employed, and I have been unemployed
for quite a long time. However, that has also meant that I've had a
lot of time to myself honing my skills in technology and I hope to
make good use of the proverbial silver lining in the cloud now that my
health has improved considerably. The main way anyone reading can get
a sense of what I've been up to is my GitHub:

https://github.com/readyready15728

I love that site and VCS! Anyway, a summary of pinned repositories
(just skim if too verbose):

* dot-vimrc: my very well-tuned Vim configuration. Neither of my two
DigitalOcean Droplets (one Ubuntu, the other FreeBSD) has any sort of
remote desktop setup and Vim is probably the biggest reason for that.
It enables highly efficient editing even in environments that are
"headless" and/or have limited memory.
* misc: essentially a catch-all drawer for every time I've had a hard
time configuring software or was otherwise unsatisfied with system
performance so it doesn't have to be researched twice. There are also
a few random oddities but most of the ~60 Markdown files fit the
former description. I noticed one day that a seasoned *Google*
engineer (GH handle "catleeball") starred it which means the
information spared her a headache. Correspondence with said engineer
indicated that it helped her with a home retrocomputing project. It
would have been better had the problem been work-related, but I still
think that's quite the good omen.
* The three machine learning projects: exactly half of my pinned repos
are instances of machine learning. Two, black-friday and king-county,
were regression tasks (i.e. predicting a numerical outcome). In both
cases, I got an RMSE score ~10% higher than the best implementations
on machine learning site Kaggle. (It's like golf: the lower the
better.) It's jack-of-all-trades performance but would still most
likely be actionable for a real organization. The other and latest
project, sms-spam, aimed to classify SMS text messages into legit
messages and spam messages. The four performance metrics applied to
the test set show nearly perfect classification, which I was obviously
quite pleased with. There is no industry that can't benefit somehow
from machine learning and I would be elated to apply these methods in
the workplace one day.
* awesome-programming-games: an attempt to round up every programming
game on Earth in one place. It still needs some work and is in one
sense only a Markdown file but it's also probably already still the
most comprehensive such resource on this planet. It shows a strong
willingness to do a lot of research and also showed my first
successful negotiations of pull requests from others. In addition, it
became quite popular, with well over 200 stars.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, just a few other things: I
don't mind if I have to get a new start well below what I can actually
do. It's understandable that employers might be a bit skittish about
someone out of work for years even with what I've just shown. I'm even
open to tier 1 hell desk duty until I can move on from that. I'm also
very open to learning and using nearly any sort of technology.
Example: some people want to have nothing to do with Windows. I would
actually welcome it in order to learn PowerShell and .NET.  ("Core"
versions of both exist and can be used on Linux, but both are pretty
scuffed.) The bottom line is that I am willing to be highly flexible
and will welcome just about any lead.

Anyway, I hope this all found you well and am very eager to hear back.

Best,
Lynn Bradshaw
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