um, a lot

My name is Mike Ward and I'm looking for an opportunity to work in an exciting tech company.

(lots of detail about me here, mostly hobbies, interests, etc.)

This resume certainly could have been created using a static HTML file, and a supporting stylesheet. But it wasn't.

This one-page app is a contrived example, granted, but my intention is to demonstrate my love of trying new things. I'll bring that tireless, pushing the envelope attitude to your company if hired.

In fact, using Wordpress would've been an easy way to pick an atractive theme and quickly put together this resume. But the sluggish performance would have symbolized the innapropriate platform choice, and many of the benefits, like great SEO plugins would be wasted in a resume site.

If you're a hiring manager, please ignore the acronym soup on the right side. The point is that I wanted this resume to be different than all the MS Word resumes that litter the inboxes of America's top employers (like you).

Hire me and you'll get the benefit of my broad perspective. I love to evaluate new technologies and see how they might be used to improve efficiency, performance, capabilities, etc. However, my real-world experience has always challenged me to try to objectively look at the tradeoffs involved in any technology decisions. Risk, stability, initial and ongoing costs, performance, security, maintainability, extensibility - all must be weighed when making decisions.

A very simple NodeJS server delivers the static HTML file from the webserver's local filesystem using Express and fs' synchronous readFile() method. It also returns {{#link-to 'modal'}}JSON{{/link-to}} data where needed, like to populate the "Skills" section.

The front-end is where most of the work takes place, as you can tell from the URLs. EmberJS was used for this reason. A core philosophy of EmberJS is to bind routes to URLs, the primary feature of the Web.

Page layout and default styling is handled by Bootstrap, solely because I'm lazy and it works well with little effort. I do typically prefer a grid layout like blueprint, and I always like to use Compass/Sass because I can easily keep everything organized in partials that get compiled into a single CSS file for production. In fact I've sneaked in a bit of {{#link-to 'modal2'}}Sass{{/link-to}} here as well.

This resume app was built on my OSX 10.9 iMac using vim editor and git versioning system with the repo hosted on Bitbucket. I'm confortable working on any system, but do prefer an environment where I can stay close to the command line. I prefer vim as my editor because my fingers' muscle memory knows what keys to hit even if I don't. I absolutely have a bias toward git because I understand the advantages of distributed versioning systems, and a DAG-based system is fundamentally better than a diff-based system as the size of the repository grows.