Graduate seeking great company to make lovely web things for

Hi there! I'm Alex. I'm just about to graduate from my degree, and as I'm now offically an adult and Real Person™, it's time for me to get a haircut and get a real job.

So, you probably wonder why you should be providing me with gainful employment. While the old saying "specialisation is for insects" is a bit crass, I thrive in all aspects of the modern web workflow, and thus far in my career, I've been focused on learning a little bit about a lot things. I've had experience with subjects ranging from visual design to wrangling servers.

I even know how to quit vim.

Long story short, I'm looking for a graduate/junior web development job at an awesome company. I've had experience working with products and for clients during my placement year, so I'm sure I'll fit right in no matter the kind of work you do. I've had the most experience with the front-end stack and PHP, but I rather fancy Rails too.

You can peruse my CV if that's your kind of thing. I have written about some of the projects I've done on my portfolio, and I have some stuff up on GitHub. I have worked on more things that can't be disclosed, but I'm more than happy to have a chat about the other problems I've solved too.

Because lists are all the rage these days, here are 5 reasons to hire me:

  1. I give a crap about web performance—I passionately believe it's one of the most crucial aspects of web development these days; and often ignored in the era of ever-larger screens with ever-increasing pixel density. I keep up to date with the state of responsive images (Picturefill 2.0 is looking good), ensure assets are always as tiny as they can be, and have a near-religious relationship to the various page speed analytics tools.

  2. I love learning. I justify the amount of time I spend on Twitter by the sheer amount of amazing, fantastic resources I find shared by people I trust—and lately, I've even started blogging semi-frequently. Sharing knowledge is wonderful.

  3. I know when to quit. Spending several hours on increasing the performance of a website by 5% is worthless before the first iteration has shipped, but easily worth the investment when you're starting to see some traffic. Sounds obvious, but it's easy to forget.

  4. I'm a hybrid. While I'm most proficient at development, I firmly believe design is the cornerstone of great products, and while I still have so many things to learn about it, I consider it a vital part of my career development. I find it disappointing that there's such a large movement for designers learning to code, but no counter-movement for developers learning how to design. Design is all around us, whether it's deliberate or not.

  5. I love baking. Birthday cakes will be a regular occurrence.

If you're hiring or know someone who's hiring, I'd love to hear from you. <3 Send me an email at alex@jegtnes.com, or you can tweet me.