Do recruiters all use the same keyword-search software?

Today I have received three emails for the exact same job. The description is generic. It sounds like something that hundreds of people could do. It’s in San Diego, so it’s not because I am a good geographic match. This seems to happen to me frequently. The recruiters of the world come together as one, and all decide that I am perfect for a particular job. Heh!

I’m working on a couple of programming-oriented posts, but I guess I forgot that technical writing is hard. If I’m lucky, people much smarter than I am will read them. I have to be accurate, which requires research. So I decided to write something fluffy first, to keep the blog from looking dead. Hello internets, I am your scintillating host.

According to the access logs, my Mac newsreader is downloaded about one hundred times per week. This is a program that I stopped working on over a year ago, that was never all that well-suited to its audience, and was never all that finished, either. A program that accesses a discussion network that is pretty much dead. One hundred times! Per week! Who are all these people?

There really should be a way I can make money off of this.

Well, I’m trying. I am hard at work on yet another program, this time targeted at the Mac and the iPhone.

The biggest mistake I made last time was underestimating Mac users’ need for apps that look good and conform to Apple’s user interface conventions. I am not immune to this myself, as a user. I prefer Safari over Firefox, because the latter might have more technical bells and whistles, but the former is much more satisfying to use, on a day-to-day basis. So this time I am going to recruit a designer to work with.

Another mistake I made last time was recruiting beta users who mostly followed me to the Mac from BeOS, where pretty UIs were not a priority. Next time I will look for users who have been using the Mac since System 6 ruled the earth.

I plan to do a really good demo app, so I can get hired at another startup. What I learned from my first startup is that I am even better than I thought at tackling technical problems of almost any sort, whether they involve technology I’m familiar with or not. I learned Actionscript, Flash, Amazon EC2/S3, and MySQL in about two months, total, for all of them. I could perform similar miracles for any other technology.

UPDATE: the final number of emails today for the San Diego job was five. weird.

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