£500 if you can find me a job (version 1.0)

That worked a treat, £500 awarded to lucky winner who found me a fun short contract.

Now I'd like another one, so I repeat the offer:

If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or if someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway. (The thing Simon pointed me at only lasted three weeks and I paid him in full anyway, because it was neat.)

And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts who I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.

Anyhow, my CV is at http://www.aspden.com, and any advice on how it could be improved will be gratefully received.

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I'll also repeat the original advert: (job-hunt.contrib 1.0)

Anyone in Cambridge need a programmer? Obviously Clojure is a speciality, and my current obsession, but I'm also pretty good with C (especially the embedded variety), microcontrollers, and Python, and I have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of all kinds. My obsessions can be pretty quickly changed when I need them to be.

I have a (deserved) reputation for being able to produce heavily optimised but nevertheless bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack together sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is appropriate when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.

I've worked in telecoms, commercial research, banking, university research, a chip design company, server virtualization, a couple of startups, and occasionally completely alone.

I've worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit microcontrollers, and once upon a time every IBM machine in one building in Imperial College was running my partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.

I'm smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.

I also have various ancient and rusty skills with things like Java, C++, R, OCaml, Common LISP, Scheme, FORTRAN and Pascal which can be brushed up if necessary. Like all lispers, I occasionally write toy interpreters for made-up languages for fun.

If you're a local company using Java, who might be interested in giving Clojure a try (motivation here, in Paul Graham's classic Beating the Averages), I'd love to try to show you what all the fuss is about.

CV here if you're interested: http://www.aspden.com

I've never used a CV before, having always found work through word of mouth. So I expect that it can be improved. If anyone's got any suggestions as to how it could be better written, do please leave comments or e-mail cv@aspden.com.