Hi Coalmarch!

I am contacting you in regards to the open PHP/Drupal developer position and feel I would be an excellent candidate.  Not only have I been programming in PHP for over 10 years now, but my Drupal experience is extensive as well.  It seems that things have fallen into place and being an expert at Drupal turns out to be what fate handed to me after taking on numerous projects to be programmed and set up in Drupal, even to the point where I started recommending Drupal for projects that I normally wouldn't have considered using it for.

I typically work in an agile-based development environment, especially when strict deadlines are involved.  I have great technical and analytical abilities and my ability to think outside the box allows me to come up with unique ideas or solutions that others typically don't pursue.  

In addition to PHP and Drupal, I am also well-versed in front-end development and can develop full-stack, if needed.  

My education and experience speak volumes about how this position is essentially perfect for me (and perfect for you, once we start working together, if all goes well :).  

I sincerely appreciate your time in reviewing my application and hope to hear from you soon.  

Sincerely,

Brett Boylen




Even though at my current position I am actually considered a Senior Web Developer, I've taken on a type of leadership role in that I lead a team of two other developers now (both of which I hand-picked out of the candidates that were interviewed) as the company has grown.  I am looking to further my career by taking on more responsibility by eventually leading a larger development team.  I also tend to stay within smaller companies as they have great growth potential, especially if you have talented people working for said company.



I've worked with Drupal for over 5 years now, starting with version 6 but quickly moving on to Drupal 7 (and never looked back!).  At my last job, I was lead developer on a full Drupal website for General Electric.  You can see the live site I developed for them here: http://www.gemeasurement.com/    It was a six month long project and we used the agile development methodology with two week long sprints.

Having worked with and successfully launched a Drupal site for a Fortune 10 company, I'm quite confident in my Drupal knowledge and proficiency.  I've developed my own modules, themes, content types, views...name it, and I've probably dealt with it in Drupal.  

As the site mentioned above was an enterprise-level website, we used Acquia Cloud for hosting and support.  Additionally, due to the level of traffic, I set up memcached server-side to deal with a common issue of load speed issues that Drupal seems to have out of the box in cases dealing with very high traffic websites.  A caching solution such as memcached can sometimes be necessary for such sites.  

Additionally, there are modules available for Drupal that assist greatly in working with a multi-developer team.  It is important that developers do not overwrite each others changes and using something such as git just won't cut it with Drupal, unfortunately, as Drupal stores most of its data in the database (git doesn't even deal with databases...only flat files).  This issue can be worked around, however, via the use of specific free third-party modules.



I actually enjoy interacting not only with clients, but also other employees.  At my last position, I taught the two QA testers how to program in PHP after learning that they literally did not have much to do 95% of the time.  

I also enjoy meeting with clients and explaining to them the plan for a specific project in a way that someone with no programming knowledge would understand.  Sometimes clients can be frustrating, yes, but that's where the business comes from. Knowing how to communicate with them and to figure out a way to get a project done to their approval is absolutely crucial.

That being said, I've also been known to spend days coding away solo to get a project done under a strict deadline.


I stay sharp by doing programming contest problems at least once or twice a week.  Basically, I am given a text input and have to write code to solve a particular problem based on that input, and then output the answer.  Once I write the code, I can submit it online and the online judge tells me if it passed all of the test cases or not.  It's actually quite fun and was something I did in college for my school.