Bachelor's degree in mathematics from top-10 US university. Also extensive study in Economics and CS. A lot of that stuff has been forgotten (graduated in 2003), but I can always re-learn anything.
Not really a programmer now, although I have been one in the past. Mostly PHP. Proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Advanced amateur photographer.
Good at thinking about difficult ideas, modeling them, and explaining them.
Very good written and spoken English. I know all the rules, and I'm a great editor (both to correct pure grammar mistakes, and to resolve unclear/improper wording); but I'm not against breaking the rules when it makes sense stylistically. I know/speak/read a good bit of German, and a little bit of Spanish. This sounds strange to say, but I have very good language-comprehension skills, no matter what the language. Even if I am unfamiliar with the grammar and vocabulary (or even the written characters), I can usually understand foreign-language documents fairly well, given enough time and a good dictionary; and I am well above-average at both understanding non-native English speakers when they use poor English (written or spoken), and producing English that can be understood by non-native English speakers (same). In short, I believe that I am very good at
interfacing and
communicating with other humans.
Please see my "horse race" analogy in the Analogy Bounty thread:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=2368.msg38118#msg38118I believe that this accurately represents my ability to take difficult concepts and explain them in plain English, even if that plain English gets a little wordy sometimes
.
In my day-to-day job, I work on databases, simplifying office work and converting inter-related sets of Excel spreadsheets to relational DB's, while training co-workers on how to use the new DB's. (DBMS = FileMaker Pro, which if you haven't tried it, is EXCELLENT for rapid application development and prototyping, although the prototype can end up fulfilling the client's needs 95% of the time if you're looking at an application that only needs to support a handful of users.)
I could see myself playing a role similar to that of Tom in Office Space. "Look, I already told you! I deal with the Goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!"