I have never really written a cover letter before, and as such I wouldn't really consider this one to be by any means a traditional one. However, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't at least try to express an image of myself before you even try to invest any time with evaluating me as a potential candidate, since first impressions are truly forever.

As you may be able to tell, I do highly enjoy writing and trying to express myself with written word and the manipulation thereof, it's a quality that I do try to pride myself on, but I chalk that more up to being adaptable and flexible. I am more or less one of the types of individuals who are obsessed with the accumulation of knowledge and ability just for the sake of having it; often people call the concept a polymath but I just consider myself a philomath. I don't want to be categorized by the extent of my knowledge but rather my respect towards it and my determination to acquire it wherever possible about any and everything I come across.

This has mostly manifested in my development in the tech area as well as expressing myself musically. Of course, I've come to find that many programmers tend to be musicians as well; I personally would suggest that there is a certain procedural commonality between the two. A desire to manipulate and control the state of a system be it through controlled requests routed to a CPU, or a specific configuration of notes and rhythms that act as requests to the human CPU to elicit emotions and specific experiential responses. Everything is a system that has methods of interacting with it, it just depends on how far out you zoom.

All that being said, I am certainly a polyglot when it comes to programming; I honestly don't write much code anymore unless I'm doing something for someone else as I enjoy maintaining and fixing more than creating, though there was a period of time where I coded constantly. My preferred language currently is Javascript, especially node js to take it outside of the browser, but I'm also fond of python, and when I was younger my preferred languages were PHP and more preferably perl. That being said though, I have essentially tried every major language that comes out so I can experience the transmutation of syntax and the methods through which one would strive to express their ideas. Personally I believe that no matter what language or paradigm you use, it's all expressions of patterns of behavior and the manipulation or construction of state (if functional programming is more your thing, which is a preference I'm rapidly developing). Anyway, that being said, it builds up to the idea that if you understand how to represent the different processes and routines of a programming language mentally, all you need to learn are the slight variations on syntax to map those abstract ideas to a concrete implementation. That isn't to say that I believe that there isn't utility in actually learning the ins and outs of different languages and the constraints they invoke, more just that on a general and intellectual level, the more general you think, the more effectively you can reason about things. If you think about reality in terms of fundamental units and axiomata, then you can reason about it mathematically and according to formal logic.

Anyway, I have spoken about myself and my qualities enough. What's more relevant is what I can truly offer you and why I want to offer it. As far as why I want to offer it, it's out of a necessity to do something with my life and contribute to something greater than myself. It of course would be nice to draw a paycheck of some sort, but it would be nicer to be part of a well oiled machine and contributing to the functionality thereof. That being said, development is my favorite thing to focus on career wise as that is my most marketable skill (though certainly not the only one but I'll get to that). And I would like to use my body of knowledge to benefit whoever would allow me to. As far as why I want to work specifically for you, it's because you are an employer that hires felons. While I am not one, I do have a few criminal charges, and that has created difficulty in the past. But companies like yours look past that and see the utility in giving people a second chance. Just because they made a bad choice once doesn't  mean they're a bad person and that their skills are worthless. Your validation and expression of this ideology means far more to me than words can express becsuse it invokes mentally the idea of a very positive and progressive, employee oriented ethos. I don't generally enjoy working in corporate environments but the best ones in my opinions were ones that focused on employees and understanding that they are not just an asset but a living, breathing cell in the corporate organism they contributed to. No matter what you do professionally, ultimately everything is about serving people somewhere along the line; people are the most important thing you can focus on, both internally and externally.

Well, all that being said, I highly appreciate you taking the time to read this even if this application gets piped off to /dev/null. Even your slightest time and consideration validates my effort and gives me reason to keep trying. I must apologize again for any non-traditional expression or also any of my rambling, as I do tend to sort of go on and on when I have a goal in mind.

Thank you again.

-G