Mojang cover letter 2019

Dear Mojang Hiring Manager,

Please consider my application to your open position of Chief Technology Officer.  The duties and requirements of this position are an excellent match for my technical skills and personality.  Since I got my bachelors degree in 1996, I have gained a great deal of hands-on engineering experience, but as an extravert, I have gravitated towards technical leadership roles as well.  In industry, I have designed and managed large projects, delegating to more junior engineers, and in academia, I have managed groups of students, both in class assignments and as research teams.  I am a strong communicator, comfortable with speaking in front of large groups, and my social proclivities are evident from the nature of the EigenCraft community that has been directly helpful to Minecraft developers in fixing a number of severe, long-standing Minecraft bugs.  I also find technical problem-solving to one of the most exciting parts of my work; I actually started learning to code in about 1979, and in that era, I learned to solve problems and optimize performance without the IDE, debugging, and profiling tools that we take for granted today.

* Background

I received my bachelor’s degree in computer engineering in 1996, and I have worked in software and hardware development for the past 22 years.  I completed my PhD in 2012, after which I took a position as a Computer Science professor at Binghamton University, and in 2017, I accepted a position as Principal Engineer with Eizo Rugged Solutions.  I have also done significant independent consulting, including software engineering, digital circuit design, expert witness for four mobile graphics patent lawsuits (relying heavily on my ability to rapidly analyze and understand complex codebases), and most recently co-inventor on four patents in association with LiquidSky Software (leveraging my knowledge of computer graphics and low-latency client/server systems).

I have software engineering experience at all organizational levels, with leadership roles over large, complex, and long-running projects.  A major example of this would be the TROZ chip, which is a graphics accelerator used in air traffic control workstations around the world.  As an implementer, I did most of the circuit design for the 2000 release, all of the circuit design for the 2004 version, and most of the graphics driver development.  As a manager, I directed the remainder of the software development, managed the testing and verification team, and assisted in managing the PCB design team.  I also represented my employer at trade shows and engaged on-site with system integrators and aviation authorities.  There are ample other examples of my strong technical and leadership skills, including research projects during graduate school and as an assistant professor, major contributions to patent applications and IP development projects with LiquidSky Software, a critical role in patent litigation as an analyst and expert witness, and the recent Safeguard and Re/Vue lossless video capture products as principal engineer at Eizo Rugged Solutions.  In 2004, I also founded the Open Graphics Project, with the help of the Linux Fund; there I functioned as CEO of Traversal Technology, where we produced an open source FPGA-based graphics card development platform.

* Relationship to Minecraft

In 2016, I discovered Minecraft and have been a huge fan ever since.  I enjoy playing the game casually with my wife and kids, but what has drawn me in as most compelling is its technical expressiveness.  From automated resource collection to Atari 2600 emulation using command blocks, Minecraft is much more than just a video game.  It is a full-blown application platform, no less significant than Google Chrome or the Java VM, with mini-game servers like Hypixel being a key example.  I also find communities compelling, and Minecraft has no shortage of them, with users specializing in amazing artistic builds, combat, technical designs, and adventure maps, not to mention the impressive array of game mods.

My broad experience in software engineering and circuit design has taught me particularly strong skills in design for testability, rapid code analysis, debugging, general problem-solving, and performance optimization.  Verification and debugging dominate the time and effort put into any software development project, and I find perfecting software to be as rewarding as developing entirely new software.  In early 2017, I founded the EigenCraft community on Discord.  This has grown to become a nexus of players of various persuasions (mostly technical), mod coders, mod API developers, Mojira moderators, and a few Mojang developers (particularly Josh Letellier and Erik Broes).  We have a heavy focus on fixing bugs and performance problems in Minecraft.  Our fixes and optimizations have been incorporated into multiple modpacks and several have been implemented in vanilla Minecraft.  My own fixes and optimizations include the following:

•	MC-79154 – Hoppers duplicating items within chunks (implemented in 1.12.2).
•	MC-119971 and MC-117930 – Numerous chunk loading bugs that cause deletion and duplication of entities, items in hoppers, and blocks being pushed by pistons (implemented in 1.13.x).
•	MC-2025 – Entities glitching into walls upon chunk reload (collaboration with Sahand “Xcom” Hesar whose fix was implemented in 1.13.x).
•	MC-9568 – Baby mobs suffocate or go through blocks when growing up near a solid block.
•	MC-98153 – Portals momentarily teleport player to wrong location, sometimes setting them on fire (also with Xcom).
•	MC-81098 and MC-11193 – Performance problems and nondeterministic behavior from redstone wire (one of my fixes implemented in 1.14 snapshots).  I have also developed a “bolt on” helper class that speeds up redstone wire by a factor of 10 without breaking any expected game mechanics.  Additionally, it makes the behavior of redstone wire intuitive, deterministic, non-orientational, and non-locational.
•	MC-134989 – AbstractMap::hashCode accounts for substantial CPU overhead (fixed in 1.13.1).
•	MC-4 – Item drops sometimes appear at the wrong location.  This is a fixed-point rounding bug, and I developed a server-side fix that works with vanilla clients.

As EigenCraft has grown, my role has shifted more towards leadership.  I assist others with their fix and optimization projects, connect people with similar interests, engage with Mojang developers and Mojira moderators, and help foster a peaceful, productive, and intellectually compelling environment.

* Conclusion

My creative, problem-solving, community-building, and leadership abilities would prove invaluable to an organization like Mojang.  More than that, I have developed a passion for Minecraft, particularly the social aspects of the player and modding communities.  As founder of EigenCraft, I have functioned in my spare time as a bridge between player and modding communities that previously did not know about each other, as well as a bridge to the wonderful team of people working at Mojang and volunteering who moderate the bug tracker.  If I were to be hired by Mojang, I would likely pass EigenCraft to my capable team of moderators in order to embrace a greater role, representing Mojang to the community, and broadening our engagement with the interests and desires of our player community.  Within Mojang, I would ensure that engineering maintains an efficient organizational structure, follows solid software engineering methodologies, has clear development objectives, and engages in clear communication among its talented developers and with others in the organization.  Moving my family across the Atlantic would be a huge undertaking, which I would only consider if I can play a critical role in ensuring that Minecraft is always the awesomest video game and that Mojang is the most rewarding place to work.