I was going to talk about how I used nodejs to move redditbooru off of crontab and prevent crazy CPU spikes I was seeing, but then I received this crazy recruiter email that I'm still wrapping my mind around. Ever since I made the jump to Winnercomm, I've been bombarded by a goodly number of people trying to recruit me every month. Since moving to the Valley, nothing's changed except now the companies are ones I've heard of. But today... I received perhaps one of the more bizarre ones I've seen yet:

SUBJECT: You're an anime fan - I am Monica w/ [Redacted] :)

Hi Matt,

I am Monica, a community manager at [Redacted], a platform for finding companies that fit you. I saw that you're an anime fan-- what are your favorite shows? Are you watching anything good right now? I just finished watching Free! and really enjoyed it.

Also I saw that you worked at LinkedIn and did web development on the LinkedIn profile pages, emails, and horizontal JS framework migration efforts. That’s awesome! But, if you are ready for something new (along with a 25%+ salary bump) we know that JobVite needs help doing JS development along with Java backend services development. You may not have direct experience with that but I saw that you were endorsed for Java on LinkedIn and I thought it would be worth asking. :)

[Redacted corporate shill because they don't get free advertisement from me]

If I bothered you and you don't want to be contacted in the future, let me know and I will make sure we don't reach out again. I will also be happy to say I am sorry with a beer (we are partial to porters) or a coffee (black!) :)

This has all the hallmarks of being both a handwritten letter and also one generated by a cold and unfeeling robot (though, being the Bay Area, probably a sexy one).

So it opens up by declaring I am an anime fan, not something like "I see that you're an anime fan", just "YOU ARE ANIME FAN!" This is not untrue, but probably the oddest way to open a recruiting email I've yet seen. I had originally written a sentence here about how people would know I like anime (blog/reddit account), but it's essentially plastered all over my LinkedIn profile. Still, stranger than the fact that anime was the opener was the fact that a super recent show was mentioned (Free! just wrapped its twelve episode run last Thursday).

Okay, one point for not being a bot. But that all comes into question with the first sentence of paragraph two where basically every word is lifted right out of my profile. Verbatim. That's super bot like (or incredibly lazy). The rest of the paragraph is too well crafted to be a bot, especially the mention of the Java endorsement (which has a story behind it that I find rather humorous).

The damning piece of evidence against this being a robot (outside of the fact that it was obviously written by a human), is that GMail was kind enough to link to her Google+ account in the right rail. And, I must say, I like what I see. If what she's saying about anime and the various other nerd type things she posts on her... whatever Google+ calls a "wall"... are true, perhaps I should take her up on that beer/coffee offer.

That date will have nothing to do with future employment.