Why me instead of an engineer that graduated recently?

Ideally, if you can afford it, the best is to hire both. I bring the accumulated knowledge from my realizations which demonstrate that reliable code will run for years without ever needing to reboot. I would get inspired and learn a lot while interacting with people with the latest academic flavor.

When the product is ready for the transition from Research and Development to production, I can provide valuable tips to reduce chip count, power usage and memory footprint. I can give as example the obvious engineering concept of replacing the garbage collection by a memory allocation system which can not get fragmented.

I would enjoy to share my knowledge of specialized algorithms used in many real applications as I found when performing reverse engineering work on different systems. I started with pinball machines and many more embedded firmware. Even when the source code is available, I took the time to compare it with the actual binary executable to resolve with great clarity the actual result of some difficult combination of macro or obscure compilation flag.

I always wanted to know what is "under the hood", how things really work. I wrote my own tools to study each systems with a specific processor. At a time when compiling would take hours, or would just fail for lack of memory, my own application would complete in record time. As a bonus, I would get a clear understanding of the encoding of the instruction set for each processor family. Finally, I have an excellent vision of the most complex features of modern processors such as memory paging and virtual memory. My study of "debug.exe", the DOS application which allows to execute code step-by-step, and my study of "winice", a fully graphical and more advanced version of "in circuit emulator", allowed me to get a deep understanding of processor registers and features which are invisible to the vast majority of software engineers.

It is hard to describe the kind of engineer that I am without appearing to brag. On the other hand, I keep an open mind and love to learn from other people.

Let's meet in an interview to discuss your dreams and challenges.