EHLO Mailbird - Career Letter

https://resume.stevens.pro/

Resume has links to my other socials.

https://www.instagram.com/diabefit/

https://www.instagram.com/TinyDinosaursOkotoks/

`EHLO mailbird.com` 👋

EHLO is not a typo. I used to telnet to port 25 to send email sometimes as a kid, before secure email took that away. Hope you or your engineers get the joke? Even if it’s not that funny?!

Music Video Part 1

(PLZ WATCH - ~10 Hours to Make!)

Gaming Music Video - No need to watch, just if you like Games.

EHLO mailbird.com 👋 Music Video Part 1 Gaming Music Video - No need to watch, just if you like Games.Contents Quick Intro I Purchased a Lifetime License in December of 2020 I am a Senior in a Young-ish Man’s Body I kick-ass, but don’t take names…I Find These Jobs the Most Interesting I KNOW EMAIL. I KNOW WHAT IS OUT THERE. I KNOW WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD.Experience Shoestring Budget / No Budget Knowledge Management and Team Collaboration Incorporated, Contractor, Consultant, Could-be-Agency Misc / Scratchpad Mailbird for Small Business Why “Better”?Answers to Questions 🚧Opportunity #1: (Not A) Head of Marketing 💘In which country will you primarily be based?Why do you want to work for Mailbird?What is your gross monthly pay expectation (in USD, before tax)? So we have an idea of whether you're within our budget. Please write the monthly value.If we were to hire you, when would you be able to start?How would you characterize your proficiency of the English language?We're looking for someone to think differently. Tell us something that shows us you are that person.What are the challenges of scaling a low LTV business model? How would you solve them?Describe a successful and impactful marketing initiative you managed. What was the challenge? Why was it important? What did you do? What were the results? What was the budget?How do you feel about our Twitter account (@mailbird), and our social media presence in general?Any LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media accounts?Before you continue, take a moment to reflect on your motivations for applying to this position, as the answers you provide will be a major factor in deciding whether you're moved forward to the next step, which is a culture fit interview. Working in Mailbird comes with a lot of benefits, but we only welcome the most committed into our family. In general, the more time you spend on your answers the more likely you are to be moved forward.What I’d Do as a Non-Head ;)Does Mailbird have a community?I’d Dad Dance I’d Launch the Mac App, after reviewing a Linux one I’d Embrace Exchange Web Services (EWS)I’d Overhaul or Instigate a Community and a Response Customer Service Desk (CSD)I’d Crawl the Internet for Feedback Tech Stack Discovery Support Desk - Zendesk ?People Discovery - Who Works/Founded Mailbird?Brand Guidelines, Colours Mailbird Primary Colour: Blue #06c Dalyle DevOps Inc.Colours - Green Primary - Blue (#)Secondary - Green (#1AFE9C)DRAFT / RUBBISH BIN Mac’s been coming a LONG time hasn’t it?

Quick Intro

I Purchased a Lifetime License in December of 2020

Thank you for that option.

I am a Senior in a Young-ish Man’s Body

24 years of Linux Enthusiasm, 18 years of Developing, Hosting, Maintaining, Supporting, and being on-call serving some of Calgary’s top performing public sector companies. Companies with net market values measured in the billions, along with Small Businesses (my fav) who’s profits are measured by the Owner’s ability to pay their own bills, similar to me, and the wonderful small business owners I grew up around, thanks to my Mom’s roles in a Barter Exchange, ultimately becoming president, granting young Greg the chance to see success and failure across hundreds of companies, and countless lives.

I kick-ass, but don’t take names…

…I move on to the next ass-to-kick instead.

I try to keep data to analyse though. Competitors, friendlies, proposal wins and losses…all the key metrics that somebody should keep.

Logging workouts, tracking/graphing results, paying attention to trends, and giving it my everything is what allowed me to go from never being in a gym until the age of 20, to becoming a WORLD CHAMPION Powerlifter. Not sure how much to 💪 that since I didn’t even realize it until looking at my stats on an open source site setup to track Powerlifting Records in an officially unofficial manner.

Greg Stevens

The OpenPowerlifting project aims to create a permanent, accurate, convenient, accessible, open archive of the world's powerlifting data.

https://www.openpowerlifting.org/u/gregstevens

I Find These Jobs the Most Interesting

(Not A) Head of Marketing - Mailbird

You have a great talent for making an impact? Mailbird is willing to give you the opportunity to challenge yourself! We're looking for our next team leader to make an impact on the Marketing side at Mailbird, and are ready to offer our next hire the environment to make it happen.

https://careers.getmailbird.com/o/not-a-head-of-marketing-palo-alto

Senior QA Engineer - Mailbird

Are you the kick-ass Senior QA Engineer we're looking to join our amazing development team?

https://careers.getmailbird.com/o/senior-qa-engineer

Senior C# Cross Platform Software Engineer - Mailbird

We're looking for more kick-ass developers for the Mailbird family! You will work closely with our other senior developers as we transition from Windows to a cross-platform framework, using .NET 6, Avalonia, Entity Framework Core, SQLite and CEF, bringing Mailbird to the Mac and beyond.

https://careers.getmailbird.com/o/senior-c-cross-platform-software-engineer

Overall, you have struck my interest in being able to help a wider audience than I ever thought possible. My life’s purpose is to MAKE THE WEB INDUSTRY BETTER, however, that purpose is continuously refined and boils down to MAKE {x} BETTER. In this case, x = Email, which almost everyone uses to some degree, and which light users are happy with Webmail, which is pretty good, but power users like me, and many other audiences, WANT A DESKTOP EMAIL APP and are unsatisfied with the far-too-basic-but-still-decent Windows Email Client, Mac Mail, or, like myself, feel obliged to use Microsoft Outlook because I am using Microsoft Office 365 for Hosted Exchange Email.

I actually used to host email, still somewhat do, both on Exchange, cPanel, Exim and something else, and so many other little trials with different email hosting solutions it is a little crazy.

I KNOW EMAIL. I KNOW WHAT IS OUT THERE. I KNOW WHAT IS GOOD AND WHAT IS BAD.

I know what’s good and bad about Mailbird, and will happily discuss/document a review of it, once I am sure I can pay my bills, haha 🤑.

I could spend ALL WEEK making videos and writing this, but I can’t, because I have to find work and have already INVESTED OVER TEN HOURS in:

Recording screencasts of all the work below.

Discovering what data you have available on jobs

Grabbed JSON feed from the Recruitee API.

Analyzing that data

Used Microsoft Power BI Desktop to gain quick insights into opportunities.
Hidden data lets me know more about you as a company, how you function, when jobs were posted and how stale they may be, etc.
Interesting updates btw…looks like each job was created at different times, but all modified on the same day, September 6, about 2-4 hours apart each.

Thinking about the questions you pose

Editing a MUSIC VIDEO of that screencast.

Timestamped
Quick Cuts
MUSIC!
Powerlifting!
Goats! (plus me, the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time)

Writing this article

Posting article to my website launched a few weeks ago, //art.stevens.pro

Debating on renaming to blog.stevens.pro now (thank you for refining me).

Modifying NextJS code in order to try and figure out why some weird Notion properties were displaying on the public site.

Edited CSS, committed, pushed, Vercel deployed 🚀
A small example of wide-areas of skills I can bring to the team.
Let’s make each other better!
Teach me your native languages! I’ll teach you close-to-perfect English!

Experience

Shoestring Budget / No Budget

Used to running a company with an overarching goal / need of as cheap as possible to get the job done as great as possible, without compromise.

Open Source Advocate since back in the 90s…before I was even 14.

Forced Microsoft lover due to them never leaving, and then embracing Linux, WSL, 365, Teams, etc. I have come around to them, but Microsoft Outlook somehow still sucks. I can run entire development environments and virtual machines on my workstation, or laptop, but it is invevitably Outlook who always crashes or is slowing something down.

Knowledge Management and Team Collaboration

See resume for main ones.

ClickUp is what Jose Lopez's touching story is wrote/hosted on.

Do you use ClickUp?
Can show you how to use a free ReactJS app to power it by Notion, just like this page! Hosted on Vercel.

Notion

Asana, Wrike, RedBox, etc.

Jira, Jira Service Management

OpsGenie
BitBucket
BitBucket Pipelines
StatusPage (www.dalyle.ca/status)

Jira and Confluence for Public Knowledge Bases

Just like Intuit!
https://www.dalyle.ca/status

I am going to stop now.

There are so many I could list that it physically makes me ill repeating them all…yet again.

Please call me and we can chat about the experience I have and how it can help you.

Incorporated, Contractor, Consultant, Could-be-Agency

https://www.dalyle.ca/blog/incorporated

Misc / Scratchpad

Native English Speaker and Grammar Nazi

I search for things like “for or of a company” to determine if I should sign myself as “Greg Stevens of Dalyle DevOps Inc.” or “Greg Stevens from Dalyle DevOps Inc.”.

Turns out to be more complicated than that.
“Greg Stevens from the Accounting Department of Dalyle DevOps Inc.”

Mailbird for Small Business

This is my jam! 🥜

I would 💘 to help you break into more Small Businesses.

Businesses who’s employees are held back from being their best, their most productive, their happiest, because they are sitting sipping potentially fattening liquids whilst they wait for Outlook to start up, or workaround some little “niggle” in the program.
Help PEOPLE realize these niggles are truly bugs 🐛 and that Microsoft does not care about their Outlook 2016 issue.
Help PEOPLE who are frustrated, but don’t know why, because they think it’s acceptable to bounce in and out of their email every five minutes like a monkey looking for a banana…that scientifically proven dopamine rush of a new email. They are little addict monkeys 🐵. We must help them like AA and so many other support groups help other addicts.
Help PEOPLE who are PROFESSIONALS but also 1337 POWER USERS who are so frustrated with email they have given up on it, forcing people to call or Teams/chat of their choice instead. Maybe texts, but I think texts are the devil’s work as well…even worse than emails since we have somehow convinced ourselves we enjoy it. 😖
If EMAIL was DEVIL’S WORK v1, then TEXT MESSAGING is DEVIL’S WORK v2. 😈
Devil’s busy with texts, instant messaging, camming, etc. Let’s sneak up and KICK THE DEVIL’S ASS by BETTERING EMAIL FOR THE WORLD, which will BETTER THE LIVE’S OF INDIVIDUALS IN THE WORLD which will BETTER THE LIVE’S OF INDIVIDUALS AROUND THEM which will EVANTUALLY BETTER EVERYONE.

Why “Better”?

I have had some trippy spiritual journey’s throughout my life, ego killing trips that inspired weeks, months, YEARS of SELF-IMPROVEMENT….BETTERMENT.

Circa July 2019, while on one of these trip’s, I concluded that there are unseen problems in the Web Industry, problems that I have worked decades to find solutions for, and have ridiculously complex diagrams and boards that helped me find solutions to these unseen problems.

DevOps helped me realize the kinds of problems I was trying to solve are not only a problem in the Web Industry, but throughout all industries. That I could actually help people across many industries, eventually tying it all together

If you have not yet done so, please read or listen to “The Phoenix Project” yet, the narrative story that came after the far more technical,, but oh so delicious, “The DevOps Handbook”. Which I just realized is a nice consistency in naming (of course it would be, duh!)

I WAS BORN TO HELP MAKE THE WORLD BETTER

(”Purpose”… not goal, as many goals will lead me to succeed in my purpose).

Answers to Questions 🚧

Opportunity #1: (Not A) Head of Marketing 💘

In which country will you primarily be based?

Canada 🍁 Okotoks, Alberta - ~15 minutes south of Calgary. Western Canada Mountain Time Zone (-7 or -6 right now I think due to daylight savings time.)

Why do you want to work for Mailbird?

I had never thought about working in email, but it makes sense for my life path. I want to work for Mailbird because of your opportunity title (not a head).I think that says a lot about an organization, it’s leaders, it’s decision makers, and it’s vibe. I believe we will vibe well together. Flat organizations can suck, but with a small team, it’s like the DevOps Handbook says, we want T-shaped personalities, people good at general things across the board, but awesome at some speciality.

More to say on this, but let’s chat.

What is your gross monthly pay expectation (in USD, before tax)? So we have an idea of whether you're within our budget. Please write the monthly value.

Roughly $8,000 USD per month VERY NEGOTIABLE. PLEASE TALK TO ME SINCE I LIKE YOU. I just need to pay my mortgage and life expenses at the moment. We will make money, TOGETHER, then we can just roll in the money. Math below on where I obtained that number from. Medical Plan greatly appreciated, more than salary, I have Type 1 Diabetes (I am a diabetic), same with my son.

Salary Math

If we were to hire you, when would you be able to start?

As soon as you let me. 😊

How would you characterize your proficiency of the English language?

EXCELLENT Professionally trained in Public Speaking when I was younger. As a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Volunteer Ambassador, I had the privilege of speaking to gala dinners with 500+ people attending. It was dope. Dope is a word I wouldn’t use in your communications, but this is an interview style response and that’s how I talk. Plenty of Fish nailed it best…BROGRAMMER 💪🤓. I would say MASTERY, if that wasn’t a racist term (Master/Slave). That’s how careful I am with my English. That’s why you’ll never find a master branch in my code, only main, and some feature/* and fix/* and developer/* branches. The developer branches are for easy code review/backup, when we don’t really know what we’re working on. Issue tracking and IDE Plugins like New Relic’s CodeStream make knowing what we’re working on, and naming branches trivial, since it’ll create them when you say you’re working on a GH Issue, BitBucket Issue, Jira (personal fav), whatever! Isn’t my formatting impressive as well?! Ask to see my custom Word templates that have preset styles for Code Blocks, amongst other Markdown like features that I couldn’t live without.

We're looking for someone to think differently. Tell us something that shows us you are that person.

Oh my gosh, if my video and this don’t show how different I am then I don’t know what will. I literally was forcibly put into a mental hospital about a month ago by caring, well-meaning, but completely off-track family. The let me out in 36 hours, after I napped for a day. It was nice. They found nothing wrong mentally or physically. Awful experience but made me STRONGER! The conclusion was that I have have “non-tangential speech”. My conclusion is that I have TRAINED my brain and my speech process to be non-tangential because there’s so many connections. I come back to conversation, just more than a little stressful being taken from your home by the police, to the hospital, without even realizing that was a thing that could happen. Restraining orders against those may be coming, but I am forgiving and merciful and likely will not do that, unless legally I have to protect myself. I worked hard for those thought processes, connecting dots that nobody else seems to see. I am proud of the Psychiatrists Notes regarding that. WARNING: I may be developing a Kanye Complex, thinking how great I am ;) Or how Kanye and Jesus both became great in their 30s, just like the path I am on now. Not rockstar programmer though, waaayyy past that point in my career.

What are the challenges of scaling a low LTV business model? How would you solve them?

I don’t know. I didn’t even know LTV meant Lifetime Value.

⚠ Please note, I am not styling the rest of this answer as a quote, like in the other questions, as I want to use lists

I would research it, like I have already done. Find what the experts say, take notes, compare, discuss with my mentors and colleagues, then set metrics to track, ways to track them, and then move that needle.

I’d likely develop some Power BI reports to help with that metric tracking, and to process whatever large datasets you may already have. I do cool stuff joining together private data with Google Analytics, Microsoft Exchange (super cool integration btw), and more.

LTV = Lifetime Value

CPA = Cost per Acquisition

Mailbird has an affordable monthly subscription and lifetime license which means that we would need to ACQUIRE MORE CUSTOMERS and ACCEPT THEY MOVE ON FAST.

Why do customers leave?

I have some thoughts on that, including lack of shared mailbox support.
emClient calls Mailbird out on its comparison page for not using EWS.

I would look into how we can support that, what kind of engineering work would be required, risk, reward, etc.
https://www.emclient.com/how-we-compare

I almost switched, tried emClient before, butttttt it’s in Czech and there are reasons, which I need to look at my notes and try to remember, that I chose Mailbird over emClient.

I would/could shoot a cool music video comparing them.
I can do so many things, I believe you would 💘 me.

Average customer use of app?

Are metrics like that tracked?
How can we SECURELY, SAFELY, PRIVATEY, and ANONYMOUSLY track usage, while not breaking someone’s system because we’re sending stats in the background that get jammed up and essentially break a connection, or slow down a PC, like the most awful OneDrive Integration in Windows that causes my entire computer to slow down when on a bad connection. Ewwwwwwww.

eM Client - Email Client and Calendar Software for Windows and Mac

Compare eM Client with other alternatives like MS Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird and pick the best email software that will suit your needs.

https://www.emclient.com/how-we-compare

Describe a successful and impactful marketing initiative you managed. What was the challenge? Why was it important? What did you do? What were the results? What was the budget?

I have not. I have guided clients on marketing strategies though. Please discuss with me further.

My other skills that will help cover the QA and Programmer Jobs ~~should~~ will make up for this lack of experience.

My research skills, combined with your experience and customer feedback, will help us to succeed.

How do you feel about our Twitter account (@mailbird), and our social media presence in general?

You MUST delete the 32 follower account for @getmailbird

Hard to know who to tag if I wanted to.

The “thanks” account is cute, but is it actually useful or just confusing?

Try posting a tweet and tag @mailbird and watch how many come up.
This hinders community/creator support.

The YouTube channel may be nice but I haven’t watched it yet.

TWELVE email clients compared in a video sounds impressive, but still have not watched yet.

Nice you posted/pinned it.

I would need to do further deep dives into what your social accounts are doing.

I’d need private information about the traffic they are receiving.

I can sign an NDA, or you can hire me and sign an NDA.

It takes me roughly two hours to do a mid-sized dive into a company, or an individual.

I can find things out though and decide what direction to head.

I can do this with your guidance, or without, but with will bring so much feedback and experience from within the company, super valuable stuff.

My hunger is getting to me, so my answers may be nonsense at this point.

Any LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media accounts?

So many…you can find them. Usually GregWorks or on GitHub, GregSweats Why GregSweats? All left hand so I don’t have to take hand off mouse when typing it in code comments or issues, or others don’t have to when they type it out. Powerlifter known for my sweatiness. “Sweating” in gaming is trying hard, which I do with everything.

Before you continue, take a moment to reflect on your motivations for applying to this position, as the answers you provide will be a major factor in deciding whether you're moved forward to the next step, which is a culture fit interview. Working in Mailbird comes with a lot of benefits, but we only welcome the most committed into our family. In general, the more time you spend on your answers the more likely you are to be moved forward.

#ProTip #Correction “Working at Mailbird..” we are not inside of Mailbird, we work there, at there.

Ha, this was an optional question, which was therefore sorted at the end.

I believe my answers are thorough and hope they get your attention.

My MUSIC VIDEO is way cooler though.

What I’d Do as a Non-Head ;)

Assuming there was nothing else to do, and also considering I would adjust all these goals based on any user/staff/community feedback you may have.

Does Mailbird have a community?

https://www.getmailbird.com/

How are the alpha/beta testers?

https://www.getmailbird.com/alpha-testers/

How do you receive feedback?

Is it automated?

App have error reporting built-in to make this all easy?

Rewards for the testers?

I’d Dad Dance

It seems dumb but it makes everyone feel good.

Playlist - GregDances

2022 07 13 All Night Long... (Critical Impact/Jonas, Day 2/2)

https://youtu.be/wdC_z_gypfU?list=PLqKgLp9aiBB9INGeyA5bGI7D8YcCG8g9Q&t=172

Playlist - GregArts

Playlist - GregSings

Channel - DadNotBot - Where…you guess it…GREG GAMES!

No way!!! I have top spot on DuckDuckGo and Google! I just rebranded that name from “UltimoPenguin7” a few weeks ago. Super cool!

I know how to find things that will rank, such as selectn8r my next project which has no results yet. Ssssh on that. Just posting it here so Search Engines crawling start ranking me for it. It’ll be a tinder like swiper for finding Jobs to apply for, or Candidates to hire.

We could make a tinder like swiper companion app, offer it for free, to let people swipe through their emails. You can take that idea whether you hire me or not…it is yours…I have many others.

I’d Launch the Mac App, after reviewing a Linux one

I am personally curious why there is no Linux version.

I had to use Hiri on Linux to connect to Exchange, and Hiri is gross.

Hiri is trying to take your market, same with emClient. Let’s CONQUER THEM!!! 🔥🔥🔥 I like beatable competition.

Hiri is just not there yet, too young, and I think a serious lack of keyboard shortcuts.

emClient is almost like Mailbird cloned, or vice-verse, honestly I wasn’t sure who copied who and I don’t care. They have Exchange Webservice Support (EWS).

I’d Embrace `Exchange Web Services` (`EWS`)

Then we can have SHARED MAILBOX SUPPORT and sooooo many other things.

I’d Overhaul or Instigate a Community and a Response Customer Service Desk (CSD)

Try my service desk out, click the question mark at the bottom right of www.dalyle.ca

Then I can show you how it tracks Time-to-Resolution amongst other wonderful things, like the frontend for customers to login to and see all their support requests, with real-time status.

Agents get to choose on a Jira ticket whether to post a Comment, or an Update to the Client.

Status changes, custom workflows, make it quick and easy for Support Agents to send an almost pre-wrote response to clients.

Browser Extensions and many Jira/Atlassian Add-ons can probably truly template responses.

IT IS SO NICE from both the USER PERSPECTIVE and SUPPORT AGENT PERSPECTIVE.

Plus, it makes you look really good on the internet.

I really feel like I am right for this.

I am tired of programming, but I want to build communities! Build a product! Celebrate with co-workers! MAKE THE WEB BETTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’d Crawl the Internet for Feedback

Just as I research everything, I’d do deep dives into finding out what people are truly saying about our product. Sorry, I keep saying ours like I am already part of the fam jam 🤗. That’s just how I am!

Tech Stack Discovery

Email Marketing - Sendinblue

From https://www.getmailbird.com/alpha-testers/

Support Desk - Zendesk ?

https://support.getmailbird.com/

Mailbird

All you need to know to get started with Mailbird

https://support.getmailbird.com/

People Discovery - Who Works/Founded Mailbird?

Check linked in later, don’t wan to publish the results here for privacy. I tend to find info that others can’t. Talk to me about all the data I have, that was publically available through my browser, that scares the 💩 out of people.

Maybe I will get thorough in my research on you, scare the 💩 out of you to impress you!

Remember, whatever I do, I can do it targeting competitors as well.

Have I mentioned my first actual hack was when I was roughly 14 years old, into a local intenet provider? Gaining remote access to one of their servers. Running a speed test, feeling great, then emailing them from a hacked Telus account, b/c telus used to set all their passwords to telus01 and I’d run a tool to check a list of common usernames to figure out which ones to use ;)

Brand Guidelines, Colours

Mailbird

Primary Colour: Blue `#06c`

Nice job on the easy 3-character colour code

Also wrote as #0066cc (can someone check that for me?)

Dalyle DevOps Inc.

Colours - Green

Primary - Blue (`#`)


#24B0FC
#105175

Secondary - Green (`#1AFE9C`)


#2efda2
rgb(46, 253, 162)
hsl(154, 98%, 59%)

DRAFT / RUBBISH BIN

Mailbird Answers to ALL the Questions (unordered H2s)

Taking over Google results for “gregworks youtube” and hopefully soon just “gregworks”

Can I PLEASE get 100 subscribers for a custom URL?

OOoh, Mailbird has 2k+ subscribers, nice!

PLEASE CHANGE THE NAME THOUGH.
Is Mailbird available?
https://www.youtube.com/c/Getmailbird
Yes, it is. https://www.youtube.com/c/mailbird
No reason for this Getmailbird anymore.,,,unless you have reasons to tell me?

Historically you couldn’t get @Mailbird - I get it - but you’re PAST THAT POINT NOW.

Can you spot the mistakes I have left in here on purpose? Accidental ones?

Old leadership trick I learned from a client, to see who is catching mistakes, has an eye for detail.