Software Engineer Sample Cover-Letter | Entry Tech Job

Adel Alaali
3 min readJan 22, 2023

Navigating the labor market in 2023 is an arduous task, especially as an entry level junior software developer in todays economic climate.

This cover-letter helped me get my foot in the door a while back as an entry level Swift (iOS) Developer.

“Gumption and the proclivity towards continuous learning.”

I have been programming machines since age 14. My professional development comprises an undergraduate degree from Rutgers School of Business and the development of finance-centric software. Formally, I was an Account Executive within the financial services industry — I currently maintain an active blog for finance and technology-related sundries. I am also an active contributor to several open-source projects.

Languages with expertise include Swift/Objective-C for iOS development, JavaScript (React Framework) for Android-iOS cross-development, and Java (Spring Framework) for web development.

Languages with strong domain knowledge include bash scripting, C# (Selenium Framework) for Windows OS automation, and finally, Python for Linux/BSD automation, data analytics, and constructing web penetration tools. Projects pertinent to the aforementioned are publicly available via my GitHub repository listing.

Two of my iOS applications are in review with the Apple App Store. The more pertinent, finance-based project, WSBCalls(shorthand for ‘WallStreetBets’ Calls), is based on Swift and Objective-C programming languages and can be accessed via a web interface or the iOS ecosystem.

WSBCalls aggregates the queried public organization’s financial data to perform a regression analysis on the asset’s 20-day moving average to predict short-term asset price movements. Additional features include the ability to populate relevant news articles and financial filings. There is also a custom-built finance calculator to accord the esoteric. The sentiment analysis is built on the Core-ML Framework and leverages Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK — Python), a dataset from Kaggle.com and Core-ML. The natural language analysis combs articles and accords the premise as ‘positive, neutral, or negative’ for the queried security.

The Java-built gateway is built on a self-hosted monolithic server. The internal API routes traffic to external, third-party APIs to fulfill data aggregation and calculation. I developed the backend service using Python (Django) and the front end with Figma design and the UIKit framework. The web interface was designed using JavaScript and the React Framework programming languages. Furthermore, WSBCalls leverages the following 3rd party Cocoa Pods frameworks and Apple libraries: UIKit, CoreData, CoreML, WebKit, the Combine Framework, Firebase (database and user-authentication), SwiftyJSON, MBProgressHud, and SwiftSoup.

Another iOS applet pertinent to the job’s scope is a web scraper that communicates with SMB, FTP, and HTTP/s gateways to view and download data. The project leverages SwiftSoup for SMB, FTP, and HTTP/s communication. Specifically, the end-user may create search query constraints, such as searching for file keywords or specific HTML tags. Coupling the search is an ‘auto-downloader’ feature, wherein the end-user may conveniently add the files to a list for concurrent downloading — a feature not possible via the iOS Safari browser. Additional projects include a chat application — built upon Apple’s UIKit, WebSockets, CoreLocation, and the StreamChat API — and Konnect4, a clone of the Connect Four game board game.

Salient projects outside of Apple’s ecosystem include a live word-to-text language translator, an O-Authenticator/downloader, a CAPTCHA read tool (image-text translation), several video/text chat applications, and tools for network security (virus scanners, intrusion tools, and RATs). I also attended IBM’s courseware for Data Science I and Harvard edX C/ C++ and embedded design, thus achieving industry-accepted certificates.

Adelal.medium.com ||Github.com/elithaxxor || Linkedin.com/in/adel-aali/

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