In the business world, the concept of an “elevator pitch” is well known. The idea is that you craft a short summary of your company or product, such that it can be delivered in the span of an elevator ride. Embracing the constraint of brevity forces you to figure out what really matters, and place your emphasis there.

Yesterday, I was asked to write what amounts to an elevator pitch for myself. The actual request was to “write a summary in 3 or 4 sentences,” but make no mistake: it’s an elevator pitch. I hadn’t done so before, so it was an interesting exercise. I gave myself a 5 minute limit so I wouldn’t overthink it, and this is what I came up with:

If you use Rails, you’re probably already using at least a few lines of code I wrote. I truly love writing code in Ruby, but can occasionally be persuaded to hack in other languages. I speak on technical topics and also on optimizing for happiness, which for me generally involves working remotely. I both contribute to and maintain open source projects, and I’ve worked remotely on my past three jobs, so I know how to act as a capable and considerate member of a distributed team.

If you haven’t written an elevator pitch for yourself, try it! It’s the kind of quick reflection that might just show you a “value proposition” you didn’t even realize you had.