CocoaBuilder is a consolidated, searchable archive of all posts to the cocoa-dev, macosx-dev, and xcode-users mailing lists. It's a terrific resource for Mac developers.

CocoaBuilder strips out email addresses to protect your privacy, but it includes your full name in the title of each page. So to see all the posts you've ever made, you can simply search for your name, as long as your name is fairly unique.

It occurred to me that if you're applying for a Cocoa job, you could include a search link in your cover letter. This would be an easy way to help the employer get an idea of you as a person. By browsing your posts, they can get a sense of your Cocoa cred, your writing style, your willingness to help, your ability to learn, how far back you go with Cocoa, and even how nicely you play with others. Of course they could easily do the search themselves, and some probably do, but why not give them one-click convenience?

Although I happened to think of this while browsing CocoaBuilder, it would work for any public forum on any topic, as long as there's a way to search for yourself in the archives, either directly or via Google.

Here are search links for my posts to the Cocoa lists. I wonder if I should change the name I use to something more likely to be unique down the road.

• direct search on CocoaBuilder, most recent first
• indirect search via Google

The results include all my dopey posts as well as the good ones, but I don't think there's a Google hack that can fix that.