To whom it may concern*,

My name is Victor. I am 29 years old. I have worked in IT** since I was a student, at which time I did a lot of work for a hosting provider. I have*** since learned a lot about networks, Linux, *BSD systems and PCs.

I was subsequently invited to join a developer’s company, to design and implement a brand new desktop operating system, with an extremely high level of security. We ported a lot of programs from Linux to our system. I was the administrator of a few workstations and tested programs on them.

After two years of working for this company****, I found work with a game development and localisation company. In Russia, we translate games into Russian. Sometimes it is just a text translation, and sometimes the game needs to be fully tailored to the Russian market, including fonts, text, voices, videos, textures and in-game objects. For this company, I worked as a quality engineer and did some programming: making Excel macros for voice recording, plugins for Redmine and tools for extracting and packing game resources.

Game development is an exciting and stimulating industry. However, in Russia, people are not paid fairly for their work and instead work mostly for fun and to try out new ideas. Therefore, I joined an online payments company as a QA engineer to prepare their testing process for PCI DSS compliance. All of the work was completed in less than a month*****, and the company's CTO was very happy about it, because before I arrived there was no QA and the system was unstable and full of bugs.

*Rather than 'hello', you should use a formal greeting. You can use 'Dear Mr. X', 'Dear Director', or if you don't know 'To whom it may concern'.

**In English, - is used differently to in Russian. You would not need ‘—‘ unless the sentence was quite complex. So, for now, you should try to find other ways to write your meaning. Here, you can just use a comma (YOUR WORDS: ‘My first work in IT started long ago, in my student days, when…’). But, actually, David and I made your sentence more formal.

***Contractions (it’s, I’ve) shouldn’t be used in formal writing. You have to write it in full: it is, I have, should not :)

****It’s better to avoid negative things like this in a cover letter. If they ask you in the interview why you only stayed two years, you can tell them then.

*****Ellipses (…) are only used like this in informal emails. Definitely do not use this kind of punctuation in formal writing. In formal writing, ellipses are ONLY used in quotations, to show some words were left out. You won’t need this in a cover letter :D

Are these sentences right?

1.Someone threw a stone into a window and it blew out.

Windows can only 'blow out' from the inside (out). So, what blows out windows... A house fire can cause windows to blow out. Maybe an earthquake? Luckily, it is not common :) 

2.We were driving along a road when one of the tire blew out.

One of the tires. Because there are two tires, and only one of THEM blew out. That is why it should be plural.

3.When a windflaw came a flame blew out.

This 'blow out' is slightly different... In the above examples, 'blow out' means something like 'explode outwards'. Here blow means to blow with the mouth, or a wind blowing. So, BLOW has to be connected to a Subject (the thing that is blowing) that CAN blow. A flame cannot blow out. It can only BE BLOWN OUT (by the wind). So, for this sentence, you can say: A wind came and the flame was blown out. OR, A wind came and blew out the flame. Another example: You blow out your birthday candles. 

Another fun use of 'blow out' (at least in Australia).

If you have a budget for something (like for the month, or a party you are planning, maybe conducting some graduate research), and all of your spending is WAY more than your budget(!), you can say: the costs blew out! I blew my budget significantly!