Topic: Jobs

Looking for a front-end jedi/ninja/warrior/whatever

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 6, 2008 @ 1:20 pm

Pathfinder is recruiting! Although it's not yet listed on our career portal, we're looking to beef up the Ajax practice at our Chicago office with a talented front-end programmer. This person should be a jack of all trades, master of several, and flexible about which warrior metaphor to adopt for professional use.

Please give me a shout if the following describes you:

• You enjoy hand-coding complex DHTML and Ajax applications. JavaScript is your passion ...
• ... but not your only passion. You also make room in your heart for standards-compliant HTML markup and expertly crafted CSS.
• Speaking of CSS, you're chomping at the bit for CSS 3. Table-free, CSS-based layout is old hat to you.
• You've used more than a single browser and a single operating system in the last five years. You can debate the merits of Gecko vs. Webkit till the cows come home. You can rattle off browser bugs like the names of old high-school friends. The phrase "Opera 9.5 beta 2 on 10.4 Tiger" doesn't sound like nonsense to you.
• You've written production code using more than one open-source JavaScript toolkit and, more importantly, you know how to code without one. You have opinions about why Dojo is better than GWT (or vice-versa) and can intelligently discuss the pros and cons of jQuery vs. Prototype vs. MooTools.
• You're passionate about front-end developement as a discrete category of software engineering, but you can jump in on the server-side stuff when you have to. SQL, Apache and the command line don't scare you.
• You've worked with templating systems in JSP, Rails, PHP or some other framework.
• If you don't have direct experience with Flash, Flex, Adobe Air or Silverlight, you're at least willing to give such competing UI technologies a shot.
• You aren't necessarily a visual designer, but you don't need somebody who went to art school to swoop in and Photoshop a rounded corner or a background pattern for you.
• You have experience working for an Agile shop - or you desperately want to.
• You may not be an information architect, but you understand the world of user experience design. You're comfortable reading wireframes and requirements documents and participating in the design of complex software systems.
• You're not scared of acronyms like XML, XSL and XSLT.
• In short, you know how to put the "V" in MVC.

If this sounds like you, I'd like to take you out for lunch and a little chat about Pathfinder Development. See our jobs page for all the boilerplate about relocation, etc.

Photos (Creative Commons Attribution License from Flicker): PhillipWest | R'eyes' | dizznbon.

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The Perfect Job

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, April 26, 2007 @ 12:10 am

Evangelical - marked by ardent or zealous enthusiasm for a cause.

Evangelist - a person marked by evangelical enthusiasm for or support of any cause.

Passion - a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything:

I turned 40 last year and at the same time have been hiring quite a number of people for my company. I worry about whether the work is interesting enough for the developers I'm hiring and that they are getting a good and varied mix of projects. This has me thinking: if I could design the perfect job for myself, what would it be?

There was a time that I wanted to be a chess grandmaster or a nobel prize winning physicist. These days I love playing around with open source code, and I love playing around with Ajax, and I especially love playing around with open source Ajax code. Contributing to open source projects is also a gas. I like teaching, thinking and writing/blogging about open source and Ajax. I like building cool software, the kind that has people saying "I didn't know you could do that."

So ideally my perfect job would have me reading, writing, thinking, coding, designing, and speaking about Ajax and open source. Yep, that about does it, except occasionally I'd like to work with our user experience design folks and on actual client projects to impart my wisdom to other developers. I guess I'd be an Open Source and Ajax Evangelist.

Now why don't I have that job? I own my own business, after all, a growing appdev and uxd consulting company. I'm the boss, so why can't I redefine my own job? Why can I devote only a small fraction of my time to those things? Well, because I have a business to run, clients to satisfy, developers to hire. Face it, it may be my dream job, but it will stay that -- only a dream.

The best I can do is offer that job to someone else. So, that is what I am going to do. I'll have a more formal (and obtuse) job posting up that will satisfy our HR dept. and that the world can parse for exact meaning, but in the meantime let me describe my ideal candidate for this job:

1. You have to be passionate about Ajax and Open Source. Passion is a word that gets thrown around the corporate world a lot. I don't mean it in that cheap and devalued sense.
2. You have to be a stud (in a gender neutral sense) Javascript/OO/CSS/XHTML developer. You have to be able to make those DOM elements sing and dance. You should be on a first name basis with JSON, XSL and XHR.
3. You must know your way around most if not all of the major frameworks and have tinkered with the guts of them, because you just couldn't help yourself.
4. You have to know some server side stuff too -- Java/J2EE, SQL, Spring, Hibernate, that sort of thing. (C#, .NET knowledge a plus).
5. You can't be allergic to commercial software. Business is business, and not all clients have an appetite for Open Source.
6. You must write well.
7. You can't be afraid to speak in front of groups and conferences (just pretend they're all naked).

So, if you (or a friend) are interested and think you can hack it as a full-time Ajax Evangelist (and you don't mind living in Chicago and working out of a cool loft office), then send me your resume, your salary requirements, and, more importantly, samples of your writing, your blogging, and any cool Ajax stuff that you've worked on. Send to careers@pathf.com and use reference number 47213 in the subject line of your email (that way you'll stay clear of the PHP pile .

Technorati : ajax, evangelist, jobs

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