“These are the best labels I’ve had (peeled) in a while.”
“It’s the humidity.”
New Crowd Favorite Careers Page
We have a shiny, new careers page on the Crowd Favorite website. For the first time, I think what we have up there pretty accurately reflects both what we’re looking for and what we offer. Our new approach is a little different than most jobs pages; it doesn’t list any jobs.
I’ve always struggled to write up the job descriptions we are hiring for. As I was trying to describe our current openings last week, I had a bit of an epiphany. The biggest reason I struggle to write up job descriptions is that we’re looking for certain kinds of people, not someone to fit into a specific position.
Instead of posting a bunch of individual designer or developer positions, we instead have a list of designer and developer skill sets. Everyone on our team has cross-functional skills and we consider this a real strength. For some reason it has taken until now for us to make our “hiring” page reflect this (instead of sticking to the more traditional listing of available positions).
At this time we’re looking for a few developers to join our team. Head on over and take a look. If you like what you see and think you’d be a good fit.
I’m very pleased that we have reached the point where we are hiring to work on internal product initiatives and to shore up our internal systems as well as to contribute to our WordPress consulting and custom development services.
Crowd Favorite is a little unique in that you have the opportunity to work on lots of diverse projects and cutting edge technology, but you don’t have the 60-80 hour work week that demanded by your typical startup.
If you care about building great things on the web – please be in touch.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Short answer: yes. Filed under: things I learned the hard way.
Very interesting to hear. (thanks NextDraft)
Team meeting to kick off our SVN to Git migration. With ice cream, of course.
http_build_query() Separator Tip
I ran into an interesting “bug” in Twitter Tools last night that I traced back to http_build_query(). I expected that the query strings generated by this function used & as a separator for the key=value pairs, but on one of our test servers, the separator being used was &. This is a php.ini config setting, so my expectation was clearly based on false assumptions. If you want to make sure that you get a & separator, you can pass it in as the 3rd parameter.
You’ll find this is particularly important if you’re making requests for remote data from within WordPress via wp_remote_get() or similar technique. If you are working on something that is run within WordPress, you can look at using add_query_arg() as an alternative to this as well.
When the Internet connection goes down at midnight, I read that as “go to bed and push your commits in the morning”.
“Daddy, I got out of bed!” And so it begins…
While we were working on the new Boston Globe website, we devised a technique to mitigate the size of requests for users that may have limited bandwidth. Before I describe it here, I should really warn you up front: it broke. But we planned for that.
There is currently no easy way to determine where the canonical data in a complex system resides and how it is updated, and my bet is we will see a new set of tools and languages evolve to create abstractions which will make it possible for mere mortal programmers like myself to get these architectures right.
This feels like one of those Good Ideas… going with it.
I think one of us does not fully grasp the rules of Simon Says.
Summary: there is no silver bullet.
Kellan points out a great follow-up to the previously linked Michael Wolfe piece. While the Wolfe piece is extremely entertaining, it’s also very true that there are smart ways to approach planning for software development. The value of experience cannot be overstated in these situations.