Samsung Galaxy Note →

I realize that it’s a punchline to most of my peers, but I’m rooting for the Samsung Galaxy Note. I’d love it to be a great device with elegant software to act as a “pants computer”, a digital sketchbook (the iPhone is too small for this), etc. However since it’s not a “Google Experience” device it’ll be effectively a dead end for upgrades…

“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.

Crowd Favorite Careers Page

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.

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”.

2 Replies

Pushing the problems around →

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.