Inventing the future...

Our web app helps companies you've heard of like Microsoft X-Box, Colgate Toothpaste, Wrigley Gum, and Mercedes-Benz make better products for consumers. It does this by connecting our customers that make consumer products to our vendors that make innovative materials and technologies like gel magnets, tension sensing rope, and stainless steel yarn. Think of us like a dating site for technology seekers and sellers. The internet makes lots of information available but it's really challenging and time consuming to source new materials. Our mission is to make it SIMPLE to source and sell these cool technologies globally.

The first phase will be taking our current web app written in ASP and doing a re-write in Ruby on Rails using TDD. The reason we are doing the re-write is we want to clean up the code base and set it up to quickly make improvements customers care about without breaking legacy code. The second phase will be to make improvements we've identified need to happen by observing our customer behavior.

The third phase will be to build a sister application to our current app - we'll tell you more about that later.

The Challenges:

We'll get into the details later but at a high level:

• Interface interface interface - If it's not obvious we don't have a solution - we need to make it super simple.
• Scale - How do we get massive scale with our application?
• Speed - Our stated goal is <0.5 seconds per page
• Machine learning - Our users need to find things they don't know to search for
• Network Effect - We have it and need to put fuel on the fire

The Approach:

Agile. We're drinking the Kool-Aid here. We've worked in a waterfall approach before but we're not interested in taking that approach anymore. We believe in failing often to succeed sooner and throwing away code that sucks. Our technical leader taught Agile at Object Mentor so we're not just saying Agile - we mean it.

You:

You'll be our 13th full time employee so we're looking for an animal. You have a passion for the web development, are self motivated, and enjoy working in a user-focused, highly intelligent, entrepreneurial environment. You have at least 3 years with hand-coded web development, with a MINIMUM of one year developing Ruby on Rails. You know how to build web applications from scratch:

• Database schema design
• Application architecture
• Javascript, CSS, AJAX
• Experience with cross browser user interface design
• Linux (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc)
• Journalism major, CS Degree, drop out...we don't care because you're awesome
• You're drinking the Kool-Aid with agile development, TDD, version control
• Need to be good at Wii baseball, Mario Kart, or Bowling - yes we have a Wii.

What you get:

• We're paying competitively based on experience
• Health Insurance at no additional cost to you
• Options Program
• Exploration budget - to keep you creative
• Tell us the tools you need Mac or PC & software
• Fuel: Breakfast, snacks, drinks
• Massages - yes we have a massage chair
• Young fast-paced work environment
• Headphones
• Nintendo Wii

Our Values:

Honesty and integrity - We are honest with each other, vendors, customers, and honest with ourselves. We acknowledge things as they are, not as we wish them to be.

A commitment to rational thinking - Decisions are based on logic and reason instead of emotions or intuition.

Responsibility - We take ownership over the outcome. We share the entrepreneurial spirit and play to win.

Excellence - As individuals we have higher expectations for ourselves than Inventables has for us. We are committed to personal excellence and self improvement

Curiosity - We are curious people that are always learning about new things and investigating new areas: everything from buying novel products at the grocery store to exploring new information technology.

Hi, I’m Brian

I work at mirRoR, where we connect agile Rails developers and employers.

We started as Rails programmers ourselves (and are currently working on a few social, facebook, and iPhone apps). This background and network help us identify quality opportunities in the industry.

That’s especially important today. While many venture-backed web 2.0 startups are cutting costs amidst this economic climate, we are working with a number of companies that are self-sufficient, cash-positive, and well capitalized for the long-term.

I’d be eager to briefly discuss where you are in the process and see if there is a potential fit, either for the opportunities listed here, or those posted elsewhere.

Let’s chat!

Brian Mariani
brian@mirrorplacement.com
888.313.2007 x702 AIM:  brianm1724 gTalk: Chat with Brian Mariani