[Chicago] Leapfrog Online is looking for some Django developers

Kumar McMillan kumar.mcmillan at gmail.com
Fri Dec 14 00:00:33 CET 2007


Hey everybody,

(nicely formatted version with clickable links:
http://farmdev.com/thoughts/37/leapfrog-online-is-looking-for-some-django-developers-chicago-area-/
)

http://leapfrogonline.com/ is looking to hire several Python
developers to work on a Django site. If you know Python but not
Django, this is an excellent opportunity to learn. If you know Django
but want to learn how to use Python in other contexts, you'll get to
do that, too. You'll be working on a high traffic website that hooks
into several web services to help customers find Broadband Internet
connectivity based on geo location (just US and Canada at the moment).
Surrounding that basic function are all kinds of front-end and
back-end features, services and systems.

The Software Engineer position is outlined in detail here:
http://www.leapfrogonline.com/who/careers.php#55

You can send your resume to kumar.mcmillan at gmail.com or send it
through the site above. These are full-time positions but if you'd
rather work with us as a contractor that may be possible.

What Do We Do?
--------------

Leapfrog Online does performance-based customer acquisition, which
translates to "we don't make money unless our clients make money."
Because of this our software has to work well and we need to collect
lots of structured, sensical data so our analysts can build the right
marketing strategies. In a more abstract sense, the interesting
challenges we face are building high-availability websites,
fault-tolerant web services, pushing and pulling at hundreds of gigs
of data, and accounting for tight security all along the way. As for
the atmosphere, we're still a small company but we're not a struggling
startup.

We Care About Open Source
-------------------------

We use open source tools that are right for the job. Currently we use
Python or Ruby for websites / web services (Django, Pylons, Paste,
Ruby on Rails), Python for backend tools, PostgreSQL for databases,
and Trac for our projects. We use rich web interface libraries like
Ext JS and we even wrote a distributed content system in Erlang
because it was a good fit.

We have contributed patches to most of the projects listed above and
maintain our own projects like nose, a few nose plugins, fixture,
wsgi_intercept, and sv. We give talks at conferences like Pycon (see
#24, #85 and #127). Also, Jeff Cohen (one of our senior developers)
runs a popular blog called Softies on Rails and teaches and writes
books about Rails.

Scrum: You'll Like It
---------------------

We started with Extreme Programming a few years ago and have moved
towards Scrum and other Agile methods as our approach to software
development. We are constantly refining our process, keeping what
works, discarding what doesn't. The company is on board with Scrum all
the way up to the principles and we are always working to improve how
Scrum is integrated holistically (a training program is in the works).

We think you'll like Agile for development. We have several teams of
no more than three developers who work in two week "sprints." The
sprints are planned out by product owners, developers, and project
managers with user stories estimated in "story points" so that the
business gets what it needs in order of priority. A sprint is exactly
what it sounds like -- you just work! At the end of each sprint the
work is released and you attend a retrospective meeting to see what
was good, bad, and ugly, and how much work you did. Nothing is perfect
so, of course, there are emergencies and derailments here and there
but for the most part Scrum keeps things moving at a productive pace.
As a developer, I find this discipline empowering and highly
motivational.

You Must Test It
----------------

We are nutty about automated testing (in case you didn't notice). All
code must have automated regression tests so if you're not familiar
with this way of writing software, you will learn! We have a fairly
involved continuous integration process running in buildbot (though
probably moving to Bamboo soon) that performs several builds of each
app, one with stable 3rd party libs, the others with trunk versions of
3rd party libs. As well as getting immediate feedback when a bad
change is checked in, this also helps us pinpoint bugs in our
dependencies before they are released. Our QA department is also
different than most in that it consists of developers who are writing
functional and/or integration tests in code and adding these to the
build process. They are essentially software engineers like the rest
of us.

Your Time Is Valuable
---------------------

No one has a sleeping bad under their desk here; we work until 5 or 6
(weekdays only) to achieve a "sustainable pace." Most of us have been
through the "death march" routine at other companies so we know it
doesn't work long term. Scrum helps us maintain this ethic.
No Pigeonholes

While we are currently looking for Python/Django programmers, we are
always interested in meeting people who think in Ruby/Rails, PHP 5 and
other open source web technologies, too. We're especially interested
if you're feeling ecumenical and want to learn about and work with,
say, both Python and Ruby. You might only work in one language most of
the time, but we think it is important for developers to stretch
themselves and understand what tools are best for the job.

_

thanks for reading and see you at ChiPy tonight,
Kumar

PS. bring your resume :)


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