[JOB] HostBaby's looking for a PHP Developer.

[Jason Hawkins]

Hey y'all. I'm Jason, and I'm the development manager (aka ex-developer) at HostBaby (http://www.hostbaby.com). We're a web hosting company that mostly targets independent authors and musicians. We're a sister company to CD Baby (http://www.cdbaby.com) - both companies are in the same physical building, which is in NE Portland, not too far from the airport.

We're looking for someone with decent back-end PHP kung fu. You'd work on planning and implementing new features as well as refactors and redesigns of existing infrastructure. We have 3 primary products we maintain:

• our public site, www.hostbaby.com, as well as an intranet site that works as our CRM interface backing it
• our CMS-ish product, the HostBaby Site Builder, which allows creative folks to build websites quickly in a WordPress-ish paradigm with shortcuts targeted specifically for them. It uses pre-designed themes that are customizable through a WYSIWYG editor.
• our mailing list manager, ListBaby. Most artists wanna email their fans when they're going to play a show or release a new record, and this helps manage that for them. The newest version of this product uses HTML email templates similar to those in the Site Builder.

This is a primarily back-end position, so mostly you'll be slinging web services, PHP, SQL, and application code, but there will also be front-end work as needed, so applicants shouldn't be totally unfamiliar with modern HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript. We're a Scrum shop with 2-week sprints, so teamwork is key here.

What you gotta have:

• Pretty solid understanding of PHP5 and OOP. If you've never typed the keywords "interface" or "abstract" into a PHP file, this probably isn't you.
• Passable skills all the way down the rest of the LAMP stack - MySQL schema design, Apache configuration, and jockeying a bash shell should entice and not scare you.
• Experience with at least one modern PHP MVC framework. CodeIgniter is greatly preferred, but Zend's cool, too. If you have the aptitude, we don't care if all you know is Symfony, but it places you at a disadvantage relative to candidates who know CodeIgniter well. In other words, you'll need to impress us.
• Some exposure to jQuery, as that's our JS headache-remover of choice.
• More than passing familiarity with modern HTML and CSS.
• Good communications skills. A lot of people put this on job posting accompanied by a great deal of pseudo-professional flummery. We really mean this. If you are a cantankerous but highly productive cave-dweller... this ain't the place for you.

What would be nice:

• Demonstrated ability to write good documentation of your own code. Writing it for other folks' code is double-bonus material.
• More than passable skills all the way down the LAMP stack - i.e. some sysadmin- or devops-type experience.
• Experience with architectures that don't live entirely on one server (i.e. 3-tier, web services, messaging.. something more complex than PHP and MySQL living side by side on the same Linux installation).
• A positive, creative, unique personality with a prodigious sense of humor and a thick skin.
• Because we are a company targeting a musician and author niche, if you have experience being one of those things, or in the industries around books or music, you will fit in well here. It's not required, though - plenty of our employees are not in bands and do not fancy themselves the second coming of Nabokov.

If this all sounds intriguing, drop me a line at ja...@cdbaby.com, and attach a resume.

And... my apologies if this is spamming the group - it was honestly intended to reach folks who don't check craigslist / oregonlive / etc.

Thanks.

Jason Hawkins

p.s. For the legal eagles: EOE/M/F/D/V.