Anyone interested in Ruby work?

336 views
Skip to first unread message

Brad Heller

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:06:37 PM2/9/12
to pdxruby
I hope I don't get flamed in to oblivion for offering up work on this
list (first time post, even!) but my startup Revisu (http://
www.revisu.com) is in search of another engineer. We just graduated
from Portland Incubator Experiment, have a little cash in the bank
now, and are on our way towards raising a much bigger round. Ideally,
we'd like to bring someone on as a full-time contractor 'till our
round closes, at which point we could convert you to Employee #1 (if
you're in to that kind of thing).

We'd really love to work with someone who has strong Ruby and
JavaScript experience. Our stack server side is Rails + Linux + AWS
(EC2, S3, RDS). Client side we're all Backbone.js + jQuery + a
smattering of vanilla JS. We're a crazy small company--just myself
(engineer, business dude) and my co-founder (creative type)--so we
like to move really, really fast. We estimate projects in hours, not
weeks.

There's a more formal (hah!) listing is available on Silicon Florist
at http://siliconflorist.com/jobs/view/engineer-2. If this is
something that interests you or if you have any questions, please feel
free to reply here or off-list (br...@revisu.com).

John Wilger

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:11:11 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Brad Heller <br...@revisu.com> wrote:
> I hope I don't get flamed in to oblivion for offering up work on this
> list (first time post, even!)

Not likely. Speaking for myself, at least, this is exactly the right
type of job post for this list---both informative and personable with
no obvious lawyer influence. I hope you get a positive response.

--
Regards,
John Wilger

johnw...@gmail.com
971-678-0999

Jesse Cooke

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:21:40 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
We just graduated from Portland Incubator Experiment
I saw the pitch at Demo Day. Very impressive stuff, and a great presentation.
If you're looking for work I'd recommend talking to Brad. 

--------------------------------------------
Jesse Cooke :: N-tier Engineer
jc00ke.com / @jc00ke


On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:06 AM, Brad Heller <br...@revisu.com> wrote:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pdxruby" group.
To post to this group, send email to pdx...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to pdxruby+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pdxruby?hl=en.


Brad Heller

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 2:27:44 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
Awesome, thanks Jesse :)

Ed Phillips

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 3:38:23 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
Brad,

This is, as the others said, a model for a job posting.

It is succint. It describes the technical areas of concern. It orients
the reader as to what the service or company does and as to what kind of hiring
arrangement/commitment is desired.

Recruiters should study/model this.

Chuck Vose

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 3:48:45 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
Only complaint is the title. But the body is great

Brad Heller

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 3:49:19 PM2/9/12
to pdxruby
Thanks, Ed! I think it's important for job adverts to be reflective of
the culture of your company--erm, well, at least the culture you're
trying to establish as is our case.

We try to be humans that get to the point but don't want to be a jerk
about it :).

On Feb 9, 12:38 pm, Ed Phillips <e...@cronos.net> wrote:
> Brad,
>
> This is, as the others said, a model for a job posting.
>
> It is succint. It describes the technical areas of concern. It orients
> the reader as to what the service or company does and as to what kind of hiring
> arrangement/commitment is desired.
>
> Recruiters should study/model this.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 11:06:37AM -0800, Brad Heller wrote:
> > I hope I don't get flamed in to oblivion for offering up work on this
> > list (first time post, even!) but my startup Revisu (http://
> >www.revisu.com) is in search of another engineer. We just graduated
> > from Portland Incubator Experiment, have a little cash in the bank
> > now, and are on our way towards raising a much bigger round. Ideally,
> > we'd like to bring someone on as a full-time contractor 'till our
> > round closes, at which point we could convert you to Employee #1 (if
> > you're in to that kind of thing).
>
> > We'd really love to work with someone who has strong Ruby and
> > JavaScript experience. Our stack server side is Rails + Linux + AWS
> > (EC2, S3, RDS). Client side we're all Backbone.js + jQuery + a
> > smattering of vanilla JS. We're a crazy small company--just myself
> > (engineer, business dude) and my co-founder (creative type)--so we
> > like to move really, really fast. We estimate projects in hours, not
> > weeks.
>
> > There's a more formal (hah!) listing is available on Silicon Florist
> > athttp://siliconflorist.com/jobs/view/engineer-2. If this is
> > something that interests you or if you have any questions, please feel
> > free to reply here or off-list (b...@revisu.com).

Sam Goldstein

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 11:40:33 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
Sorry to take this off topic, but I started thinking...

Brad,

Are you guys using Revisu to build Revisu?

My current employer has apparently gotten to the point where they can commission fancy videos to describe what we do (http://newrelic.com/about). 

My favorite moment in the video is when Ralph says "We use New Relic to monitor New Relic...".  I know github uses pull request in their internal development process.  I'd bet 37 signals uses Basecamp to manage development on Basecamp.  Twitter began as an internal communication tool for a company doing who-the-fuck-knows-what.

Is this a secret to startup success; be your own customer?  Use your product to build your business?

Is there logic to this, or am I cherry-picking a few startups into some horse-shit theory?

~s

Brad Heller

unread,
Feb 9, 2012, 11:54:11 PM2/9/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
Was chatting with one of the founders of 37signals that moved to PDX the other day and that was his big thing. If you build a product for yourself, you'll at least have one very solid data point when you get lost and don't know what to do. At this level you probably should never build a product you wouldn't use yourself.

I don't know if it's necessarily a recipe for success, but I think it helps a lot. You get to actually use your product as a user. We do use Revisu to build Revisu and a lot of inspiration for new features or polish comes from that. It's pretty rewarding to improve your own experience with a product--new feature, squashed bug, etc. But, I also get habituated to weird bugs that "I'll get to eventually" so sometimes it is a little embarrassing when a user runs in to it!

Brian Troutwine

unread,
Feb 10, 2012, 12:45:19 AM2/10/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:40 PM, Sam Goldstein <sgr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to take this off topic, but I started thinking...
>
> Brad,
>
> Are you guys using Revisu to build Revisu?
>
> My current employer has apparently gotten to the point where they can
> commission fancy videos to describe what we do (http://newrelic.com/about).
>
> My favorite moment in the video is when Ralph says "We use New Relic to
> monitor New Relic...".  I know github uses pull request in their internal
> development process.  I'd bet 37 signals uses Basecamp to manage development
> on Basecamp.  Twitter began as an internal communication tool for a company
> doing who-the-fuck-knows-what.

Other products:
* original Apple machines vs. typewriters
* Internal Google Mail (gmail, eventually)
* Blogger
* StackExchange
* Balsamiq Mockups, I believe
* Amazon's developer offerings

Perhaps a stretch for the off-topic topic:
* GNU userland and most (all?) modern *nix kernels
* self-hosting language compilers

> Is this a secret to startup success; be your own customer?  Use your product
> to build your business?

A bullet, surely, if not the silver one, for all the reason Brad
outlined. A dog-food eating culture succeeds by exploiting the human
tendency to in-group bias: if we _are_ the user, we offer preferential
treatment to other users, identifying more readily with any distress
they might suffer. Self-consumption can subtly degenerate and, in
doing so, suffer from extensive Not Invented Here syndrome. Countering
that is a matter of explicitly defining core focus and the
establishing the primacy of the pursuit thereof, if you're getting a
chance to bootstrap your own culture. Self-sustaining, off-grid
cults--religious and secular-ish--do this really well by ritualized
recitation of core beliefs: they can exploit connections to the world
at large without eroding their essential identity. Status quo bias can
also be a problem: as a user you have incentive to not make radical,
disruptive changes to a product which you might have made, with less
difficulty, from a more removed position.

Hmm, that paragraph took a strange turn somewhere. I'm, uh, not at all
advocating that start-ups should be organized along the lines of cult
organizations.

--
Brian L. Troutwine

evan

unread,
Feb 17, 2012, 4:13:20 PM2/17/12
to pdx...@googlegroups.com
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Sam Goldstein <sgr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry to take this off topic, but I started thinking...
>
> Are you guys using Revisu to build Revisu?
>
> My current employer has apparently gotten to the point where they can
> commission fancy videos to describe what we do (http://newrelic.com/about).
>
> My favorite moment in the video is when Ralph says "We use New Relic to
> monitor New Relic...".  I know github uses pull request in their internal
> development process.  I'd bet 37 signals uses Basecamp to manage development
> on Basecamp.  Twitter began as an internal communication tool for a company
> doing who-the-fuck-knows-what.

Actually no. We were looking in to how people collaborate, and
specifically how young women use SMS. We also were looking in to how
to use group text messaging to organize protests. There were ideas
from how bike messengers communicate also thrown in, and a bit of how
people used .plan files and the finger command on old university unix
servers. Then a bunch of prototypes were built in a hackathon. Some
with IVR, some with voice, some with flash web recording, some with
pictures, some with text messages. The twitter one seemed compelling.
After about a month, there were only 100 users, but a 100,000 messages
delivered.

It was not a tool for ourselves nor for internal use. It was an
intentional effort to develop a communication product in a space we
thought was interesting. That is, mobile, casual, semi-private, blog
like, limited feature, fluid communication.

The company was Odeo.com, a podcasting company. I should know, i was
the 1st contractor, then 1st hire, then lead developer.

-rabble

Brad Heller

unread,
Feb 20, 2012, 12:59:21 PM2/20/12
to pdxruby
FYI, this position was filled. Hurray!
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages