Developers, Work for a Pioneer: CTO and Founder of Orbitz
Just received an amazing software developer opportunity from Alex Zoghlin. Alex founded Orbitz and is truly a pioneer in the world of Chicago start-ups.
Looks like his new company is booming - and they need help! See below. I enjoyed reading the requirements and the humor placed in each of the points, but if you know Alex, he's to the point and amazing to work for. Good Luck!!
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VHT is a fast growing venture backed startup in the Real Estate marketing space. We've recently launched a unique software platform for the industry which is catching on significantly faster than we anticipated. We expect to add over 200,000 paying real estate professionals onto the platform THIS YEAR! Our sales efforts is outstripping our ability to handle the customers, and we need help.If you are a talented software developer and can answer YES to the following questions, we'd love to talk to you!1. You're more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist2. You've muttered "I'm up anyways, might as well code" at 4:30 a.m. at least once in your life.3. You understand why the above is misleading because time is continuous, not discrete and the probability of any individual having muttered anything at exactly 4:30 a.m. is near zero. But, you answered yes to #2 anyways, because you're practical and know what was actually meant.4. Your sense of satisfaction from software development is a function of how many users are delighted with what you've built.5. You can argue both sides of a technical debate most of the time, if you had to. Some of the time, you actually do, just to better understand the tradeoffs.6. You've been impressed with someone else's code at some point in your life.7. You've reused someone else's code at some point in your life, and resisted the temptation to rewrite it.8. Given a weekend, you could build and launch a trivial web application from start to finish in a language/platform of your choosing (C#,Java,PHP,Python,Ruby,etc.). And, since you've actually had weekends, you've actually gone ahead and done this.9. You're strangely comforted by the fact that the list of languages in #8 is alphabetical and not in descending or ascending order of quality/power/coolness/etc as you really don't have the time for a religious war on languages and platforms.10. Given a long weekend and some caffeine, you could do #8 with a popular language/platform that is not of your choosing.11. You've developed something non-trivial before that nobody you know could recreate in a weekend (and you know more than two people that you'd consider great developers).12. You're going to start your own company someday. So, you're interested in sales, marketing, operations and things other than figuring out how to make Ruby on Rails scale to large numbers of users when there are complicated database queries involved.13. You read a lot, including things like Slashdot and hacker news.14. You're not just an internet developer, you're an internet participant. You actually use the stuff other people have built.15. You've used Microsoft products (including things like .net 3.5 and C#) and are not afraid to tell anyone.16. The whole concept of cloud computing excites you because you don't want to have to think about things like managing datacenters, or limiting the customer experience because of hardware scaling issues.
Kevin Rose's People Offer Conan a Job:On the Internet
http://revision3.com/blog/2010/01/18/an-open-letter-to-conan-obrien/ That didn't take long, the folks behind Revision 3 and Diggnation formerly offer Conan a job.
Trying the New Dominos
Did the new ads make me want to try the new pizza? Yep.
There is a Jersey Shore in All of Us
There is quite the hub-bub about the MTV show, 'Jersey Show'. I won't go into the ins and outs of the show, etc, but I will say, I believe it. We live in a large country and there are many ethnicities that make up the demographic of our melting pot. As a first generation Macedonian gal, I can attest to the flashy cars, gold chains and gel that existed when I was in high school (and still exist with some family relatives and cousins today). Now, I won't say that my high school and 20 something years were as 'loud' as what the cast of 'Jersey Shore' is up to, but I, along with many people I know spent time doing one or more of the following: -Cruising a main drag in metro Detroit, listening to the pop radio station and looking at boys, with the bass kicking in a way that would make your ears hurt
-Wearing red lipstick everyday in high school
-Drenching hair in enough gel to keep the natural curls tight all day long
-Keeping a well stocked supply of scrunchies
-Wearing a gold chain, complete with the flag of your parents' home country
-Turning 16 and getting a brand new car (this didn't happen to me)
-Turning 21 and still living with your parents I managed to find some old photos that clearly put me in 'Snooki territory'
-Wearing red lipstick everyday in high school
-Drenching hair in enough gel to keep the natural curls tight all day long
-Keeping a well stocked supply of scrunchies
-Wearing a gold chain, complete with the flag of your parents' home country
-Turning 16 and getting a brand new car (this didn't happen to me)
-Turning 21 and still living with your parents I managed to find some old photos that clearly put me in 'Snooki territory'
Lego Keeps Old School Current
Loved watching the video for Lego's new LegoClick.com social community- a new effort that aims to keep the idea of creativity alive and strong.
Image c/o mashable.comNetflix to Come to the Wii Soon? Yes, Please.
As I catch up with post CES news, I just picked up this tidbit via Mashable. Netflix may soon be coming to Nintendo devices. For those that aren't familiar with what this means, Netflix currently enables users to stream videos from devices like the Xbox, certain Blue-Ray devices and TVs that are connected to the Internet.
Nintendo looks to be the next device on deck...which could mean that movies may be able to stream through via the Wii. It behooves Netflix to make movie watching as seamless as possible. I predict this advancement coming up before the end of the year.
What say you? Would this addition make you a Netflix subscriber?
Chicago Primary Elections...What Does a Comptroller Do Again?
In Chicago, hearing about or participating in politics is a way of life. From current offices to our infamous history (1968), Chicago is associated with what is sometimes called 'the machine'. Whatever way you slice it, this town loves to debate. Which brings me to the upcoming activities that will surround our city on February 2 - The 2010 Primary.
We have some hot races going on: Senator, Governor and County Board President seem to be the most talked about offices that news organizations and pundits are discussing. I like to consider myself an active, informed city dweller, but time and time again, I find myself slightly dumbfounded with the amount of candidates that are running for offices I either haven't heard of or seem to only hear of come election time. I also begin to see the political ads road blocking the the slots before and after my local evening news.
I know what you are thinking: 'As a city dweller, you should research each office and figure out what the job is, then review the candidates from there.' I would typically agree with you, however, I think the city has quite a bit of room to grow and educate the public on a)what each job is b) why each job is important and c) what the impact of these government jobs has on my day-to-day life.
For example, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District seems to be a hot ticket with the Democrats. Given Chicago has a large lake as our neighbor, I'm guessing this is a pretty big job. But what exactly does this person need to do?
Going through the rest of the posts, I see there is are both Committeeman and Committeewoman posts. What do they do exactly? How are my interests representing through these folks? In a nutshell, why should I care?
I continue to see ads and commentary about the importance of voting (which I will do at the South Loop School), however, the attention with the February 2 Primary seems to be around the Senator and County Board President races. If Chicago is such a grassroots town, shouldn't there be more weight given to us understanding what our local representatives can do for our districts and wards?
If yes, who is responsible for making sure we understand who these folks are and why we should pay careful attention to their campaigns?
