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denglish

112 karma · joined September 1, 2008

http://www.cultureamp.com
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denglish··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)
Culture Amp - Melbourne, Australia - http://CultureAmp.com - VISA - Full-time Front End Lead Developer (Not considering remote workers for this role)

We're looking for a front end specialist to join our development team in Melbourne, and lead the evolution of the JavaScript and SASS/CSS within our codebase. Our application is built primarily in Ruby on Rails, with a MongoDB back end, and hosted on AWS. We also have a Java component (but we won't subject you to that).

You love crafting beautifully designed and intuitive user experiences, and you believe that creating well tested, clean code is just as important for the front end as the back end. You enjoy being surrounded by talented engineers, learning from others, as well as contributing to their development. To top it all off you've got a passion for culture and changing the world of work for the better.

There are plenty of challenges in the front end code to keep you interested. Our user-friendly survey capture form needs to work across a wide range of browsers and devices, and provide a simple, enjoyable user experience. On the reporting side, we use JavaScript and CSS to visualise and make sense of big data. We use JQuery and some JQuery UI and Bootstrap components, and we know there's a need for other libraries to help streamline the code - that's where you come in.

We're a small development team, using lightweight agile processes and working closely together on the codebase. We use git and an automated CI for builds, and review each others' pull requests. We believe in automation over repetition, and aim to make our code and infrastructure modular and reusable.

We work with some of the worlds most innovative tech companies (Airbnb, Pinterest, Etsy, Uber, Slack, Squarespace, yelp, are just some of our well known clients) to help them better understand and improve their culture. We're located in one of Melbourne's most vibrant co-working spaces, Inspire 9's Foundry9 - a stone's throw from Richmond Station, and the monthly venue of the Melbourne Ruby user group.

We care about who you are and what you've achieved, not what pieces of paper you hold. For this role, we're looking for a front end focused developer with strong technical skills in JavaScript and CSS, leadership experience, a keen interest in learning and an awareness of existing libraries and frameworks.

If you're excited by the opportunity to work in a fast growing start-up, where there's plenty of opportunities to pitch in on anything from shaping the next product feature to influencing our technology stack, and building a global software company from Melbourne, reach out to us.

https://jobs.lever.co/cultureamp/d620e798-5774-42c4-8a41-2b9...

denglish··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2014)
Preferably Melbourne, Australia, or REMOTE. Full-stack developer (emphasis on front end). Culture Amp http://cultureamp.com

We're a Rails shop, with some Java components, but passion and pragmatism trump technology specifics!

We help companies measure intangibles like employee engagement, manager effectiveness or candidate market sentiments. We've got a rockstar client list - Airbnb, Box, Adobe, Etsy, ModCloth, Pinterest, Disqus and Klout to name a few, and we're growing rapidly. We're still a startup though with less than 10 employees looking to add another 3 right now.

Interested? Check out our hiring page and drop us a line: http://www.cultureamp.com/join_us.html

denglish··on Write Better with Draft
My advice would be to give people something for signing up. For example, let them start playing without email, let the save, and then ask for their email address to send them a unique url to their new account. This has the added advantages that (1) more people will play with the app and hopefully talk about it! and (2) those that sign up are more qualified leads as they know what they're signing up for.
denglish··on Ask HN: How do you manage shared company passwords?
We've been using https://www.boxcryptor.com/ on top of Dropbox for passwords and other need-to-keep-very-secure data.
denglish··on Ask HN: Worthwhile hacker events in the Bay Area for March/April 2009?
Thanks for all of the great tips everyone. Should keep us busy :). Looking forward to meeting some of you at some of the events.
denglish··on 13 Of the Best Linux Tutorials and OpenCourseWare on the Web
No worries, glad you like. I thought it'd be a useful one for others when I stumbled across it - I've bookmarked it for my own future Linux reference.
denglish··on Google Turns On Text Ads In Google Maps
Ultimately Google is a for profit company and their business model is built around advertising. I feel Google has aways been quite reasonable in their advertisement placements and their leveraging of google maps advertising is fair enough - the service is free after all and very useful!
denglish··on Thank goodness for the dot com bubble
It is quite true - both bubbles represented market speculations that outstripped the underlying financial realities. And I believe the reverse can be said that the massive corrections after both bubbles burst are also results of investment confidence dropping below the underlying financial realities. We in the IT sector are very lucky these bubbles didn't align or the bubble bursts may have been much much more severe.
denglish··on Domain Name Dollar Store
Hilarious! But oh so true!!!
denglish··on How do I get in shape? Excercise Hack for Entrepreneurs
It really depends on your goals. 30 minutes twice a week is probably fine to maintain fitness, but particularly if you want to lose weight taking the sessions up to an hour / hour and a half and increasing the number of sessions a week significantly speeds up the process. And I know I function much much better on at least 8 hours sleep a night.
denglish··on So, you need a job? Man, do resumes suck
I agree with tailor, but it still needs to "accurately represent" - there really isn't any point getting to an interview you shouldn't be at. Just waists everyone's time.
denglish··on Great Thoughts
A lot of studies have shown that sleep is the best enabler of 'great thoughts' http://www.cnn.com/2004/HEALTH/01/21/sleep.creativity.ap/ind.... Perhaps more high thinking job positions should pay workers to guarantee they'll make time to sleep 8 hours a night!
denglish··on Grad School Enrollment vs. Unemployment Rate
I suspect the stats may be more biased by people who 'take what they can get' in the recession time, and then don't actually look to find more career progressing opportunities when the markets strengthen. (I've got a couple of friends that did that in the 2001 hiccup and despite my harassing still haven't left the jobs they compromised to take.)

If that is the case it's more important you recognise when times have improved, than to delay your entry by another x years.

denglish··on Microsoft still paying people to search
Surely paying your users isn't the answer - for starters it's almost an admission it doens't stack up to the competition on it's own! It's also only going to insentivise a small group of users that are very likely to dump the product as soon as the payments stop. They've got to stop looking for gimicks and compete on product.
denglish··on Einstein letters reveal a turmoil beyond science
It must have been hard for him and his family to have their private lives scrutinised by the world - it's not like he chose a profession likely to bring him world fame!
denglish··on The Traditional Workplace is Broken
I think everyone agrees the status quo for most companies isn't working. The hard question is how do you change it? Simply 'challenging' your workers is not really enough (although a good start). For smaller innovative companies there isn't a lot of bureaucracy yet, and the chances are the founders have had a direct part in hiring all the staff – with a vested interest in picking the top quality people they can. And with top quality staff of course you naturally give them the freedom and flexibility to be as effective as they can.

The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they ‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate too.

Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.

denglish··on Audi detects when lights will turn red
My first thought was - yeah, that'll create a lot more speeders! But actually on reflection I think there are a couple of very good side effects to come out of this:

1. The most dangerous time to speed / stop heavily is in or very near an intersection. Giving drivers more warning may actually encourage them to use the actual intersections more safely.

2. Traffic is considerably congested by the stop start nature of intersections. If this helps to more gently control cars passing through in both directions, it may considerably speed up everyone's trips (even those that slow rather than speed - keeping in mind they can then still hit the green light at say 2/3 speed rather than zero.)

denglish··on Invert the Employee/Employer relationship start an Umbrella Company
This is a pretty common practise here in Australia as well. I've been contracting through an umbrella company - certainly takes the headaches out of paperwork. Don't quite know how they manage it but usually their fee is added on top of my negotiated daily rate rather than taken out of my rate. Works for me :)
denglish··on Posterous: I went to etc., can I still work for you?
I think it actually has a lot to do with the disciplines of Computer and Software Engineering being so new (relatively speaking to pretty much every other arena of engineering). Because of this a couple of things are quite unique to programming (but also quite similar to the other disciplines when they were young):

1. Things change at a much faster rate. As theoretically useful it is to pick up a text book from the 70s, it's not going to provide you with the practical on the job experience needed to work in, say, Ruby on Rails.

2. There's not as many codified ways of working. This means there's a much larger reliance on the 'talent' of the individuals working in the field.

denglish··on Better than Guitar Hero?
I've always been fascinated and concerned by the concept of computer composers. As much as music has an immense wealth of theory and mathematics behind it, I'd also like to think it also has a uniquely human sense of art and creativity to it too. What does it mean if a machine ends up being able to do this better than us? I'm hoping that at least in the near future the computer simply remains the artist's aid!
denglish··on Looking out for number one
Interesting article, and a phenomenon I hadn't thought about before. One thing the article didn't really focus on that struck me as a more intuitive way of understanding the phenomenon is that 1 is the first digit hit when the order of magnitude is increased (and 2 the next). So assuming for example a particular sample rarely goes above a given number, say 250 for argument sake, that means a large sample of the results are likely to be between 100 and 199, majorly skewing the results. Even if x was 700 a first digit of 1 would be far more common than 8 or 9. At the next order of magnitude the same logic would apply.
denglish··on The Programmer and the Elves: a Fairy Tale
I was expecting the elves to come back charging exurbanite consulting fees to maintain a system no one else could understand...
denglish··on Ask YC: What to have on site while under construction?
Are you game enough to put a demo date up?
denglish··on Japanese women like protected sites
It makes sense to me - traditional media is highly controlled and edited, whilst most interactive forums are completely open. Nice to see people developing middle ground alternatives. There must be a better way than snail mail to confirm identity though!
denglish··on Fighting for the Right to Clone
What an inspiring story! It really is the real life version of Good Will Hunting.
denglish··on Success as an Entrepreneur: Why It’s Not About You
Can anyone honestly say they're in the start up world simply to alturistically help other people? This article seems a bit twisted to me - yes I agree you make money by solving a business problem, or helping others make money, but if you don't ultimately make money yourself, surely that's considered failure! I know your investors would say so...
denglish··on Try not to use threads - (Not sure I agree)
Does seem a bit paranoid! No doubt threading adds a (potentially significant) level of complexity that shouldn’t be added unless required, but with the world moving further and further into the realms of cloud computing and multi-cores, it seems to me it’s a complexity we’re going to need to embrace.
denglish··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Dilbert quit?
The thing I've come to realise recently is that most people in IT are resigned to the fact that they work for money and live life outside work. Even the thought of starting a company never enters their minds. I quit recently to start up a company and almost everyone from my old employer that found out I was leaving asked me what employer I was moving to. On hearing my news most said something like "wow that's really brave!". I kept saying is it? The reality is it would have made more sense to them if I'd said I was taking a career break to travel the world for six months. I kept saying but this way my cost are much lower and I have a (hopefully good) chance of making real money, compared to the traveller that comes back - all be it having had a lot of great experiences - broke and looking for work again.
denglish··on How to make your user interface CRAP
...and makes it nearly impossible to separate the crap from the CRAP!
denglish··on Don't Be Afraid to Break Stuff
Don't know about this. In my experience the best way to take fear out of a codebase is to have a rigorous unit testing and continuous build platform. I've got no problem with refactoring but would like to think it has a bit more of a design element to it. Perhaps time is better spent fixing defects - another good way to learn a codebase and a more productive excersise in our time constrained projects.
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