Front-End Developer (comfortable at all levels of the stack) For Web (Rails, Backbone.js) And Mobile Apps (iOS & Android on Titanium).
Our small development team, working in an unorthodox way (read “lean startup”), has created our web app, our mobile apps (iPhone & Android) and our initial Facebook app. This is a full-time position with our development team in Austin.
“Lean Startup?” What does a typical development cycle look like…
Our development team typically make small changes in very short development cycles (1/2 day to 1 1/2 days) so we build & release quickly. An example cycle from your point of view might look like…
- you’re part of a team discussion focused on improving customer retention (or customer activation, etc.) during which the whole team will review metrics & user behavior to find specific problems & define a hypothesis and experiment for improving it,
- then you’ll mock up some email (or page or screen) design - working with the other people who are solving this problem
- then you’ll convert those mockups to HTML + CSS templates for email (or page or screen)
- then you’ll work with another developer who will do the backend changes & jointly define the experiment setup & deploy the changes
- … once some time has passed, you’ll review the metrics & user behavior from this experiment in the team discussion… (repeating the cycle, improving based on what you’ve learned)
Required Skills?
- experience with HTML5, Javascript and CSS3
- experience with browser-side libraries such as jQuery
- experience developing html page & email templates within some web app framework (e.g. CakePHP, Rails, Django, etc.)
- sufficient server side skills within some web app framework (ruby/python/php models, database persistence, sql, ad-hoc sql queries)
- html page & email template development in Rails
- experience with browser-side MVC toolkits such as backbone.js
- app development in javascript, e.g. for single-page apps on web and/or for mobile using Titanium
- experience developing against RESTful APIs
- github account with examples of your work
We develop in a way you’ve probably never seen – ferociously applying lean startup principles, this means (among other things) we are constantly running multiple experiments to learn what changes really make a difference to our users (typically 10 experiments running at any time) & individual developers deploy to production multiple times / day, release Android multiple times / week & release iOS weekly. Everything we do goes straight back to how we are making a measurable difference to our users.
Learn more about how lean startup is applied within Food on the Table from the recent book “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries (pages 99 – 102), from our CEO Manual Rosso’s talk at Startup Lessons Learned “Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study”, or “Some Patterns of Lean Startup at Food on the Table” by Steve Sanderson.
If you’re interested, the get hold of me: I’m Steve Sanderson and my email address is my first name at foodonthetable.com & I’m @stevesanderson
