The Third Bit

Indivica is looking for developers and support engineers to help extend and deploy OSCAR, an open source electronic medical record system used in small and medium-sized medical practices. They’re a distributed company—most people work from a home office (or a coffee shop, if they’re young and hip)—so applicants from anywhere in Canada are welcome to apply.

Developer: Java (J2EE preferably), Web experience (JavaScript/jQuery/CSS), Python (plus Django if possible, but not necessary), MySQL, Subversion and/or Git experience; iOS experience a plus; would also be good to have experience with server development. Duties will be to fix bugs in OSCAR, new software/feature development, convert new customers’ old system databases to OSCAR’s schema, and to interact with the support side of the business to address customer concerns.

Solutions Engineer: Doesn’t need to be a strong coder (very little development will be required), but will need to understand Java, JavaScript, and MySQL, know how to administer a Linux-based system, and know how to use a debugger. Duties will include interacting with customers to address their issues with the system, training, installation, and acting as a liaison between customers and the development team.

For more information, please contact Jennifer Ruttan.

Employment

All right: what kind of job do I want? It’s a fair question, and since I’ve often asked students what they would work on if someone offered to pay their salary for a year, I suppose I should try to answer it myself.

First, I want to stay in downtown Toronto: relocating isn’t an option, and since I don’t drive, getting out to the burbs would be two or three hours every day that I wouldn’t be spending with family or on the job. For the same reason, I’m not willing to look at jobs that require a lot of travel, which rules out most of the evangelist positions that people seem to think I’d be good at.

Second, I want to be part of a team that I enjoy spending time with. I’ve had help with Software Carpentry, but I’ve been the only full-timer on it for the last 11 months, which has been kind of lonely. I enjoyed the lunchtime conversations and brainstorming sessions with the crowd at Nevex, and with the CS lecturers at U of T; I have missed that, and would like to have it again.

Number three on my list is working on something that will make the world a better place for my daughter to grow up in. This doesn’t necessarily mean fundraising to fight global climate change, but it rules out SEO for social marketing ad campaigns.

“Cool technology” is the last thing on my list, but only because the others are more important. At 48, I can feel myself slowing down, but Haskell on GPUs in the cloud to drive touch-screen interfaces for personal robots still lights up my inner geek. I’d jump at things like:

• developer tools for extensible programming languages (JetBrains MPS and Intentional Software’s ghostware being two examples)
• a 21st Century presentation tool that would put creating and maintaining web-based content within reach of the average overworked instructor
• anything in the open notebook science space
• next-generation tools for teaching programming (UUhistle is neat)

but I realize these are more “R” than “D”. If NSERC hadn’t turned down every application I sent them while I was a professor, I’d probably be two years into one of these by now, but “what if” doesn’t pay the bills…

Organizational technologies are interesting too: I’m a bit of a software development process geek, and I’d enjoy helping a development team go from 3 to 13 on the Joel Test (13 instead of 12 because I think that “Do you use a debugger?” ought to be on the list).

So: close to home, good team, personally rewarding and technically sweet—it sounds a lot like most other people’s lists. I’ll compromise where I need to (work remotely, for example, and I’m very flexible on salary for the right job), but I know I’m still asking for a lot. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Employment

It’s trivial by comparison, but since money hasn’t materialized for another year of full-time work on Software Carpentry, I’m now looking for a job. My CV is up to date, and my interview shoes are polished, so if you know of anything meaningful and interesting in downtown Toronto, please give me a shout.

Employment, Uncategorized

Via Serguei Zinine, a draft paper looking at the effects on students’ financial prospects of graduating during a recession. Charts with results start on pg. 47.

Later: Diane Horton pointed out that they only analyzed men; the word “women” comes up only once in 73 pages. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t notice this myself.

Employment, Equity, Learning

See the flyer for details — they’re an interesting group, doing cool things.

Announcements, Employment

Phantom Fiber has a couple of openings in Toronto:
Development

We’re looking for good Java developers to write software that translates between our customers back-end protocols, and the mobile-device optimized protocols that our client apps use. We have a lot of interesting work coming down the pipe, and so initiative, independent work, and communication are very important, as is being able to come-up-to-speed on new technologies quickly, and debug problems no-one may ever have seen before.

QA

We’re also looking for a QA person. Actually more of a Testing person, since much of what we do has few or no specifications. The job would involve learning about and testing the various applications Phantom Fiber produces on the many different platforms we support. Since we’re a small company, there is room to grow into development, deployment, build maintenance, requirements gathering, actual quality assurance, or tech support roles, if that was desired.

Employment

Good post from Leona Hobbs on how to ace a TUCOWS job fair.

Employment

It’s that time of the year once again — I have a crop of bright undergraduates who are looking for full-time jobs starting at the end of April.  If you want smart, hard-working developers who believe in good tools and good process, please let me know — I’d be happy to introduce you.

Employment

The National Post is running an article about “Brad“, a Canadian entrepreneur who’s trying to turn his vision of Web 3.0 [1] into reality.  As I posted a week ago, he’s looking for Flash programmers to help him do it.  If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, I’d like to hear from you.

[1] Web 1.0 was, well, the web.  2.0 is what happens when you make it more open and interactive; 3.0 is what happens when you tie it back to physical objects to make the things around us as accessible and malleable as the pixels on our screens.  You heard it hear first…

Announcements, Employment

(Posted on behalf of a close friend who has a very promising business plan. If you’re interested, please contact me for more details.)

I require a developer or development team with the following expertise:

Proven expertise working on Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), using Flex, AJAX, or comparable tools.

My site incorporates dynamic interface elements (i.e. graphics animated via user controls) that will be driven by a very large rules-based data array (12000+ variables, defined and provided by the customer) which must be regenerate in real time (in order to facilitate the interface functionality). Indications thus far are that RIA tools are best suited to this task.

Proven expertise in developing realtime web-based 3D models.

My interface incorporates 3D models which will be generated by using the rules-based data array to feed parametric vector controls in the model. The 3D model is not generated in realtime per se, but must be regenerated very rapidly on either the client- or server-side. There are two distinct elements in this function: model building and model viewing. At this time, it is believed that the model building will be best accomplished via an existing or custom-built 3D modelling engine (perhaps borrowed from the gaming world). The model viewing could be addressed either through Flash Viewer (thus avoiding the requirement for custom viewer downloads), or a custom viewer.

Expertise in linking the above functions into a fairly standard eCommerce and backend Database order processing system.

This falls into the realm of ‘standard programming’, with the exception that each ‘order’ must track 12,000+ datapoints rather than the more typical ten or twenty.

While there are obvious advantages, the three main requirements above do not necessarily have to be drawn from the same source. However a complete development team, with coordinated approaches to all three areas, must be defined before work commences.

Employment