I have a few great openings available that I have to share with you. These are really great positions working with really interesting and smart people all over the world.
Some of the outstanding benefits include:
- Work from home.
- Work for a great project lead (me!).
- Work with an international team of really great developers.
- Work on a product used by thousands of people and seen by many more.
- Work tasks are pretty much self-directed. Nobody is looking over your shoulder.
- Set your own schedule and work at your own pace.
- Interesting cutting-edge ASP.NET work.
- Gain great experience working on a product and increase your marketable skills.
Some of the interesting projects include:
- Building a next-gen plugin architecture.
- Localization and Internationalization.
- Advanced Skinning architecture.
- General application architecture and API improvement.
- Streamlined UI design using AJAX.
- Advanced Bayesian statistical analysis coding.
- Windows CardSpaces and Infocard.
For such a great opportunity, I must warn you about a few of the downsides.
I have a gut feeling that second downside is going to be a bit of a deal breaker for a lot of people. But did I mention you can work as many or as few hours as you wish?
As you probably figured out already, I am attempting to recruit people to contribute to the Subtext Project. I have to cut down the number of hours I put into the project for the rest of the year and into the first couple months of the next year for a couple reasons I will mention later. I’ll still be heavily involved, but won’t be able to contribute as much code as I have been.
Why Accept No Pay For Work?
I’ve written on this a bit before.
In truth, there are many reasons people work on open source software, and they are not all the same. Many just find it fun to work on something more interesting than the boring data-in data-out systems they build at work. Some want to have a hand in building a better mousetrap. Many enjoy participating in a community and perhaps gaining a bit of recognition among their peers.
However there is another angle I want to promote. It can help you get a better job. On one hand, it helps you get experience in skillsets you might not otherwise exercise at your current job.
37signals, that über hot company right now, see Open Source contributions as a great way to judge a potential candidate.
Open source is a gift to those who need to hire technical people. With open source, you can track someone’s work and contributions — good and bad — over a lengthy period of time.
That means you can judge people by their actions instead of just their words. You can make a decision based on the things that really matter:
In fact, they only hire people they know through open source. Most companies aren’t that extreme, but trust me, it’s a serious turn on to a potential employer.
Hmmm... I’m Intrigued. What Do You Need?
Great! Glad you asked!
We have a great team as it stands, but we can always use more help in any and every area. Everyone is welcome to contribute to anything. Even so, I would like to have a few people step up and become responsible for a few areas. That person doesn’t necessarily have to do the work in the respective area, but just take ownership of getting people to contribute and get it down. Basically I want to decompose Subtext into multiple smaller projects. Here are some of our needs:
Documentation Guru: We need someone to be in charge of documentation. This would include making sure our project website is up to date. It can also include generating NDoc documentation and posting it on our site, etc... In fact, it’d be nice to have our project website redesigned to be a better resource for Subtext users.
Build and Deployment Master: Right now, this has been handled by a combination of Me, Steve Harman, and Simone (Simo) Chiaretta. Unless Simo wants this title, I think it’d be nice to have one person be responsible for maintaining our Continuous Integration and built scripts as well as our final deployments.
QA Manager and Testers: We need more people to help out with QA before we release builds, but one person to manage this process. I have someone in mind for this, but I thought I’d put it out there since we could use more help in this area. This would include helping us increase our unit test coverage and start getting WATIR tests going. After the last error plagued release (my fault), I want to get more serious in this area.
Developers, Developers, Developers: And of course, we need more developers! We have several ongoing mini-projects we could use help in. Simo is chugging away on our new plugin framework, but I know he’d appreciate some help as well as someone to start writing some initial plugins to deploy with Subtext.
I have a new skinning architecture I want to get in place, but I won’t have the time to implement it, though I can describe it to anyone who will listen in great detail.
Robb Allen is working on our new membership provider. I’m sure he’d love to have some help finishing the integration with Subtext.
And there are many more minor tasks that we’d like to get done such as general bug fixes, feature requests, code refactorings. I’d like to clean up some of our data access architecture to streamline it a bit. Maybe even evaluate using Subsonic.
Wrap Up
To be clear, any and all contributions are worthy and helpful. I may be ambitious asking for volunteers to take on these specific management roles, but it’s worth a try.
However, if you have some time to contribute, but don’t want to take on a management role, don’t let this dissuade you. For example, if you don’t have time to help manage the QA process, but can do testing for a bit here and there when we are preparing a release, please jump on in!
If you are interested in joining in the efforts, start by subscribing to the subtext-devs mailing list and we’ll get you going.