Jobs

Part time PHP Person Who Does Not Fear People

We need to hire a part time, contract-to-hire, PHP web developer with strong communications skills and a willingness to interface directly with clients. Prelude is a small company, so your impact will be noticed immediately and very relevant to our success and growth.  Prelude Interactive is an Austin, TX based company specializing in nonprofit technology, specifically tools built with PHP and SalesForce.com.

http://www.preludeinteractive.com/about/

Requirements

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – LAMP stack.  Sometimes we use WAMP when we have to.  You don’t have to be a guru sysadmin, know all the crazy performance switches in MySQL, or be able to recompile any of these things from source.  Just be very comfortable with using them.

If you can use MySQL on a command line, that’s great.  If you’re comfortable with phpMyAdmin, that’s also good, but just misses the ‘great’ cut.  You should be familiar with the difference between left and inner joins, and be well versed in group by, limit, aliasing, keys, indexes, and other MySQL stuff.

We have some PHP4 to take care of.  It hurts to say that, but it’s true.  You should be comfortable with some of the differences, and also able to maintain two development environments if you need them.

You definitely need to already know about MVC frameworks and have good coding practices.  Being a code poet or object oriented artist is not necessary, but you should be a ‘senior’ rather than a ‘junior’ developer.

We do a lot of Joomla.  If you don’t have any Joomla experience, that’s OK, more of a bonus.  Ditto WordPress.  SalesForce development is Java-like, using eclipse, so if you have experience there too, be sure to mention it.

We telecommute, you should be comfortable doing the same.  However, candidates in Austin will be slightly favored due to their ability to tag along to some in person client meetings.

Oh yeah, clients.  Your written communication skills should be solid.  That means how to get your ideas across, and tease out the right information from others.  It’s better that you’re able to “speak client language” than spell every word correctly.  Mostly this will be through email and a ticketing system, but the phone can be an amazing tool for getting back on the same page with someone.  Don’t be afraid of the phone, or more generally, people.

If this goes well, we will probably have the workload to bring you on > 1/2 time sometime later this year.  If it doesn’t, we won’t.  We aren’t looking for another contractor, we’re looking for someone to grow into a full time role.  That’s very different.  You can have other clients, but you need to be aiming to either bring them into Prelude (we can work that out later) or eventually let heavy ones go.

If You Are Interested You Should:

- Email ehren@preludeinteractive.com with some mix of a resume, portfolio, and cover letter.  A non-boilerplate paragraph or two about why you think Prelude is the right company for you would be extra good.
- Include “banana” in the subject line.  This is a test of your attention to detail.
- Not be hurt if we don’t respond right away, or at all.  The crush of interest on even a simple Craigslist post is a bit overwhelming.  Apologies in advance!
- Include what kind of hourly rate you’d need to see, assuming we did around 20 hours a week together.

If you are looking for immediate full time work in the New York area, check out Open Action.  They rule and I think they’re hiring.