Jobs

Help!  We need your SalesForce.com, CRM, or DBA skills!

Have you intentionally, or unintentionally come to love CRM?  Isn’t it great how the essence of an organization, team, or process can be distilled with such efficiency and elegance?

Ok, how many times have you actually seen it happen that way?  Thought so.  Our job is help our nonprofit clients make the most of their resources so they can save us from ourselves.  Most often, we do this through importing, configuring, consulting, tweaking, and slowly improving their SalesForce instance with them.   Less often, we bring Apex, VisualForce, and jQuery to bear and build custom UIs for them as well, or connect SalesForce to other systems via an API.

If you have even one of the following under your belt, we want to work with you:  Database administration, CRM, Java, or Excel.  That’s right, there’s room for you in our projects even if you have a secret love affair with VLOOKUP and pivot tables.

Email us, and include “strawberry” in the subject line so we know how detail oriented you are.  ehren@preludeinteractive.com & ed@preludeinteractive.com

We’re also usually looking to meet people with great general purpose websauce, as below.

Freelance UI Person Whose CSS Is So Amazing I Will Not Be Able To Distinguish It From Magic

For the most part, we see backend web development projects – donor databases, volunteer management systems, integrations, online commerce, that kind of thing.  But we know and respect the need for pretty, functional, usable, sane user interfaces – without them, nobody likes using the tools we build.  I am also well aware that while I have learned a lot, my HTML/CSS/Javascript skills amount to less than our clients deserve.

We do not officially support IE6, but you should be prepared to develop and test for IE7, IE8, Chrome, FireFox, and Safari – how you go about having access to all those browsers is up to you.   You should be an artist with the Web Developer Toolbar, or Inspect Element, or other diagnostic tools (and feel free to teach me new tricks!).

It’s also important that you consider yourself a freelancer / contractor.  While I don’t plan on hounding you all hours, your day job will get in the way.  I don’t need everything done right now, but I usually need to know when you can get to something within a business day.

The Javascript stuff is really a plus – it’s usually CSS/HTML that needs the most help.  Finally, you should know how to use a code repository/versioning system like Subversion, and not be an absolute clod when it comes to good team development practices.

I know what competitive hourly rates are for good people like you, and I’m prepared to pay them.  Looking forward to hearing from you!  Please send your portfolio, resume, examples of work, or references in whatever mix you like – send anything as long as you think it represents you well.

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.