domodomo

Giftster | Senior Fullstack Python Developer | Minneapolis, MN (Greater Twin Cities Metro) | Local Candidates Only | Full Time | Salary 150K-190K | www.giftster.com

Yello! I'm Ian, co-founder and CTO at Giftster. Giftster is an online two-way wishlist service tailored for families and friend groups. Founded in 2008, we have over 3 million members and counting. We are looking for a Senior Fullstack Python/Django Developer to join our web dev team.

In this role, you’ll take ownership of both building and running Giftster’s core systems. This includes our backend services, web platform, and mobile API—all of which power millions of wishlist interactions.

We’re looking for someone who can contribute across the full stack and is equally comfortable shipping new features and ensuring the system operates smoothly in production. Strong experience with Python is essential and Django experience is preferred.

You’ll collaborate with product and design to refine requirements, implement new functionality, improve existing features, and resolve issues. Just as importantly, you’ll help ensure that what we ship remains stable, performant, and reliable for our users.

Core Technologies:

Python, Django, Django REST Framework, Javascript (Vue), CSS (Tailwind), HTMX, Docker, Git, Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, etc), Cloudflare

We are looking to add to our local team, so while work is remote, all applicants must be local to the Twin Cities MN Greater Metro area. Sorry!

Apply here:

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4405362533/

Thanks for checking us out!

I've been planning on learning Love2D / Lua soon, and this looks amazing.

Have you shared it on the Love2D forums yet?

Would it work well for a use case like say, debugging behavior on collision? Like say I fall through a platform, rewind, change a variable, play forwards, fall through, rewind again, etc?

Isn't Github having it's annual employee family picnic this week in SF?

This is literally going to ruin someones picnic.

You've nailed it here, outstanding job.

Any chance of defining a custom selection key other than ctrl? On my Macbook air, holding the control key with my pinky or thumb while I type is really awkward. Shift would seem more natural, as the pinky finger is already used to using this as a modifier, no?

Dude, this is impressively MVP. Google forms for submitting, and just linking to a 3rd party webpage for actual job details. Awesome.

Are you just manually updating the page by hand when people add jobs? Kinda concierge style. I would actually respect that all the more.

People talk a big game on MVP, but it's cool to come across where someone actually gets it.

How did you get your initial inventory? Just manually sifting through HN posts? I think getting new and quality inventory will be the biggest challenge, that's harder than getting job seekers.

You've basically created a less crappy and niche focused indeed.com:

http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=&l=Remote

I'm not sure if indeed.com spiders automatically or what, but I'm guessing you could emulate their approach to getting job openings.

Another option is to try to actively partner with headhunters who often have a source of inventory you wouldn't normally see on job boards.

As for the UI, ignore the haters. The simplicity reminds me of Startupers (http://www.startupers.com/) which is doing just fine.

Had this idea too, glad someone has executed on it so awesomely. I've been eager to get better at Sublime Text, so will start using this.

Two suggestions which I think would be really awesome.

!. The hard part of exercising though is getting your butt to the gym. What if you could sign up for a daily email that keeps you at it, challenging you to take it to the next level, tracks your progress, sets goals and reminds you to make them, etc.

2. It's really abstract to just hit key commands without seeing them actually do something. What if you made small animated gifs for each action your are emulating, maybe even with a full fake editor background? This way, your brain would be tricked further that you are actually performing the action represented by the keyboard shortcut.

What is the VC culture like in Berlin? Are there many VCs, and what kind of companies do they typically invest in?

To me, this is the difference between a good town for bootstrapping and a good town for creating a startup. As it stands, this article seems more like an argument for why Berlin is a great place to bootstrap a company. Which is also great, but different.

This reminds me, whatever happened to Turbogears? Are many people using it? I never really hear people mention using it compared to Django.

I thought long and hard about the "Should I learn Django or Turbogears" question 3 or four years ago, and went with Django. Back then, Django was not yet the "default" answer.

This is a silly weekend project I put out last Wednesday night. I presented it at a lightning talk at Minnebar (Barcamp in Minneapolis) and it got a surprisingly warm reception. So thought I'd share it here.

Platform is: Bootstrap, Django, Pinax. Hosting it on webfaction.

And if there are any bakers out there or you are interested, I highly recommend this book by authors here in Minneapolis:

http://www.amazon.com/Artisan-Bread-Five-Minutes-Revolutioni...

They have a no-knead bread method that is appeals to the hacker mindset; heavily optimized and efficient.

My deal is that I already went down the 'scratch your own itch' path, totally ignorant of the customer development approach and got burnt bad. So now I am going extreme opposite. My guess is there is a happy middle ground I need to drift back towards. I'll keep your advice in mind.

All my hobbies are too nerdy, and therefor over-served btw. Except one: sailing. Maybe I should take a harder look at that.

What took the longest for me wasn't the sending of the emails, but the research that went into finding who to email. This would be the same deal if I was cold calling. And I'm not sure how to automate this, you just have to slog through it. You can only call or email as many people as you can find after all. So that's the bottle neck.

So if the time investment is a wash, then it's really a question of what converts better, not based on bulk. I have a feeling calls will...but I don't have the personal data to prove it yet.

It's interesting you had bad experience with calls though. Were you selling something? Maybe that's the difference.

I'll check it out.

Part of the trick is I don't even have a demographic or problem statement. I'm trolling for ideas with my lure in the water, sailing in circles. Consequently, 50% response rate would be a miracle. But maybe not for cold calls, we'll see.

Also, the whole buy some adwords and do a landing page thing worked for you? I have had zero luck with this approach. How niche was your idea? It seems like a rare combination where 1) The adwords are affordable, and 2) There is enough search traffic to generate real data.

Oh and if you look closely, you'll see I completely stole my copy from you. Doh.

Okay, sorry to re-reply but here are the two versions of the email I sent. Mind skimming them and tell me what I did horribly, horribly wrong? I'd honestly love your feedback. I think I would follow something shorter than this but the same in spirit for cold phone calls. So maybe you can save me some pain and anguish.

Polite Version: Dear %fill:FirstName%,

First off, sorry for this out of the blue email. I found your name %fill:FoundYourNameSource%, and was hoping you might be able to help me.

My name is Ian Fitzpatrick, I'm the founder of a small software company in Saint Paul. I'm investigating ideas for my next software product, and I'm interested in creating an application that serves your industry.

I see that you're a %fill:JobRole% at %fill:CompanyName%. Are there any parts of your job that you feel are a hassle, repetitive, or error-prone -- where if you had the right software at work, your life might be a little easier? That's the kind of thing I'm super interested in hearing about.

If you have just 20 minutes available any time this week, I'd love the meet and pick your brain. I'm honestly just trying to learn, and hopefully create a product that makes your life a little easier.

Impolite Version:

Hi %fill:FirstName%,

I’m a software developer investigating some projects ideas in the %fill:IndustryName%. I’d like to understand the problems and successes you've had at %fill:CompanyName% a bit better. I’m not trying to sell you anything, I would just like to hear your thoughts on a few things related to the industry.

Do you have 20 minutes available to meet at some point in the next week? I'd like to conduct an informal interview with you.

Hi, I'm Ian, the author of the blog post. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm a little late to this thread.

I'm a fan of your posts and listened to the the interview you gave (eh the link escapes me) and found it super interesting.

After listening to your interview, one thing that I thought of was the advantage you had in at least starting with an industry that you know exists. You can speak their lingo already, you may have some theories on their problems, etc.

But what if you are starting from scratch? In my case, I'm going totally blue sky and just contacting random industries. I contacted farm inspectors, CNC milling companies, elevator repair companies, OSHA consultants, and other random companies. And how honest would you be about your approach, and your ignorance of their industry?

So far I've taken the approach of being as honest and authentic as possible. Perhaps to a fault, I should probably fake up some confidence.

Another thought I had, I think you may have mentioned this in the podcast interview, is in addition to "making it about them" is to offer something of value in return. I have a background in IT support and consulting. So one thing I was thinking to offer was a free IT assessment of their network. Maybe even include an attached invoice with the amounts zero'd out.

I know that the cold email approach is inferior to calling, but I wanted to dip my toe before I took the plunge into cold calls. For what it's worth the one on-site interview I got just lead to a second interview with a different company last week. So I wouldn't say these emails are totally worthless.

Also, what's your workflow for finding cold prospects? I found the most time consuming task was just creating a spreadsheet of contacts, and googling for companies. Maybe I should go to a business library and work with a librarian or something.

If you can't export and save it should be fine. Also I doubt you can create a clickable PDF with this, which is one neat use of Balsamiq.

ux.stackexchange.com is exactly their target demo. Normally a company like Balsamiq would pay for ads on a site like this, that would entice you to try their free demo. This cuts out that step, they can try a basic version of the software right on page. And it's good for the ux.se community too.

Pretty brilliant move.

Studied abroad twice in college, and have done a pretty good job of keeping my language ability on life support via weekly face to face language exchanges with native speakers. So I think this idea makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't say they helped me learn anything, but it has helped me to keep from forgetting.

It seems like this kind of system has a couple of markets. I think the reason a lot of Spanish speakers are using it, is because they may already have book learned the basics of English, but lack the day to day interaction. So that's one segment. It seems like this site is a sweet spot for them.

But another segment probably not as well served would be people who are completely new to a language. Most language partners won't have the skill to introduce someone who has no background in it. So I think the uptake for these kinds of language learners would be low.

One thing that would be really awesome is to consider integrating some kind of learning curriculum. But the trick is if you had to supply curriculum for every language, that won't scale well at all. Instead, consider the barefoot language learning school of thought:

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Acquisition-Made-Practical-Le...

This book is out of print, but it's an amazing guide to learning any language without a textbook provided you have a language partner.

Graphical dictionaries for language learners would also be super helpful:

http://www.lexicarry.com/

Also, for more advance learners who are already able to carry out basic conversations, topic suggestions would be super helpful to keep the chat flowing. You can only talk about your family for so long...

I looked to sign up but none of my languages are supported yet, otherwise looks promising.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

My bad for not noticing this. Thanks.

Although I hope Project Skyway succeeds, I think your perspective is interesting.

The Midwest can kick the coasts' ass any day of the week but not with the type of companies project skyway wants. It's with the type of companies it specifically doesn't want.

By this you mean companies that actually charge for their product, right?

Anyone have experience with this service?

*$65 or so a month.

Right? I came here to post the exact same thing. My animal brain kicked in immediately at the $800 a year and thought "woah, why is it so much?" Then I realized that's just $65 or so year.

I'm in the same boat, and use this: https://github.com/panicsteve/nv/downloads

This fork of Notational Velocity adds a third pane which shows formatting using markdown.

If you are willing to learn markdown, and it's pretty darn easy, you can add formatting while maintaining raw text format.

I like markdown enough though that I find I write in markdown, and just hide the preview pane that includes formatting. I just don't really need it.

Not sure if you are looking for this kind of feedback, but UI critique: I kept trying to click the light blue text, thinking it was a link. In fact, my assumption was finally validated, but only at the very bottom 'sign in with your Twitter' link.

I also agree, you should just stick the public stream (or an abbreviated version of it) on the front page, there should be no steps required to get a taste of how things works. At the very least, a screenshot of how it looks on the front page...need something to entice me to log in.

Once I logged in though, yes I dig it. I like that you can retweet from within the interface. The UI is simple and works quite well, push that out to the front page!

The real cultural hurdle isn't the indirectness in Japan, it's the burdening sense of obligation Japanese people who are connected socially feel to one another. Facebook already feels like a part time job to me, but transplant an urban Japanese's persons relationships as well as their loose ties onto a social networking site...that would be a lot of work for them to maintain that sense of equilibrium in all those relationships.

But if they do try, they should totally get Joi Ito's help.

If you are only sharing a subset of folders that are under the free limit, I'm pretty sure the other side can still use the free account.

I'm doing this with a friend right now, I have the paid account and am using 30+GB, he has a free account, and we share just the folders we need to.

We sail on little Lake Harriet. The community is really active there, and from what I'm told it's a little more interesting than Calhoun as the winds are much more variable. That's due to all the obstructions and variation around the lake. The band shell in particular creates a deadspot or sweetspot on some days.

I joined the Twin Cities Sailing Club in August, I'm a newb ;), know just enough to be dangerous:

http://tcsailing.com/tcsc/

The people in this club are seriously cool people, a great group. Everyone is very generous in terms of teaching less experienced sailors, I've seen nothing but generosity when it comes to tiller time.

I think we have about a dozen boats or so, a mix of scows and daysailers. There are club days twice a week where you can crew up with a skipper and hit the lake. Once you pass your skipper tests, you can take the boats out anytime you please. Annual dues are $200 or so I think.

Oh and we are having our annual banquet November 7th:

http://www.socializr.com/event/830239512/1867039201

If you are not quite ready for putting down $200 and just want to try things out, definitely hit me up in May and I'd be more than happy to take you out!

I'm a member of a sailing co-op here in Minneapolis, great people and everyone is your teacher. We just pulled the boats off the water a few weeks back (and were already sweeping snow off the boats, dontchaknow). Just tested for skipper status before the season closed out.

Don't know if it's everyone's cup of tea, but definitely worth trying. If there are any HN'ers in Minneapolis/St Paul, happy to take people out for a try next Spring ;)

I heart OpenDNS! Just thought I would jump in and say so.

That is all.