grokcode

Location: At the moment, DC metro area, US

Remote: Absolutely, remote position preferred.

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Django, JQuery, Git, Linux, Puppet, Postgres. In the past I’ve also worked in the Java, .NET, and PHP ecosystems, but I won’t swamp you with all of those keywords too.

Portfolio: http://grokcode.com/programmer-portfolio/

Hi, I’m Jess. I build things that surprise and delight people, and I use data to make the world a better place. I want to work for a company that does those things too.

By trade I am a software developer. I build awesome webapps and have done a bit of data science work too. Along the way I’ve picked up enough related tech to handle the full stack: frontend, backend, devops, database administration, and even a touch of design and marketing.

My current weapon of choice is Python, but I believe in using the best tool for the job.

I’ve built data-crunching SaaS tools for internet marketers, a hosting dashboard, open source Django apps, Stripe payment integration, WordPress plugins, and a bunch of odds and ends. You can see some of the highlights in my portfolio.

Also, I have a snazzy bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and enjoy opportunities for continued education.

For the past few years I’ve been a solo bootstrapper working on Author Alcove, a book discovery service for readers. I’ve hit a bunch of new user milestones, worked through scaling issues, learned a lot, and had a great ride, but now I’m ready to move on to my next big thing.

That big thing is a full-time position with a company that moves quickly – a startup or established company that has lean / agile in it’s DNA. Broadly speaking, I am interested in alternative energy, quantified self, home automation, and developer tools. But there are intensely interesting problems in every industry, and if you are solving them, I would love to hear about it.

At the moment I’m in the D.C. area of the United States. Remote work is preferred, but relocation could work, especially if the location is warm, walkable/bikeable, and low crime.

If you think we could build amazing things together, let’s chat: jess@grokcode.com.

Sideproject implies probably working nights and weekends. How many calendar days it takes to complete something shouldn't have any bearing on how appropriate a project is for a Show HN post.

Thanks evlapix for building this and good luck with the project.

Thanks lox. That problem should be fixed now.

Thanks, this is an interesting idea. I actually need more than 3 books to generate useful recommendations...more like 20 ratings. The other problem is that this is still beta stage and the algorithm to create your book list is very computionally intensive. It takes days not seconds to compute everybody's recommendations. The choice is between good recommendations delivered after waiting, or not that great recommendations delivered instantly.

The more accurate you want to get, the more computationally expensive. Netflix actually did a contest with a million dollar prize to the team that could come up with the most accurate rating prediction algorithm. In the end, the million dollar algorithm was too expensive to implement, so they never ended up using it.

I'm building a book recommendation engine. You rate books you have read and we recommend other books you might like. We don't care about anything that doesn't improve the quality of the recommendations, so no book clubs, no author blogs, no user book lists...

http://authoralcove.com

I read a bunch of research papers on different keyboard layouts and ergonomic designs, with the goal of increasing productivity. There is no consensus whether DVORAK is more productive than QWERTY, or which of the various ergonomic keyboard designs are more productive or less prone to contribute to RSI. The research surrounding keyboards is so conflicted, the only thing that makes sense is to try a few different keyboards and then pick one that is comfortable for you. It probably isn't worth switching to DVORAK because of the lost productivity while learning the new layout.

A more detailed summary of the research can be found here: http://grokcode.com/701/the-ergonomic-keyboard-productivity-...

Thanks! jess.grokcode@gmail.com

I think the solution is a combination of tactics. A curated "getting started" or "best of" list is a good way to get eyes on some of the best posts that are representative of the blog. Make good use of categories and tags, and use lists of related posts to make navigation between similar posts less painful. On my blog (http://grokcode.com), I also have a prominent "popular today" section on the homepage so people can see which posts are getting the most traffic at the moment (these are rarely the newest posts). http://www.alistapart.com/ has a curated "editor's choice" section on the homepage that is frequently updated and help draw attention to great content from the archives.

Also, the standard blog format uses entire posts on the homepage and archive pages, but everything is so much cleaner and easier to navigate if only post summaries appear on those pages.

There is often a big difference in competency level between written and verbal communication. If most project communication happens through email, how someone communicates on video isn't a good signal for how well they will communicate.

To be fair, DotCloud offers much more flexibility than Heroku. With DotCloud you can mix and match different stack components. Currently in beta: Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Redis, Ruby, and SMTP. Plus there are tons of others in alpha, including more esoteric stuff like Erlang. DotCloud also supports any type of version control.

Heroku does Rails apps using Git, and thats it.

The tradeoff is flexibility vs. complexity.

I would love to do this as a weekend project, although I don't have the first clue as to what fonts should be recommended based on what uses are intended. Anyone interested in collaborating? I'll do the backend and you develop the questions and font recommendations.

The first thing is think about who your audience is and what kind of connection they are trying to make with you when they view your about page. An about page for a startup, a freelancer, a blog, etc will all have different audiences and different goals.

If you are a startup, your audience will likely be potential and current customers, journalists with press inquiries, and possibly people looking to fund you. They will want to know why they should use your product, what makes your company/product unique, who are the people behind it, etc.

I'm currently redoing my own about page, and have gathered a few helpful links:

For startups: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/08/what-does-your-abo...

For freelancers, but contains some great general tips too: http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/09/06/how-to-write-an-effec...

Good general tips: http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/about-page-guidelin...

The scale of this thing is unbelievable. Its producting 4,000 videos and articles per day and "By next summer, according to founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Demand will be publishing 1 million items a month, the equivalent of four English-language Wikipedias a year."

Sadly the quality is horrible.

Sure makes sense. Any idea why clojure doesn't do automatic tail call optimization, and instead depends on recur?

Ha thanks for your comments spuz. Not sure what happened on #2 that I ended up posting broken code. For number #3, I don't think recur will work without changing the algorithm a bit. There are 2 recursive calls depending on the conditional, and recur needs to be last for it to compile. Also in my defense it works on my machine ;)

So, yes its a learning process. I'm updating the post. Thanks again for your comments.

Freshbooks is awesome. I started using it about 6 months ago and it reminds me of 37signals products in the sense that just using it you get the idea that it would be a good place to work.

Do you know if they are hiring developers?

I think Amazon could work pretty well. Using Jeremey's numbers, but taking into account Amazon's tiered affiliate percentages, you would actually get 7% assuming you make 260 sales / month. This gives $819 / month.

I run a tutorials site for programmers (its much more loosely focused than your site though, with code tutorials, career advice, a few open source projects I've built, etc.), and my Adwords CPC is similar but Amazon earnings are historically 5-6 times better than Adwords.

The key is to link to relevant books within the text of an article. In your case what might work is add references section to each category page that contains links to reviews on books on the subject. Review the book well, describing what type of user the book is geared toward, and only recommend books that you personally stand behind. This problogger article contains some nice tips for getting free review copies of books: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/02/14/how-to-get-fre...

Good luck to you.

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