'Net Features : developer community

Developers Hit the Auction Block

Amberly Dressler — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 03:56:00 GMT

If your company has ever recruited a developer, chances are the experience was taxing. This group is in such high demand that it not only leaves the rest of us questioning our career choices, but also makes the job search process for developers a highly polluted one.

This group is what Developer Auction Co-Founder Matt Mickiewicz (and also the founder of Flippa) terms "The 5 percent that are never unemployed".

Mickiewicz’s site, launched April 2012, brings together developers and companies in an auction format. Developers are exposed to new job opportunities from pre-qualified employers/bidders at 500-plus start-ups. In turn, employers are able to recruit top engineering talent.

“Engineers in San Francisco get an average of a recruitment pitch every 31 hours...the noise is so high that the good opportunities get thrown out with the bad,” said Mickiewicz. “We're allowing start-ups to get in front of top engineering talent from the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter, MIT and Stanford — engineers who otherwise would have never read or responded to a "cold" recruitment pitch sent via email or LinkedIn.”

Since Developer Auction’s August debut, two auctions have concluded. According to the company, in its first auction, which ended Aug. 31, 88 engineers put themselves up for auction and 142 start-ups, including Quora and Dropbox, submitted more than $30 million in job offers.

Developer Auction does monitor the talent pool. In the second auction, which ended Oct. 18, 3,600 developers applied and only 154 were approved. Additionally, there were 749 offers made to 150 developers, with almost $80 million in offers.

Important to note, is that there are no obligations from the developers to accept the highest offer (or any offer at all) and offers made by companies are non-binding, as developers can decide to interview based on offers.

The benefits of this service are multi-pronged.

“We're flipping the funnel...rather than writing 20 cover letters, and filling out 20 application forms, we're saving developers time by having companies who are interested in their skills, at their location, at that particular point in time, come to them with indicative offers,” said Mickiewicz . “Engineers no longer have to agree to an in-person interview (or three) before finding out how much they are going to get paid. We're cutting recruitment agencies and headhunters out of the equation and putting the developers in touch with the CEOs, Founders and CTOs at VC funded companies.”

Additionally, the company notes that employers save 30-50 percent compared to traditional recruiters and developers save time by only interviewing with companies who can afford them.

Scalable Java Development Comes to Open Source Community

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:50:00 GMT

The Web is an increasingly communal organism that provides a way for developers and creative professionals from all around the world to collaborate on projects that can, in some way, end up benefitting nearly everyone who uses the Internet.

Open source communities of developers help facilitate this kind of interaction, and as the technology evolves, this type of collaboration will become even more commonplace. This is likely why Azul Systems has announced that it was going to enhance its support of the Open Source community by making Zing JVM freely available to developers projects to use for development, qualification, and testing their projects.

Azul Systems is letting Open Source applications that support commodity x86 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and/or Ubuntu Linux have full access to Zing, the company’s Java virtual machine, and all of its unique features and capabilities, including:

- Improved application responsiveness
- Reduced application latency
- Elimination of response time outliers
- Support for large, in-memory data processing
- Elastic scalability with memory heaps that grow or shrink to meet real-time demands
- Dramatically simplified application deployments
- Reduced customer total cost of ownership
- Accelerated time-to-market
- Improved production time visibility and runtime diagnostics

Zing JVM was built to give developers consistent Java performance and scalability, and putting it into the hands of Open Sources developers (for free, no less!) removes the bottlenecks often associated with Java runtime, while enabling application innovation in new markets, including in-memory computing and big data analysis.

Student Developers Try to Crack Joomla's Core

Michael Garrity — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:00:00 GMT

The widely used open-source content management system (CMS) Joomla will be participating in the Google Summer of Code program to allow students 18 and older to contribute to the company’s CMS core.

Google Summer of Code is an international program that gives students stipends (up to $5,000) to write code for open-source projects.

Eight different students will each be working on a separate project, and when they’re finished their work will be considered by Joomla for inclusion in its platform. Among the assignments are creating APIs for integrating Facebook and Google services onto a Joomla-powered website, MediaWiki APIs and multi-language options for Joomla installation.

Summer of Code ends on August 24, but the codes won’t be moved immediately into the Joomla CMS core; rather, they will continue to be developed, and may even be used by extension developers. Many of the projects involved in the program are focused on the Joomla platform, providing the infrastructure for the future development of the CMS and other applications that build upon it.

The Joomla platform generously allows developers to create multi-purpose and multi-device apps (including mobile and cloud computing applications) and enterprise systems that can be run independently of its core CMS offering.

Students working on Joomla projects span the globe, coming from Brazil, Sri Lanka, the United States, Romania and France.

Network Solutions' LinkTogether For Developers

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:02:00 GMT

Developers using Network Solutions' LinkTogether community now have an opportunity to sell their original content including design themes, videos, white papers and more.

Members can now share original content with the community for free or list items for sale. Members that create a seller's account are allowed to list items, assign a price for sale, and track sales. Network Solutions will collect a 15 percent seller's fee.

"Creating a seller's account will allow Web designers and developers to sell and track sales of the files and content they upload," said Warren Smith, director of product management at Network Solutions. "By providing a new avenue for profit, we hope to help Web developers draw additional attention to their work and talents on the already exciting Web community developing at LinkTogether."

Free LinkTogether memberships allow Web developers to list up to two items for sale at any one time. Pro members may sell an unlimited number of uploads. Pro membership is available for $19.99/month. To list items for sale, members must have a valid PayPal® account on file in order to collect payment.

Omniture Developer Connection

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 13:51:00 GMT

Analytics provider Omniture has announced a Web community designed to help its customers build applications that use their Omniture data.

SiteCatalyst data can be used across third-party aplications, such as an intranet or as a company branded application. Data can be used to create calculated metrics, or format the data to meet specific Internet needs. Developers can also use the data collection API to integrate SiteCatalyst with apps that can't easily be tagged with JavaScript.

Omniture has provided a Getting Started guide (for users with a SiteCatalyst login) which helps new users through the process of learning the prerequisites, enabling the Web services APIs, and testing and authenticating newly developed applications.