My task was two-fold, find the best new tech talent for ImpulseFlyer but also to let the soon-to-be-grads know about ‘real careers’ in software engineering and in small companies. A bank did not have to be their destiny.

So I collected emails and eulogised in person and tonight I sent a note to that list. An edited version appears below.

Hello future engineers,

When I left university I didn’t realise it was possible to have a fulfilling career in and around smaller companies, it took me four long years to leave the golden cage I’d put myself in. Don’t feel bad for me, I met my wife made some friends and it wasn’t all bad.

This is to share my particular passion for a career both as a software craftsman and also doing that work in startups or small companies.

Right. Down to business.

About small companies / startups

Small companies are a very different proposition to larger corporates.

Small companies:

• Responsibility, quickly
• Strong personal relationships
• Relaxed work environment
• Nowhere to hide, you will work hard (but won’t be exploited)
• If you find the right people you’ll learn a lot
• You get to bring your whole personality to work, but you’ll bring a bit home too

Big companies:

• In theory, job security – but my experience is that your skills become your security. A good programmer/designer is rarely out of work for long.
• You might prefer the formality and structure of a big company
• You may be able to earn more money for less work
• A recognised career path
• You can generally leave your work at work

You’ll notice I haven’t put “fame and riches” as benefits of startups. Personally if that’s the reason you want to do web startups you’re going to be disappointed. Optimize for your own day-to-day happiness, get skilled, be lucky.

Your Personality

I’ll mainly be talking about the technical and design opportunities in this email, but most of the personality traits and behaviours are common in the non-technical roles as well.

Confident & outgoing: a quieter person may struggle with the banter amongst the individuals at this early stage of the company. It’s not that there is no room for quieter people in our company, it’s just that the makeup of the team is such that we’ve got quite a boisterous bunch right now.

Great communicator: design and development (and other startup work) is made much easier when you are able to express yourself well; both in person and in the written word.

Diligent: we do not have time to check every piece of work you do. You love to finish things, to ship code and to show people what you’ve done.

Self-motivated & Passionate: You see opportunities to improve things and you talk through the problem to come up with a potential solution. If you are only good at doing things you’re told to do, this job may not be for you.

A Good Learner: coming out of university education I do not expect you to have the exact skills I’m looking for, in fact I expect to invest time in training you.

We are looking for:

• Software engineers to work in a variety of technologies (primarily Ruby on Rails with the potential to move into mobile applications)
• Designers with visual flair
• ‘Business people’ with the raw materials for sales, marketing, content and support roles

Good signs for engineers/designers are:

• Working sites of your own
• A professionally presented portfolio (design or code examples)
• A blog
• A github page
• An interest in web technologies in addition to those you have studied

Things we look for in “business people” are:

• Strong analytical skills, ideally with relevant internships or other experience
• Exceptional presentation, communication and negotiation skills
• Passion for travel

General Advice

You should bear this in mind when you’re applying to us, as well as any other companies.

Work out which companies you want and then make an effort to apply to those specifically, do not just spam out your CV to everyone. You may get a job that way, but probably not one that suits your personality.

Your CV looks the same as everyone else’s: thus we probably won’t cast more that a cursory glance at it. Keep it short. Take the effort to write a specific cover letter, listen to what I’ve said in this email, find out what the company does and who the individuals involved are.

Make a strong impression, not just with your cover letter and CV, but especially during the interview. If we don’t remember you after the interview, that’s a problem. But… for goodness sake be yourself, it’s ok not to get offered every job, it’s about fit between you and the organisation.

About Our Company

ImpulseFlyer is a e-commerce startup based in Singapore. We are a private (invite only) booking site for luxury & boutique hotels for affluent travellers in the Asia Pacific region.

I’m Andy, the CTO, meaning I’m in charge of design and development at the company, I’m the one you met at the careers fair. British guy, t-shirt, enthusiastic.

We are a small startup, with some funding, that launched in October 2011. We’re very design-focussed and we want to provide a pleasurable experience for both customers and our hotel partners.

We do not have a list of ‘open positions’. We’re small and agile and our own jobs change daily, so getting a job with us will be an exercise in learning every day.

So. Apply. If this sounds like you.

If we sound like a good fit for you, drop us an email. If you look like a good fit, one of us will meet you for coffee and we’ll have a chat and take it from there.

Now as well as making ImpulseFlyer look awesome, I’m interested in giving a little advice and helping you find a decent job. If you’re skilled but we can’t hire you (for whatever reason) I can always pass your information on to some other startups I know. But I’m only gonna do that for the right people. I’m not a CV clearing house.

And now, some general advice for beginning software engineers

Never call yourself a Java developer or a C/C++ developer, because that is what they taught you at school. You are a developer or a software engineer, the languages you use will develop over time.

By all means have a specialization, or tool you like to use for certain kinds of work, but don’t close your mind to new techniques and paradigms. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I also personally advocate against ‘certifications’ for particular brands of software (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle), whilst you’ll be easy for recruiters to place into jobs it’s too easy to end up doing the same work over and over again.

Work hard on your communication skills. They are as important as your technical ability.

Some useful Rails/programming links

We use Ruby on Rails, a great framework for writing web applications.

rubyonrails.org

Online training:

• railsforzombies.com – online rails course
• codeschool.com – further courses
• peepcode.com – screencasts
• railscasts.com – free, short screencasts
• codecademy.com – learn JS in the browser

Get e-books from these places.

• pragprog.com – for developers
• abookapart.com – for designers, front-end engineers
• fivesimplesteps.co.uk – for designers
• htmlandcssbook.com – not read, but it looks good

Also… if you are serious about web development (of most sorts), you’ll want to be on a PC running Linux or a Mac. Windows is possible, but harder. Most engineers in small companies have a choice of their own development environment, more than 50% choose Macs.

Interesting SG places, meetups

• groups.google.com/group/singapore-rb Singapore Ruby Group, meets regularly
• websg.org – Web Standards Group (website in transit!)
• nushackers.org – NUS Hackers, a student-run organization spreading hacker culture
• groups.ixda.sg – Interaction Design Singapore
• hackerspace.sg – Programmers Hangout
• connections.sg – Good links for Singapore tech scene

And lastly a plug

RedDotRubyConf 2012, May 18th-19th

If you’re interested in a career as a Ruby developer, you could do worse than come to the conference on the 18th & 19th of May.

Note: I organise this event, Singapore’s biggest programmer conference, so I’d love to sell more tickets, thus I have an ulterior motive in raising it here.

We have awesome international speakers lined up and there will be developers from all over the region. You’ll have to spend your own money, but it’s a good couple of days.

Well done you made it to the end

I hope you found this worthwhile. If so you should follow me on twitter at @andycroll.

If not, never fear, you need never hear from me again. I wish you the best of luck in your search for work. Good luck.

A Book Apart and Five Simple Steps have transformed the way I continue to learn and think about our craft.

The books are beautiful physical objects and that care permeates every word, thoughful illustration and even their digital counteparts.

The three stand outs for me are Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design, Jon Hick’s Icon Handbook and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte.

Hardboiled is a manifesto as much as a book, dispelling narrow thinking and chellenging the reader to do explore and do better in every piece of their work. It switched my brain onto the benefits of multiple techniques and for trying to push the envelope even in ‘standard’ websites.

The Icon Handbook is simply luscious & beautiful, a pleasure to hold. While I’m an ‘art challenged’ reader I appreciated the insights and the true artistry the medium of very tiny drawings.

Responsive Web Design will probably be looked back upon as a seminal work in the development of the web as it’s own medium; both similar but distinct from the printed page. The most important $9 a web designer can spend.

For the grand total of $54 you can buy the whole eBook back catalogue of a Book Apart and for £77 you can own all of Five Simple Steps. This should be less than a couple of hours of your hourly rate; you owe it to your career to spend some time with these words from the great thinkers in our industry.

Sidenote

When pulling together cover images for this article I noticed something… Zeldman has been planning a color takeover of the web design books industry and he’s been planning it for years.

In all seriousness, is there colour-collusion going on?

My inputs are all circumstantial but I can quite believe the graph shows causation, not merely corrolation.

The iPad discord

My iPad is my favourite device, but the one I could most easily do without.

This realisation came to me when my wife ended up with a free iPad as a result of a work benefit. “What do I use it for?” my response was “everything except complicated stuff”.

I reach most often for the iPad for instapaper reading, web surfing, the guardian app, note-taking, writing, twitter and gaming. It’s, most often, the best device for me. I can do all these things on my phone or laptop but not as enjoyably.

But…

In these early days of the ‘post PC era’ we’re still not in a place where advanced spreadsheeting, serious coding or even pulling from dispirate applications is possible. Not yet.

So I couldn’t give up my laptop for these more specialised tasks, and obviously as the CTO and lead programmer on a startup that’s not realistic. And I wouldn’t enjoy giving up the power of the portable smartphone in my pocket.

Not replacement, supplement

The other thing I notice is the appearence of iPads in the hands of people for whom computers are not such a key tool in their lifestyle. Parents of friends & people who keep their work at work in corporate jobs. They likely have a computer at home, but rarely use it for complicated stuff, but every now and then they do.

My theory is this:

Instead of an aging PC being replaced with a new one it is simply relegated to those ‘once in a blue moon’ tasks and a new, relatively cheap, iPad becomes the everyday machine, because it’s better for that 80% of cases and it’s cheaper. The old PC is kept around to do those few tasks that are more suited to a traditional keyboard and mouse arrangement.

I think the PC market is suffering from a) a recession and b) the relatively cheap iPad eating into their PC replacement sales. In addition, the iPad is a high margin product whereas the PCs it’s cannabising are low margin and cheaply made. This could get really bad for the PC hardware guys.

ViKi

I completed my contract stint up to the end of February. A good bunch of people and now the place I refer good Rails people to, the ones I can’t hire anyway. They seem to be getting the traction they wanted and just raised a monster round of funding for a Singapore-based company.

Razmig and the team are definitely onto something and they have a real shot at being a big internet name. Perhaps Singapore’s first startup success.

Anideo

Starting as equal partners in March, I was ousted suddenly one July lunchtime after an SMS to bring me to the nearest Starbucks. It got a little bit unfortunately legalistic, as I had to fight my corner. Let that be a lesson: protect yourself, even if your instinct is to trust people, all business is reliant to a certain extent on the egos involved.

I ended up ok financially, as if I’d been hired on contract, but when I think about the time I’m still extremely sad. Removing my ‘presence’ as requested the morning after is among the more melancholic experiences I’ve had. I’m still proud of the work we did, but it’s coloured by the shock of the exit and the speed of my erasure.

I felt like I’d put a lot of love and effort into the products that we shipped and that we were on a great learning experience together. I was wrong. Whatever drove the ousting, I suspect I will never know. They still have a couple of very talented technical guys, so I guess more power to them.

Most importantly I lost a friend, someone who I’d looked out for and learned a lot from, from whom I have had no contact since the fateful silent latte as the other partner told me to leave.

RedDotRubyConf

An event unsullied by the Anideo experience was the surprising success and size of the first Ruby developers conference in South East Asia. With the help of Jason Ong & Carl Coryell-Martin and many others, the event was a huge success.

I’ve already covered it in a lot of detail, but suffice to say running it was exhausting and I got very, very drunk at the after-party: those github boys like a beer or two.

Now 2012’s version needs to be even better.

Secret Pivotal Project

I worked alongside Pivotal Labs, as I had at ViKi, on a short term MVP of another (!) video site. A great palette cleanser as I returned to what I thought would be the orignal plan, contracting gigs with some small side-products.

However that was not to be.

ImpulseFlyer

I’ve known Steve for years, since our Wego days and he’d been disappointed when Anideo happened, locking me in, just as he was starting out on his own venture. However the very day after the unfortunate event, we had a beer and he pitched me.

It took some time for me to be ready to commit again after the bad breakup. Turns our startups are like marriage. Another reason was the big commitment to staying in Singapore; My wife and I have been here five years. Startups are a long journey and by joining Steve as a late-founder I (and we) have commited to a good number more.

So here I am, officially CTO, officially staying and officially excited about the year to come and the team I’m putting together.

If I’ve learned one thing in 2011, it’s to roll with the punches and stand up again. That’s got to be a useful skill.

The beauty of bootstrap is in its ability to remove decision-making about how front-end HTML should be coded. For internal projects this is great, I can concentrate on functionality and straightforward layout and have everything else ‘kinda look ok’. I wouldn’t use it ‘pure’ in an outside facing project, but for internal projects/prototyping it’s perfect.

In the course of building out administrative tools I also had cause to use kaminari for pagination. So I forked the kaminari themes to provide a useful set of templates if you’re using bootstrap.

I note from the issues queue I’m not the first to provide this to be pulled back into the main themes repository, but I think I’m the ‘completest’.

You can simply copy the HTML (or HAML) templates into ‘app/views/kaminari’ if you want to use them.