Here’s the official description:

Simpleweb is a small, fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building awesome web based products. We have an agile approach to development and are looking for a talented, dynamic and organised Project Manager with a track record of delivering digital software applications to join our brilliant team.

We are looking for a driven and focused Project Manager who can handle multiple projects easily, isn’t phased by abnormal working hours and takes pride in their results.

You will be core to our greatest asset – our team, a hard working, creative team of developers who like to play hard too…

We build everything from simple WordPress sites, web start-ups to our own products. You will already have a broad range of experience that you can bring to every project.

Personal Traits:

You will be a pragmatic and outgoing person with a passion for online projects and not shy away from the challenge of effectively and confidently managing a range of projects.

You need to be a great team player, love technology, have entrepreneurial spirit, with a good sense of humour, a bucket load of common sense and enjoy delivering great results.

Responsibilities:

● You will be responsible for the delivery of simultaneous projects to a high quality, on time and on budget through the effective management of clients, people and resources.

● The Project Manager is the first point of contact for clients so is responsible for managing expectations, problem solving and elevating issues at the appropriate times.

● Provide the team with clear insight into project requirements and expectations highlighting critical success and failure points.

● Work with technical team to determine feasibility of possible solutions and assist in decision making based on project expectations, time and cost.

● Manage our internal projects with a consistent approach to our client work.

● Effectively manage time and resources for ongoing client support for issues that arise outside of fixed projects, in line with our SLAs.

● Run suitable project debriefing sessions and work with directors to assess where ongoing improvements to processes can be made.

Remuneration:

● Salary competitive depending on experience

● Company share options

● Private medical insurance

● Pension scheme

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to Holly

No agencies please.

When optimising we think about value, usability, readability, communication and personality as well as the more traditional foundations such as SEO and load times. Covering all these core concepts will ensure you have a delicious product.

So how do we do it?

Throughout each step of design, development and testing we think about these core principles based on our collective experience and through experimenting. Here is one such example…

For one of our top secret projects we have in development we have two large containers which you can navigate between, we found that having a drop shadow these containers caused a subtle but noticeable lag when animating in and out. As with any project there is always more than one technical way to active a task so we brainstormed potential fixes which would allow us to keep the design with a drop shadow.

We decided to trial our current method (A), animating css position values, against CSS Transitions (B). To stress test the demo each container was filled with 2312 child elements all individually coloured and with opacity. The parent containers have the same drop shadow as we intend to use in our project.

Method B out performed A quite significantly in each of the tests. Spending just a little bit of time on this problem helped ensure we had a buttery smooth animation. Although this is a very specific example this logic is used each of the optimisation tests that we run and is essential to making great products.

You can view this test here…. but remember it is a stress test so it may crash your browser.

Why are we offering these for free? Well, we want to build up some great case studies demonstrating social interaction and “customer listening”. We’ve got five to give away and we’ll let you know by the middle of April if you’re eligible.

There are two types of support applications that we’re offering to build for you:

Customer Voice

Allow your customers to ask questions, suggest ideas and discuss other peoples ideas. Your customers sign in quickly with Facebook or Twitter and can then add a new idea, question, comment or vote up somebody else’s idea or question. View by most recent, popular or just your submissions.

Great for product discussion, quick customer feedback, FAQ’s, etc.

Customer Forum

A traditional looking customer forum deeply integrated with Facebook and Twitter. You and your customers can start discussions about specific topics quickly and with just a few clicks. Presented simply for non technical users making it as easy as possible for you and them to interact around specific topics.

Great for in-depth discussion about any topic.

Both products offer tight integration with Facebook and Twitter, a design that fits your current website and integration with your current mailing system.

[If you can see the form below please try this link instead]

For a while we’ve been using Git Flow as our preferred workflow. It’s been pretty good, certainly from the point of having some sort of a recognised workflow/process. The only problem is, it’s turned out to be a bit heavyweight for what we want.

We love agile development, and for us, this means:

• Short sprints of development
• Regular releases (minimising serious issues)
• Flexibility to experiment and throw away bad ideas
• Team spirit and collaboration

The problem with git flow is it’s far better suited to a fairly fixed release cycle. We’ve found the release mechanism is cumbersome for quick/regular releases, and… it’s all a bit heavyweight for the entire team. We want all of our team to feel they can commit and contribute without feeling they might break something in the process. We also want to encourage communication, collaboration and experimentation!

So, the solution is, we’ve switched to Github Flow way of working. So what is it? The basic principles are this (stolen from http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html):

• Anything in the master branch is deployable
• To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie: new-oauth2-scopes)
• Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server
• When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request
• After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master
• Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately

Here’s an excellent presentation that explains it:

What about clients reviewing code before it might be production ready? Well, we simply push a given feature branch to our stage server. If two developers are working on a separate feature branch, they can either merge each other’s feature branches or create a new shared branch for the purpose of a client reviewing code.

We’ve dropped all our develop branches and the team have been merrily discussing pull requests and getting stuff done. So far so good, we are liking the shift a lot.

Inevitably this is the exception to the rule, as being from different industries most people know what  they want yet find it difficult to know the best way to describe it and miss out large chunks that are important to us. In the NLP world this is known as “deletion”. We all do it; “pass me that”, we delete the reference assuming that whoever we are talking to knows what we’re on about.

When we get job referrals like this, at the expense of possibly losing the project we ask the potential client to clarify their idea with two specific processes. This also helps us determine if they are serious about the project.

1. What’s the essence of the idea? This is essentially the elevator pitch.
2. User stories. What platforms and users are involved and what can they do. We call this the “stage” and actors.

The five minute elevator pitch

Distilling the essence of an idea into a single sentence is a really great way to communicate your project succinctly. A nice template to get this up and running quickly is as follows:

• For [target customer]
• who [statement of need or opportunity]
• the [product name]
• is a [product category]
• that [key benefit, compelling reason to buy].
• Unlike [primary competitive alternative]
• our product [statement of primary differentiation].

For teams and businesses who need to keep track of their contacts the ContactZilla platform is a contact management solution that is completely social. Unlike Sugar CRM our product merges contacts from social media and traditional sources effortlessly.

Just this one statement helps with our understanding in a really big way. It’s quite a fun exercise too. We originally discovered this in the book “The Agile Samurai“.

User Stories

User stories are a pragmatic way to get a project communicated effectively. Essentially you are describing what the application should do for particular types of user and while not telling the developer how to do it. This means you don’t have to keep asking “is it possible?” you just state what is needed. The developer then needs to figure out how; with the resources available.

Project managers will weep that we ask a prospective client to come up with user stories. It is such a simple way to convey interactions, goals and functionality that even if done badly it’s usually more helpful… (we can argue about that in the comments)

First you need to identify the “stage”, this is a simple theatre metaphor that a lot of people understand straight away – the stages in a lot of cases can be an administrative area and a public facing area. We then need to identify the “actors”. These are the different types of luvvie people interacting on your stages. For example an administrator, a guest visitor, a bronze user, etc. This then leads to the user stories themselves.

As an [actor], I can [feature] so that [reason]

As an Administrator, I can delete a blog post so that I can keep things tidy.

You may find that you don’t need the reason, so get rid of it.

As an Administrator, I can delete a blog post.

If we now combine this with the stages we can break up the user stories into sections;

Administration Area – Managing Users

As an Administrator I can delete a user

As an Administrator I can send a message to a user

My profile page

As a logged in user I can update my profile picture

As a logged in user I can change my biography

You can take this much further as a project manager and a development team but for the sake of simplicity this gives a client a really good starting point to convey what they want to achieve in a succinct format.

We find that most clients find this a really rewarding process, it focuses them on what they want to achieve as opposed to how to achieve it. In some cases it also demonstrates the complexity of what it is they want and either validates or invalidates their idea. Which we can all agree is best done early.

Conclusion

Using these two simple techniques helps both parties enormously. It’s not always necessary and doesn’t need to be an extensive exercise but just enough to ensure a level of understanding on the side of the development, project management and sales team (after all its hard to quote for something you don’t understand).

Introducing the very talented Adam Butler, a front end developer with ace Javascript skills, he massively impressed us at our first Rusic hack day and we just knew that we wanted him to work with us.

Dan Stringer, our latest developer with Rails, PHP skills and various CMS’s under his belt. He’s also hot on accessibility and is an awesome addition to our already killer team of coders.

Last and by no means least is Holly, who’s now running the office, admin, kicking ass and generally keeping everything together.

Good times ahead.

Whilst we were having the work done we thought it would be an ideal time for a day out of the office to treat our hard working team and a couple of our great freelancers Simon and Jamie. So, a spot of lunch at Lockside and then off to the Go Kart track.

Everyone had a really good time. Even Adam who managed to get black flagged in the race!

Here are some photos from the day.

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

And the entries were:

In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

@iamkeir – Rusicursive

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to :) Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

@daleanthony - Best Recipes

Lovely design and use of Masonry

A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

@jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

I want that breakfast

Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

@tholder – Mountain biking locations

Lovely Google map integration

A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

@adambu1988 – 360k

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

 @jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

Liking of Comments.

These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

@scottifydotcom – FootoFan

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

@benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

The lovely action hover bar

A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. :) Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

And the winners were:

Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

Best Idea - 360k

We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the  closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. ;) So instead:

Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

We are a fast-paced and energetic company with big ambitions, great ideas and a focus on building awesome web based products. We have an agile approach to development and are looking for a skilled and enthusiastic developer to join us on our journey.

We currently have two exciting SaaS based products (Rusic and ContactZilla) that we are looking to accelerate the development of and take to a wide market. You will play an active role in their development and be an integral part of the companies success.

The tech we are using for our products includes Ruby/Rails, PHP (Zend), JS/CoffeeScript, Node.js, MySQL, Mongo, Redis, Chef/Vagrant and cloud based services and more! So, you will need to be looking for a position that is challenging where you want to stay at the cutting edge and not shy away from a challenge!

We also undertake some more traditional application and website development work for our clients. Solutions involve WordPress, Drupal, Magento and custom builds but we try to spread work out throughout the team and rotate projects to keep the mind fresh!

We work normal office hours but it’s quite common for the team to be hacking away on something cool gone home time… you will need to be of the same developer mentality. Whilst we all work hard, we like to rewards ourselves when we hit our targets, this is normally in the form of some random fun activity out of the office.

We’re looking for a unique web application developer that understands the importance of good engineering solutions above all else, takes pride in what they deliver and enjoys being an active part of a hard working and smart team.

Personal traits:

• Sense of humor
• Passionate about your work
• Strong communication skills
• Smart and humble
• Equal willingness to learn and teach

Responsibilities:

• Participate in the planning, analysis, design, development and deployment of products, features and enhancements
• Build high-performance, scalable applications and APIs
• Create clean, maintainable and well tested code

Requirements:

• Excellent debugging and problem solving skills
• Proficient in at least two of the following languages/platforms (and an eagerness to learn new languages!): Ruby (Rails), PHP (Zend Framework), Node.js, Javascript/CoffeeScript, Objective C
• A strong command of HTML, Javascript and CSS, familiarity with Less would be good
• Experience with MVC development frameworks, test driven development and agile development processes
• An understanding of database theory with experience of MySQL. Any experience of NoSQL alternatives is a bonus!
• Good understanding of the entire development process, including testing, build, deploy and maintenance
• Strong communication skills

Remuneration:

• Salary negotiable based on experience.
• Company share options.
• Pension scheme.

To apply, please send us a cover letter/email with a bit about yourself and a concise CV outlining your experience to info@simpleweb.co.uk