Be a part of a newly forming team that will be tasked to entice new authors to Wikipedia. You will create responsive UI-driven software components in a highly iterative environment to support user engagement experimental features for Wikimedia websites using JavaScript, CSS3, HTML5 and PHP.

Some of the projects you'll work on:

• Develop new experimental editor engagement features for Wikimedia sites.
• Extend MediaWiki software to support new experimental features.
• Participate in periodic technology meetings for design, development and testing of experimental features.
• Scrum master for development team.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of web development experience, including front-end development (JavaScript/jQuery/HTML5/CSS3), and server-side development using PHP/MySQL.
• 5+ years experience with rapid iterative software development processes, ability to quickly grasp requirements, derive UI workflow and develop functionality.
• Experience deploying code into high transaction volume production environments.
• Experience with A/B testing, cross-browser testing, debugging.
• Knowledge of Agile Methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP). ScrumMaster training preferred.
• Familiarity with version control systems/continuous integration tools (we use Git/Gerrit/Jenkins).
• Must be able to meet aggressive timelines, iterate rapidly, and switch rapidly across multiple projects.
• Strong communication skills: Must be able to communicate clearly and effectively; have strong written and oral communication skills as well as be able to collaborate easily within a cross-functional team.
• B.S. or M.S. Computer Science or related field preferred.

Extra Points if you have:

• Experience with MediaWiki and other open source PHP-based content management systems
• Experience in the Wikipedia community
• Experience contributing to a major Open Source project
• Understanding of free culture / free software /open source
• Experience working with online volunteers.
• Experience with wikis and participatory production environments.
• Good sense of humor
• Being creative, highly motivated, hard-working and ability to work effectively in multiple cultural contexts are great assets
• Comfortable working in an open, highly collaborative, consensus-oriented environment

Please provide URLs to any existing open source software work you may have done (your own software or patches to other packages) if possible. We'd love to see what you can do!

About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 482 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property worldwide. Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 21 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants. The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of Wikipedia and its sister projects. It currently employs 130 staff members. Wikimedia is supported by local chapter organizations in 38 countries or regions.

To apply, submit your information here (Jobvite)

Following on from the success of our recent event in London last month we're happy to announce that the CodeIgniter Conference is back for more CodeIgniter-based antics! This time we'll be in San Francisco! We've got a new site, a new set of wonderful sponsors and early bird tickets will be ready shortly for those of you know just can't wait to reserve your place. Last time we very nearly sold out of tickets, so keep an eye out for them.

The event, happening August 11th and 12th will be at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. If you'd like to get involved (or maybe even speak!) let them know by entering your address on Twitter. You can pick up your Early Bird tickets now, though - a Student rate for $65 USD and a Full price for $95 USD.

The chances are if you are using a library, addon, Spark or tutorial for your CodeIgniter projects it will have been written by one of these guys. Adam Griffiths wrote the book, Alex Bilbie has made some amazing OAuth 2 and Mongo code, WanWizard wrote DataMapper ORM - the most popular ORM used with CodeIgniter - and I've [Phil Sturgeon] released a few blogs about CI over the years.

They'll be doing the double-event conferences this year again - this time they'll be in London (February 18th-19th and San Francisco at a yet to be determined date). If you'd like to attend the London sessions, you can already purchase your tickets - a student pass for £35 and a standard ticket for £45.

Starting from there we realised that the idea and purpose of writing software to help the lives of the people around us was exactly what we are about but more importantly, this was an idea that should happen more than once. The HackForGood evenings were born. The following day, we decided to put a simple descriptive page together and organised the event on Eventbrite. Once this was in place we plainly announced it on Twitter to see who would be interested. After having received over 30 signups in 2 hours, we knew that we had hit a nerve and decided to make this event a success.

He goes on to talk about the evening - the presentation of the sponsors, the split off of the groups and the work (hours of it) that was done to create things like the winning entry - 911Stealth, a mobile app for contacting local emergency services when you are unable to use your voice.

During the conference in San Francisco, Yusuke Ando recorded some images from the sessions and interviewed Dustin Whittle. The video is now available.

If you're looking for a more in-depth look about what happened during the two day event, check out part one and part two of Stefan Koopmanschap's experience while there.

The Symfony Live Conference 2011 was a unique opportunity to meet the Symfony community, talk with the Symfony core team, and share your experience with the framework.

In the Day 1 summary he mentions talks from a Microsoft Developer Evangelist about Symfony on Windows, a talk on the history of Symfony, a look at a CMS built on Symfony 1.4 as well as a look at Doctrine.

The summary for Day 2 talks about Symfony2, the Twig templating engine, when not to use PHP, caching and asset management with Assetic.

I've already posted about the Symfony Live Conferences schedule a few weeks ago, but since then, we have added quite a few sessions from top-notch speakers.

San Francisco will be getting a talk from Dustin Whittle (a Symfony core team member) as well as Kris Wallsmith speaking about Assetic (an asset management library for PHP 5.3). Those attending the Paris conference will be happy to know that Weka Entertainment, the developers of a major Facebook game, will be on hand to talk about how they migrated everything to Symfony in less than three months.

You can find out more about these conferences on the Symfony Live website.

]]> Fri, 28 Jan 2011 09:10:43 -0600 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15675 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15675 On the Symfony blog today there's a new post of schedules for the upcoming Symfony Live events happening in San Francisco and Paris.

First of all, I wish you a very happy new year! I wish you the best and I hope 2011 will be a big year for symfony and Symfony2. 2011 is getting off to a great start with the Symfony Live conferences. As you might have noticed, we have unveiled the schedule for the Symfony Live conference in Paris and San Francisco a couple of weeks ago.

Speakers and topics featured in San Francisco include Tom Boutell on Apostrophe, a real world session on Symfony2 and Scott Chacon's talk on git. In Paris you can see Josh Holmes talk about simplicity, Thomas Rabaix on Solr and more about the "big plans" Lukas Smith and others are making about Symfony2 and CMSs.

So, for the third year in a row, I and Sensio Labs are very proud to announce the Symfony Live conference for 2011 in Paris. And I am even more excited to announce that for the first time, we will also organize a Symfony Live conference in the US (in San Francisco). The San Francisco conference will take place on February 8-9th; and the Paris conference will take place on March 3-4th.

Each of the events will also include "Hacking Days" surrounding them where attendees (or non-attendees - they're free!) can come and work with others on their favorite Symfony projects and code. Besides the conferences, they're also organizing some "Training Day" events. Of course, to fill up all of these conferences, they need speakers so if you're wanting to talk about some of the great stuff you've been doing with Symfony, check out the conference website for more information on getting in on the Call for Papers.

Summary:
Betfair US currently seeks a Lead Software Engineer to focus their creativity and passion on our Web Platform. This position will have overall responsibility in delivering consumer-focused, highly scalable and high availability web products.

Through collaboration with Executives and our Architectural teams; our Lead will manage a small team of talented developers to take technical and design concepts into production through their creative vision…

Responsibilities:

• Create, deliver and maintain a very scalable system architecture to address a high availability internet site and varied sets of internal applications
• Work with the technology and product management leaders to develop and deliver the company strategy and vision
• Work with the senior engineers to provide clear leadership in technical design and architecture of Betfair US software systems
• Share knowledge with other members of the Software Engineering team
• Lead the development of white papers and other technical documents to effectively present Betfair's US technology
• Participate in reviewing and evaluating 3rd party technologies and vendors
• Work with patent attorneys to identify and file patents

Requirements:

• BS in CS, Preferred MSCS (or equivalent) and 5-8 years of hands-on software design and development experience or data and mathematical analysis
• Strong hands on skills in - PHP, RoR, Java, Flash, AMFPhP, memcached, memqueue, + at least one of LAMP stack environments
• Relational Databases and SQL ( MySQL, Oracle, logical design and stored procedures).
• Front-end Web Technologies (HTML, Javascript, XML, XSL, good understanding of HTTP protocol and some knowledge of development with varied mobile platforms
• Proven ability to lead and manage a small (3-5) team of engineers
• Deep experience building Distributed Large Scale Systems focused on highly available websites
• Proven ability to operate effectively at the senior level
• Exceptional motivator and technical leader
• Excellent oral and written communications skills

Additional Experience Desired:
Social & Web Gaming; Mobile Gaming, Virtual World Applications (UX, Currency, Transactions, Community, Micro-Payments, Start-up Exp)

Betfair US Overview
Located in San Francisco; Betfair US is a true start-up being developed from the ground up! We are an incubation team consisting of highly talented, passionate, and collaborative team members. We look to continue to build our team with the brightest and most creative individuals across all disciplines. This is a tremendous opportunity for those with an entrepreneurial mindset to help create the direction we take with our technology platform and product portfolio.

For more infromation or to submit your resume, contact Seth Dawson at SDawson@tvg.com or by phone 415-515-2654.