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I’m a bit skeptical about this, but anyways I think the results will be interesting…
_ Carsonified » Blog Archive » Matt Week – Day three and where we’re at

Day three is upon us. We have had a few challenges along the way but all of the team are making progress.

There is a bit of an air of pandemonium, but all the team are weighing in with a tremendous effort. We are getting an enormously valuable insight into what web development companies have to go through day in day out.

From an email:

As you may already know the Carsonified team have set ourselves a challenge this week – to build a web app in four days (32 hours) and we’re launching tomorrow at 5:30pm GMT.

The app is called Matt and it helps people post to multiple Twitter accounts (Multiple Account Twitter Tweeting). We know the idea for the app isn’t going to rock the world, but we’re going to share everything we’re learning in the process – so hopefully that’ll be valuable for other people.

What do you think?

OK, so I’ve not got long so will be brief and to the point with this one, in the hope that it will help some of the people that read this blog, and maybe even some of the folks that are looking for devs to join their teams.

I’ve had to run through a lot of agencies and candidates in the last month or so, recruiting for Kindo, and these are some thoughts in no particular order:

As a candidate

DO:

• accept there is lots of good competition; you have to stand out to be noticed
• research on the company you’re interviewing at – it’s polite and will help you with 3, 4 and 5
• send a cv that is relevant to the job spec – java experience won’t interest someone looking for a php person
• learn how to sell yourself and articulate your experience – enough said
• accept you’re going to have to send code to show what you can do – send your best relevant code
• describe what your code is supposed to be doing to there is context – don’t just send a bunch of methods
• comment more than you think you should – esp if you’re going to work in a team or be contracting
• write documentation in the code for something like phpDocumentor – that makes people happy

As a general rule (unless you’re a superstar), your work environment, the people you work with, and the work you’ll be doing, should all supersede remuneration unless you have a specific reason (like a mortgage for example).

As someone recruiting

DO:
Read this first:
http://www.nickhalstead.com/2008/07/01/10-reasons-why-i-hate-recruitment-agents/

• accept that it is going to take up a lot of your time
• have a clear job spec and role description in place to send around
• use your personal network first
• get your agencies to send some cv’s to assess the kind of candidates they have
• ask for source code if you like the cv – you’ll do less unnecessary face to face’s
• expect them to do some filtering and work for you; if not, bin them
• turn your phone off if you want quiet time to work
• agree on terms first, or re-confirm them if circumstances change on your end

Hope that helps!!

Was at Open Coffee last week (looking for developers), and did this interview with Vincent and Eugene from Intruders.tv on Kindo. Talked about how we’ve tackled some of the usual web app issues like scaling our userbase, internationalisation, product dev, marketing tricks, revenue generation….
_ Intruders.tv interview on Kindo.com

Kindo.com is a “new take on the traditional family tree”. In this interview, we sit down with Gareth Knight to talk about Kindo and their user acquisition strategy. Gareth shares with us his experience of attracting users to the site and the effectiveness of strategies such as blogging, Google AdWords and PR.

If you’re building a webapp, could be useful