[LRUG] [JOB] CTO and business partenership

[Kevin Monk]

Dear Rubyists,

This is more than a job vacancy. I'm looking for a CTO/Senior Developer who would like to partner up with me on my business.

I posted an initial job opportunity back in late March for a £400/day contractor and we had a good response. I've reposted the job advert below. Apologies for the cut/paste but it was a very detailed description of the job and my Pivotal Tracker velocity is dropping.

Since the original job posting, things are looking even brighter and we're now on the look out for a coder/businessman hybrid who wants a share alongside a good salary. We're willing to offer a considerable equity share of the business so that you can feel real ownership of the product and a passion for it's success.

Please let me know if you're interested.

Testimonial from one of our previous developers in response to our advert

> Ah "George I" - does that mean I get my own wikipedia page?!?  Just to follow up on this I did this contract for 2 months to fill in a gap I had from when my previous contract finished at christmas until a new one started in March.  It was a real shame to leave but unfortunately I had already signed the march contract back at the end of last year.


> A little bit of info from my point of view: Kevin is a great guy to work with and the project was really interesting on both the business and technical level.  On the tech side of things it was great to do a full project in Backbone and Mustache rather than just play with it on a backburner idea (and especially as the project genuinely required such a solution rather than "hey lets use it because it's new and cool").  It also really helped having a member of NHS staff who would be using the system each day available to speak to for any uncertainties/clarifications about requirements.  On the business side I hope the project succeeds as it will encourage the NHS to use small firms to provide IT systems rather than default going for the large, expensive and poorly provided IT systems.  The setup is such that the NHS owns more than half the company so the profits go back into the NHS and all the other trusts get better IT systems than they would have otherwise (+ at a cheaper price).  The response from the trusts they had presented to whilst I was there was equally as impressive - I think every single one was keen.  Anyone who knows people in the NHS will know how poor a lot of their systems are so I for one would be quite happy to see some of the current IT health companies go down the drain.


> As a related aside this was the first contract I picked up in 3.5 years of freelancing via the lrug mailing list so I stil find the job postings useful as long as they are not recruiter spam.  It helps to keep an eye on the market, where Ruby is used and by which companies, and with the new job tag you can filter them straight out if you're not interested.  Long term I do think a job board may be a better option though.


> George


Here's the original job posting...

The Company
Based in Crystal Palace, we were a very small company consisting of myself and my sister-in-law; with occasional input from others. We've been making RoR systems for an NHS Trust for about three years now. We're on our third system and in autumn last year we were invited by our client to demonstrate our SARD (Strengthened Appraisal and Revalidation Database) product to a group of the most senior doctors in London. They were very impressed. I honestly hadn't gone there to sell. I'd gone there to show what can be achieved with a small budget and a lot of enthusiasm and therefore I was really unprepared for the following question:

"Thanks, Kevin. It looks great but the people sat around this table are responsible for a budget of about £2.5 billiion. How big a company are you?"

*Cough* *cough* *splutter* *splutter*

"About, two. -ish.", I spluttered. "Well, one and a half really because Barbara has two kids and she can only work when they're at school."

That's now known as the Dragon's Den meeting.

I didn't really think much more about it until our client rings me up out of the blue and says "Look, Kevin - we've been thinking. Everyone likes the product, they want to buy it but they're concerned that you're too small a company. Why don't we set up a joint venture? We give you the commercial stability of a large organisation and a bridging loan to expand your business and grow. The best of both worlds; a small dynamic company with financial stability, the NHS get good software and then the majority of the profits can be a revenue stream for funding doctors and nurses. How about it?". In the business world, I think that's known as WIN-WIN-WIN. And so, SARD JV was born.

And then the glorious reign of George I...
In December, I posted on LRUG with the title "The best job you've never had..." in the form of a cuke feature and got an excellent response (about 10-15 candidates, a majority but not all from LRUG). An excellent LRUG developer arrived on the door step in January and made a great job of getting our Backbone.js stuff in order as well as helping me to shape the future development of the product. It was only a short term contract and he had some commitments that he had to honour so he's gone off now. More's the pity.

About Me
I'm not a recruitment agent. I studied as an electronic engineer at Southampton Uni and then worked in the defence industry for a number of years before the big organisation bureaucracy and nonsense made me jump to going it alone as a software developer. I've been doing that for about 6 years and never looked back. I'm not a rock star coder and yet we seem to make stuff that people like and come back for more.

About Babs
My sister-in-law. Before she had my niece and nephew she was a C++ developer for the Symbian OS Java API and a bloody good one. She was going stir crazy as an intelligent stay at home mum and was keen to get back into coding so I suggested that she learn Ruby. When the youngest was in primary school she started coding with me and we've been doing that for about 2 years. She's living in Chenai for 6 months as my brother is setting up an engineering team out there.

The Rest
There are about 3 or 4 people from the NHS who have a part-time active involvement on the project; including the Medical Director of the Trust. We also have a full time seconded staff member. The NHS team are great to work with and it makes the project a joy. You get to work directly with the users of the product and get real feedback about what they require.
We have an excellent and experienced business consultant who acts as a mentor for me a couple of days a month. Awesome. As an aside, don't underestimate the importance of good business consultants.
My wife comes in 1 day a week to research the market, competition and changes in the business landscape. She often wins "Employee of the Day".
My dad is our QA man.
Uncle Simon is the freelance graphic designer.
Uncle Tim runs his own Joomla based business upstairs.
I think that's enough family.

You
Not quite the 'Eden' way but has elements of that. We need a senior developer and someone who's a little more fully formed as a Rails developer just because you'll need to hit the ground running. Having said that, George was working on Backbone.js for a large part of his stay here and not many people are that familiar with Backbone yet. He proved the oft made point that a sharp mind, good work ethos and sound engineering principles will trump prior knowledge.

The Atmosphere
It's a hard thing to describe but Crystal Palace has a good atmosphere. There's lots of friendly people around. Good restaurants, cafes and pubs. People are friendly to you and you get introduced to all the locals and made to feel part of the community. I imagine it's a little bit like professional work used to be in the 1970s - a bit more laid back, inviting and homely. Up to a couple of years ago, we worked in an office where a dog used to roam about and people still smoked at their desk. But don't worry, we don't do that any more; we stubbed out the cigarettes and had the dog shot. There are no bean bags or giant exit slides but we do have an office door, desks and chairs; which is convenient.

The Tech
It's Rails 3.1, MongoDB and uses Backbone.js for some important pages.

Testing
Ahem...
Test coverage is err.... *sketchy*. I know this may be a heretical thing to say but in the early stages and with a really small team, the TDD and BDD were interrupting the process of discovery and creativity when in early development. We use Cucumber and RSpec but for our initial purposes build came before test and we've been burnt before from an over enthusiastic test coverage whilst the B in the BDD was still being hammered out. To paraphrase, 'If it ain't broke, don't test it.". IMHO, the ultimate MoFo of full stack testing is this..

Given I have done some work for a client
When I go back to that client
Then they should want me to do more work for them

Business Driven Development, distilled?

Having said all that, this is not a recalcitrant position. The product needs more test coverage now that it's rolling out as a Beta; partly for the reason that we need some regression testing. You may wish to consider this a technical challenge of the job. I'd genuinely welcome a dev that will teach me the error of my ways and I'd be more than happy to bask in the warm glow shining out of a GOOS TDD arse. It's cold out here. Show me how TDD can make my life better.

Wonga.com, contract terms and all that
£400 per day for a contractor. Minimum contract is 2 months but expect it to be longer if you're enjoying it.
If you like the work, the environment and things are going well, then over the longer term we're looking for a CTO with substantial equity and the equivalent perm salary.

We've spent the last two months presenting our product in the South East and London. The mood is up. The game is on. Our order book is filling up, we're self funding and we're keen to get out into the rest of the country and my attention is being taken off the day to day coding. That's why we need you.


Kevin Monk
Technical Director

Mango Swiss Ltd
Westow Hill Studios
45 Westow Hill
Upper Norwood
London SE19 1TS

E: kevin at mangoswiss.com
T: 020 8670 5461
M: 07736 066408



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