[LRUG] [JOBS] Would anyone like to help Teach Monsters to Read?

Fri Jun 14 14:53:30 PDT 2013

FWIW that was an epic sales letter. I'd hire you!

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 8:42 PM, Alex Reis <alex at alexmreis.com> wrote:

> Sorry all for the group reply. Apologies
>
> Alexandre M. Reis
>
> http://alexmreis.com
> +32 484 77 99 27
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Alex Reis <alex at alexmreis.com> wrote:
>
>> Hey Antonio,
>>
>> I'm Alex, a Brazilian developer who lives (legally, for 3 years now) in
>> Belgium but prefers to work for clients in the UK ;) I take deep interest
>> in what you're building, since my 8 year old son is facing challenges in
>> the second grade due to not being able to grasp what he reads, on top of
>> having to learn a second language at that young age for his main duties in
>> school.
>>
>> Here's a summary, aka TL;DR:
>>
>> - 14 years of experience as a dev, 4 with ruby and rails
>> - Great at prototyping, coaching, rescuing projects and simplifying
>> complex code
>> - Available for 20h/week until August, full time afterwards
>> - Ruby, Rails, EventMachine, RSpec, Capybara, Cucumber, FactoryGirl,
>> MySQL, Postgres, Linux, Chef, Redis, MongoDB, Bootstrap
>> - Loves JS, CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Spine.js and single page web apps
>> - Entrepreneur, Lean Startup afficcionado, loves and excels at Product
>> Design and development
>>
>> Publicly accessible previous works:
>>
>> - http://lovetoride.net (Rails 3.2, Spine.js)
>> - http://myrpspace.alexmreis.com/ (Rails 2.3)
>> - http://store.wicoms.com (Backbone.js, PHP backend)
>>  - http://quotr.herokuapp.com/
>>
>> Now if this got you interested, read along ;)
>>
>> == Background ==
>> I've been doing RoR since 2008 on and off, but only really managed to
>> make the carreer switch in 2012. Before that, I've grown from PHP dev in
>> 1998 to a Java developer in 2001, and a Java architect from 2006 onwards,
>> though I hate that title - I think all teams work best when everyone's
>> level in skills and in the org chart.
>>
>> == Availability ==
>> I'm currently on a contract with Fitzdares, a bespoke bookmaker in
>> London, and have worked previously with Luke Saunders - another LRUGer - on
>> http://lovetoride.net for the first half of last year. My contract with
>> them will probably end in August or so, we're taking a migration project
>> live this month and I need to stay around for necessary bug fixes still.
>>
>> I'd be able to work on Teach Your Monster to Read for 20 hours a week,
>> and while this might mean me skipping a few days at night, it will be
>> consistent, quality output. I'm usually in London once a month around the
>> 20th, I'm in town next week in fact, at Friday the 21st. If that's not
>> enough face time, I can always arrange a bit more travelling.
>>
>> == Development ==
>> My main strong point as a developer is in prototyping
>> applications/features fast, while making sure they can evolve nicely into
>> production systems. Lately I've been doing a lot of CoffeeScript and
>> Backbone.js and creating small single page apps for specific workflows.
>> Since I've been into single page apps from 2008, I tend to have an edge on
>> creating maintainable code bases using JS/CoffeeScript.
>>
>> Another strong point of mine is rescuing projects - be it writing tests
>> and fixing bugs, helping other devs think out of the box, or restructuring
>> complex code to make it simple - though for that I advise against taking me
>> half time, cos it takes full time effort to make a great job.
>>
>> == Product Design, UI/UX ==
>> I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and though none of my ventures took off
>> yet, I've helped others with theirs by coaching them following the Lean
>> Startup principles. Some teams I've coached are http://inthis.co ,
>> http://ebookplus.com and http://8thcolor.com . I've participated in a
>> Startup Weekend in Brussels where my team (Just Delivered) won the "Leanest
>> Team" awards selected by Ash Maurya, who also coached us during the weekend.
>>
>> During my more corporate work on the Java days, I've been known for
>> taking a project and making it fit the client's needs, no matter what the
>> requirements say. I tend to be good at facilitating discussions around
>> features, coming up with simpler ways of achieving the same goals, and at
>> UI design and usability. I've had more than one client say I achieved "more
>> than they thought possible" on their projects.
>>
>> Taking a product from concept to an actionable list of User Stories /
>> things to do is one of my greatest skills as well. I've worked for 2 years
>> with the belgian startup D Square and took them from a research MATLAB
>> project to a full blown multi-user cloud Java app. They had a vague idea of
>> what their software would do, and by involving early adopter customers and
>> their team, we achieved a product that is now used by some of the biggest
>> oil and chemical companies in Belgium to monitor and troubleshoot their
>> production processes
>>
>> I can also sling some Photoshop and Web Design, having done quite a bit
>> of design on my own. One of the most recent examples of that can be seen in
>> https://www.dropbox.com/s/6vh80p95p3kmqvq/landing_page_participant.png ,
>> a landing page for one of my previous ventures that didn't fly.
>>
>> == Agile, TDD, BDD ==
>> I'm really passionate about software development, and care deeply about
>> the code I write. I believe in Software Craftsmanship and Agile, but think
>> of Agile practices as more of guidelines than rules. I love employing TDD
>> when it fits, but only where it makes sense too. I'm a versed user of
>> RSpec, Cucumber, Capybara, FactoryGirl and friends, and think if there's
>> any truth in code documentation, it's in passing, readable tests.
>>
>> == DevOps / Sys admin ==
>> From 2001 to 2003 I did Linux server administration as well, and keep
>> doing it to this day for the servers that run my own apps. I know the
>> bootup process like few, know my way around Apache and Nginx and can handle
>> pretty much any requirement on a server.
>>
>> I've been using Chef and Capistrano lately to deploy anything that is not
>> on heroku, and have recently helped a client migrate from a Solaris bespoke
>> server to a Amazon EC2 / Ubuntu / Chef setup. They're now running 2
>> instances of the application, saving money and happy they can just run a
>> single command to spin up more servers.
>>
>> == Thanks! ==
>> If you read all the way to here, my most deep thanks for your time and
>> patience! My rates are usually around £300 a day or £40 per hour, but let
>> me know what your budget allows for and I can adapt. If you need any
>> further information, feel free to contact me about it, I'd love to hear
>> back from you!
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Alexandre M. Reis
>> skype: alexmreis
>> http://alexmreis.com
>> +32 484 77 99 27
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Antonio <
>> antonio at teachyourmonstertoread.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> I’m looking for some development support on this project:
>>> http://teachyourmonstertoread.com
>>>
>>> It's a free game to help children with reading, set up by a charity
>>> founded by Peter Usborne (from Usborne Publishing). The product is
>>> doing really well, has a solid and expanding user base and has won a
>>> number of awards and commendations.
>>>
>>> The web-based part of the system is built in Rails and is fairly
>>> straightforward - it generally deals with teacher and children
>>> accounts, passwords and so on plus a few other bits and pieces.
>>>
>>> I’m looking for someone to take over development of this system and
>>> help us add and refine the functionality. It has quite a few people
>>> using it so I’m looking for someone reliable.
>>>
>>> Ideally someone who’s got basic front end skills would be great too -
>>> and someone that’s into their UX a little is always great.
>>>
>>> It’s not a huge amount of work - probably a day or two a month by my
>>> estimation - and the best thing is we’re really flexible on timings so
>>> it would suit someone who’s looking to fill in a bit of time here and
>>> there.
>>>
>>> Note that I’m based in London - I’d be happy to work remote as long as
>>> there could be an occasional meet in person.
>>>
>>> If anyone’s interested please get in touch with me at
>>> antonio at teachyourmonstertoread.com.
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> Antonio
>>> Producer: Teach Your Monster to Read
>>> http://teachyourmonstertoread.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Chat mailing list
>>> Chat at lists.lrug.org
>>> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>>>
>>>
>>
>
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-- 
Ali, http://happybearsoftware.com
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