Non-profit Nationwide Initiative on Rails

Tags: New York, Fulltime, On-site, Off-site, Hybrid, Team Member, Lone Ranger, Small Business, Urban Center, Jeans & Sandals, Business CasualWe are a non-profit working on a nationwide initiative to build local communities of support that will foster ongoing collaborations among volunteers, students, and educators. We do this primarily through our online platform that connects teachers with STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) professionals, community volunteers, and a variety of other resources - all there to support and help teachers strengthen their STEM programs.

Job Details / Required Skills:
Developing and maintaining Ruby on Rails applications for a high-profile non-profit
Test Driven Development
Aggressive Refactoring
Working directly with management to improve the product and the message


Additional Skills:
JavaScript, including experience with Javascripttesting frameworks
SQL
Ability to communicate and coordinate with non-technical management


Our site is a standard Ruby on Rails application (ruby1.8, rails 2.3.5, mongrel1.1.5.1, mySQL 2.8.1) with some part (sign up) using extensive javascript.

The source code is on github (http://github.com).

The application is deployed at engine yard clouds 24/7 (http://www.engineyard.com/) both for the demo/staging site and the production site.

Other clouds used:
Amazom S3 with paperclip for file/image upload (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/)
Flickr to get images for sideshows (http://www.flickr.com/)
Donorschoose for project funding (http://www.donorschoose.org/)

Gems/Plugins:
SOLR with ActAsSolr for the search engine with some special boosting queries for matching.
Geokit for geocoding
Whenever for cronjobs scheduling
Fastercsv for creating csv files

The application was developed using Pairing, Test Driven Development - Rspec, webrat, selenium, and jasmine (for javascript) - and Continuous Integration.

All stories are recorded and prioritized on Pivotal Tracker http://www.pivotaltracker.com/

For reporting we use Hoptoad for errors, Google Analytics for stats and New Relic for performance.

This position, Non-profit Nationwide Initiative on Rails, was posted on September 13, 2010. The job is located in New York. The employer is Amazon. Since this job has been published, it has been viewed 48 times.