JT Smith

Best Practical has a Perl Hacker job opening that I thought many of you might be interested in. Here are the details:

Perl Hacker

We’re Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, MA. We build software and sell support, training, consulting, and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker), is the premiere open source issue tracking system. We’ve been around for a decade, and things just keep getting busier.

About the job

We’re looking for a Perl hacker to help us enhance and refine our products, and as well as to be excellent to our customers. You’ll be responsible for everything from implementing new features, to testing and applying user-contributed patches to our released software. In a typical week, you’ll probably spend about half your time working on internal and open source projects, and half working on customer projects; this requires good communication skills, as well as a desire to help customers get the most out of our software.

The hours are flexible, and we all telecommute some of the time…though we work from our office in the heart of Davis Square, Somerville on most days. While we do a fair amount of our collaboration in-person, you should also be comfortable using email and instant messaging to coordinate and get work done, as we have a few employees in other parts of the globe.

About you

You should be a self-starter who has solid experience with Perl, as well as some experience with at least a few of the following buzzwords:

• Open source development practices (code review, backcompat)
• Distributed source control (git, branching, patches)
• Test driven development (smoke testing, Test::More)
• User interface design (HTML, CSS)
• Documentation (user-facing, API)
• Javascript (jQuery, events, AJAX)
• SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite)
• Optimization, profiling, and debugging (nytprof)
• UNIX systems administration (webservers, mailservers)

It’s okay if you don’t know everything out of the gate, but you should be able to learn on the fly and be comfortable asking questions when you get in over your head. RT is a large codebase to dive into, so you should be prepared to work with a project that’s too big to hold in your head all at once. If you want to see what sort of trouble you’re getting yourself into, you can find all of our open source code on github.

We’re a small company; you should be comfortable working both independently and in small teams, and prioritizing tasks on your own. Being able to task-switch efficiently and juggle several projects at once is a necessity.

Compensation

DOE - This is a full-time salaried position, but the details are negotiable. We’re a small, self funded company. The standard benefits apply, of course: health insurance, dental insurance, and junk food to make that dental insurance worthwhile.

How to apply

Send something approximating a cover letter, a resume in plain text, HTML or PDF, and a sample of some code you’ve written to resumes@bestpractical.com. If you’re involved in open source development of one kind or another, please tell us about it. If you have a CPAN ID tell us what it is; we won’t consider applications without some sort of code example to look at. We’ll be paying particular attention to the readability, comments, and tests.