Full Stack PHP Developer

anywhere  ‐ Remote
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Description

Hi there!

I'm Manuel and I'm looking for a full stack web developer to join me at SwingLiving.com.

The company:
SwingLiving is an invite-only, paid membership dating site for swingers in Latin America (for now) built using PHP, MySQL and jQuery. We also use LESS and Redis a bit. This is the lightweight MVC framework the site is built with: http://sifo.me

We've got thousands of happy users who use our site daily and I'd love your help in growing that number, as well as our revenue, 100x :)

The team:
You'd be joining a team of three: 2 part time customer support reps / community managers, and me. We're all remote and communicate daily using Gmail, Skype, Google Docs and Basecamp. Communicating efficiently and quickly is a must for this position. This means: no disappearing for (work) days without replying email, replying promptly to things, being a good written communicator (English or Spanish), asking questions instead of guessing or just wasting hours trying to find an answer I can give you, etc.

You'll be working directly with me. I built the site from scratch over the years and now I'm looking for someone to take over most of -or all- the development work, even though I expect the transition to last a few months (the amount of code is considerable).

Full list of technology, tools and services we use: Basecamp, Subversion, Google Docs, CommerceGate (payment gateway), Pusher (for our real time chat), SendGrid, Amazon SES, Amazon Cloudfront, Ngynx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, jQuery, CSS & LESS, Memcached, Smarty. I think that's it. You don't need to have experience with *all* of that, by the way.

What you'll work on:
  • New features to the site. Some might be small (a day), others big (weeks).
  • Code up (HTML/CSS) promotional pages (say for an event or campaign) after being given a .PSD file.
  • Fix bugs whenever they come up.
  • So some changes to our Wordpress blog when needed.
  • Build new products: we have a couple of ideas we want to launch in 2015 and they'll be built from scratch.


  • Being this a remote position where you may end up being the only developer for a while, this position requires a person who doesn't need constant micromanagement, gets things done and embraces responsability. I don't like working with people who make excuses and can't meet a deadline. I'm looking for someone who will thrive in a tiny team and who is excited to make a difference in an service with thousands of daily users and with paying customers. You should be unwilling to ship things “rough around the edges” or unfinished. We can be lean on number of features / scope of the task, but whatever gets built should be done well and with attention to detail.

    Skills
    It’d be great if you speak Spanish, since that’s what our users speak, but the site can also be used in English. Otherwise, fluent English is of course a must.

    You should have solid programming skills and plenty of experience with production LAMP applications using an MVC framework (Symfony, Cake, etc - although ours is a lot more lightweight). I’m OK with you not having experience on something we use outside of our main stack (Redis, LESS, Wordpress, etc), that can be learned on the job. But you should have a few years building serious apps on HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP & MySQL.

    You should have experience with optimization techniques to improve performance on web apps with considerable traffic. This includes using caching in smart way, know how to optimize queries (or write them in a performant way in the first place), profile performance of a web app, etc. I'm not looking for an expert that can scale the site to millions of users, but if you only have experience building sites that have almost no traffic (and thus optimization isn't even taking into consideration, or heavy load was never a problem), then you're probably not the right person for the job.

    Experience using Photoshop to chop up a mockup in .PSD and come up with the HTML / CSS is a strong plus.

    Good design skills are a very strong plus. Even just having good taste when coming up with the styling of a new feature on your own (instead of being incapable of seeing when something looks “off” or ugly compared to the rest of the look and feel of the site) would be a strong plus.

    More than a rockstar who will single handedly help us grow our platform 100x without a hitch (our scale is, and will continue to be, small by today's standards), I’m looking for someone who is reasonably reliable (won't disappear in two months), smart (can fix bugs and learn a new skill if needed in a timely manner) and can produce good work (quality and clarity of code, reasonable expectation of lack of major and obvious bugs) in a timely manner.

    Availability
    I'll be working from Barcelona, Spain most of the time. While it'd be nice, and sometimes required (if a Skype chat is in order), to have a few overlapping hours of work with a 9-5 there, I personally don't care where in the world you're located, nor your working hours.

    The position is for a dedication of around 30 hours a week, but unless there is something urgent that needs to ship with a strict deadline (very rare), I don't mind which days, and how many hours per day, do you work. I just expect someone to reasonably and honestly work what was agreed, and a satisfactory amount of work to be done in that time. I'm not going to be tracking how many hours you work, just your output. And if you end up being incredibly productive and end up churning out in 20 hours what I would do in 30 (and up to the same standards), then I guess that's your gain.

    In terms of emergencies, all nighters, crunch mode, etc. my philosophy is that unless you pushed a serious bug to production, it can wait until tomorrow. If that is the case, though, I expect you to able to fix it ASAP (I will call you on your phone) unless there's a really good excuse for you not being available, in which case I'll fix it myself.

    Also, since it will take a few months to get someone up to speed on the code base, I don't want someone only looking for a short gig for obvious reasons.

    In terms of days off, while I won’t be tracking any sick days, holidays or what not, I expect you’ll take about 20 days of holidays / personal time off per year.

    Hours & Salary
    This is a position for 30 hours a week, working remotely (from whenever you want in the world) and the pay is 2,500 USD a month. Legally, you’ll be working as a contractor.

    Send me an email with your resume/portfolio/etc and explain why you want this job.
    Start date
    ASAP
    From
    SwingLiving
    Published at
    06.02.2015
    Contact person:
    Freelancer Map
    Project ID:
    846282
    Contract type
    Freelance
    Workplace
    100 % remote
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