{"id":3100,"date":"2010-12-17T18:15:41","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T18:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/2010\/12\/17\/code-before-company-saucelabs-selenium-santi-community-contributions-and-hiring-in-argentina-scala-lift-dpp-dexy-ana-nelson-on-engaging-early\/"},"modified":"2010-12-17T18:15:41","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T18:15:41","slug":"code-before-company-saucelabs-selenium-santi-community-contributions-and-hiring-in-argentina-scala-lift-dpp-dexy-ana-nelson-on-engaging-early","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/code-before-company-saucelabs-selenium-santi-community-contributions-and-hiring-in-argentina-scala-lift-dpp-dexy-ana-nelson-on-engaging-early\/","title":{"rendered":"Code before Company. Saucelabs, Selenium, Santi: Community Contributions and Hiring in Argentina. Scala, LIFT, @DPP. Dexy, Ana Nelson. On engaging early."},"content":{"rendered":"

I met with Jason Huggins<\/a> of Sauce Labs<\/a> recently, the creator of Selenium<\/a>. He is a goldmine of stories and all round awesome, but I particularly liked one particular story he told about how the firm is hiring.<\/p>\n

The story is simple, and talks directly to an inescapable trend \u2013 the best jobs are the ones you create yourself, just as the best startups are based on code, rather than slide deck business plans.<\/p>\n

Sauce Labs is very much an early stage company \u2013 currently only 15 people work there. Most are based in Chicago \u2013 because Jason is very much a \u201cChicago Tech Mafia\u201d guy<\/del>. But one hire stood out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a bunch of guys in Chicago<\/del>San Francisco and then there\u2019s Santi in Rosario, Argentina… He was the <\/strong><\/em>most prolific contributor to our forums, so we hired him when we got money<\/strong><\/em><\/a>.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

RedMonk is seeing a lot more of this kind of stuff. As I tweeted last week \u2013 we\u2019re engaging with startups at earlier and earlier stages: another great example is the company David Pollak<\/a> is establishing to commercialise Scala and his LIFT<\/a> framework.<\/p>\n

We have been supporters of Dave since he came to RedMonkOne at CommunityOne, and helped Bryan Cantrill<\/a> work out what some Ruby code was doing during a DTrace demo. Bryan is no slouch \u2013 in fact he is one of the best systems engineers on the planet right now- he just didn\u2019t know the language in question. But Dave was a standout.<\/p>\n

David also showed his chops when he emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to help some SAP community hackers (Anne Katherine Petteroe<\/a>, Dennis Howlett<\/a>, Richard Hirsch<\/a>, Vasill Dichev<\/a>, Darren Hague<\/a>) build the experimental ESME<\/a> enterprise messaging platform, which brought microblogging concepts to SAP back ends long before platforms like Chatter and Streamworks were on the cards. Oh yeah- we gave ESME some free advice on licensing too, which led to the decision to go with Apache<\/a>.<\/p>\n

LIFT is to Scala as Rails is to Ruby\u00a0 – that is, a scaffolding to accelerate Scala application development. Scala is a functional language, or should I say a statically typed object oriented language with closures<\/a>. Its designed to take advantage of concurrency \u2013 and crucially runs on a Java virtual machine (JVM), which is one reason its seeing enthusiastic adoption by Java ninjas. It allows for high scale messaging based apps, and takes advantage of JVM optimisation for performance. And you can take advantage of Java class libraries in building apps.<\/p>\n

When David ran his LIFT OFF event in London a couple of months back, he told me that online betting and high end financial services firms in London were some distance ahead of Silicon Valley in Scala adoption and maturity. He also told me he was getting funded and was going to sign up RedMonk as an advisor as soon as he did. He did, and he did. Events and actors (see Akka<\/a>) and cloud, maybe Derek<\/a> has a point.<\/p>\n

My point, after that long winded digression (or was it the main argument?) is that we engaged with David because he was clueful, he taught us something, and he had solid, productive code to pimp. For some weird reason he thinks RedmonkOne was big deal, but we just wanted to feature language diversity at our first event, which piggybacked on JavaOne (rather less diverse).<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2013 you will hear a lot more from Pollak, and Huggins. They formed companies to sustain their code, rather than the other way around. They value community more than investors. That\u2019s getting it right.<\/p>\n

The latest awesome piece of code I\u2019m hanging out with right now is Dexy<\/a>. You will be hearing a lot more from my good friend Ana Nelson<\/a> \u2013 if you ever write about code she can help make you awesome. And who knows- she may even end up as a RedMonk client. Maybe in three years or so.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n

Programmers<\/h4>\n

Promote<\/strong> and improve your code with automated documentation.<\/p>\n

Scientists<\/h4>\n

Create<\/strong> beautiful, reproducible documents including graphs and analysis from your raw data and code.<\/p>\n

\n

Dexy is an open source document automation tool that can help you create documents using your favourite programming languages and your favourite software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I met with Jason Huggins of Sauce Labs recently, the creator of Selenium. He is a goldmine of stories and all round awesome, but I particularly liked one particular story he told about how the firm is hiring. The story is simple, and talks directly to an inescapable trend \u2013 the best jobs are the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[54,93,135,144,151,225,427,323,325],"class_list":["post-3100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-akka","tag-cantrill","tag-dexy","tag-dtrace","tag-esme","tag-lift","tag-sap","tag-scala","tag-selenium"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-O0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}