How to apply for a job
January 26, 2012 § 1 Comment
Whenever we are hiring at Mint Digital, it always amazes me some of the responses we get. Unfortunately often not in a good way. So if you are thinking of applying for a job (not just at Mint), here are a couple of handy tips I’ve noted based on the many applicants I have reviewed. Please note this list is specifically related to development jobs, however some, if not all, of these will apply to other industries.
BACON: the conference on things developers love
January 23, 2012 § 5 Comments
Mint has a great conference policy for its employees. Last year, the tech team at Mint traveled all over Europe and North America, attending and speaking at traditional technology conferences like Arrrrcamp, and Strange Loop, but also off-the-wall choices like San Diego Comic-Con and Lebowski Fest.
Last summer, I had an idea. There’s lack of large conferences in London that we would like to attend. Also, we have been attending a lot of conferences, and have a lot of experience about what we like and don’t like. So why don’t we just throw a conference ourselves?
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Why we use unicorn
January 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Recently a colleague asked me why we used unicorn, obviously I answered “because its awesome”, however this didn’t seem to suffice. So rather then explaining I thought I’d write this post:
In the almost 6 years that I have worked at Mint we have ran our rails applications using a variety of software. Back in the dark early days we used fast_cgi under apache, luckily we moved on quickly to thin, behind nginx, a web server we have since stuck to. However from thin we moved to mongrel when Zed showed us the awesome and then finally to unicorn. I miss out a brief stage where we entertained the idea of using passenger, but fortunately this never made it onto our production servers. Unicorn has been part of our stack for longer than all of the others put together and this in itself is interesting.
How cool is Erlang?
January 18, 2012 § 1 Comment
A few years ago it seemed like everyone in the Ruby community was checking out Erlang, I guess they thought it was the next big thing, or cooler than Ruby or something. Anyway that seemed to pass as everyone found Scala and recently it seems Node is the place to be (unless you want to run fibonacci sequences). Actually if you’re super on it, you’re probably writing CoffeeScript, ignoring the fact that its just JavaScript.
Anyway, that all said, around that time, like many rubyists I bought “Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World”, started reading it then realised it was kinda hard, and well I had other things to do. Since then I have actually read it, in fact a number of times, along with various other Erlang books and have decided that it is, well, pretty cool. Here are a few things that I’ve really liked and have found useful even when not writing Erlang.