Insight Tracking | Junior or Senior Full-stack .NET Web Developer | Hayle, Cornwall, UK | Full time | £30,000—£40,000
We're small, fully bootstrapped, software as a service company. Our main product is an assessment tracking web app for primary schools. We currently have over 360 schools nationally and are growing rapidly.
We're a four-person team, focused on delivering excellent customer support. You'd be working closely with our main developer, as well as the customer support team. There are plenty of new features to build and existing things to improve.
From a tech point of view, the server-side runs on a mixture of ASP.NET MVC and Web API, which talk to RavenDB and SQL Server. The front-end has a legacy Angular UI, but newer screens are built using React.
We're not bogged down by bureaucracy and meetings. We aim to keep the process lightweight, with a focus on rapidly delivering great software.
Being based in the seaside town of Hayle means we're close to the beach and the countryside. It's a chilled out town, with good connections to other parts of Cornwall. Remote work is also a possibility, however being UK-based would be preferred.
Skills we need:
Experience with C# and .NET, especially ASP.NET;
Experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript;
Basic knowledge of SQL Server;
Basic knowledge of Git
Perks:
Your choice of computer hardware;
Sit/stand desk and ergonomic chair;
Full-time here is just 30 hours a week (flexi-time);
In addition to the usual 28 days holiday plus bank holidays, take unlimited unpaid leave during school summer holidays;
Regular team outings (recently we've completed an Escape; Room, played Skittles, learned to make Easter Eggs and spent the day in VR);
Work-place pension, with up to 15% matched contributions;
Free snacks, coffee, etc;
Close to the beach!
So this can be confusing. We can definitely purchase things for you. Want us to order flowers? Have someone come install your air conditioner? No problem, we can even handle the payment for most things.
However, we do this by billing you securely (just like iTunes, etc), and then letting the assistants use "the company card." So the assistant won't actually handle your credit card information, but we can still make these purchases for you.
So users never have to expose their Credit Card information to their assistants. The assistant will never ask for it. If you need us to do something that actually requires knowing your entire credit card number for some reason, that's the type of thing we can't do. But making purchases doesn't fall under that umbrella.
I mean if the flowers cost $60 (from the florist), how much would they cost the client via your service? I mean outside of the normal cost for using the service.
Essentially what I'm asking is if there is a "service fee" on purchases?
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).
Hi, looks like an interesting service! I've already sent it to a bunch of my friends who I think can get a lot of value out of it.
Unfortunately, I don't think I could extract $25/mo out of the service myself. Do you have any plans for alternative pricing structures? I would definitely pay $100 for a block of 20 requests that I could use over the course of a year, say.
I was thinking along the same lines. I'd much rather 'pre pay' for tasks than have a monthly limit. Else i'll have to think if a task is worthwhile enough to use up one of my 5 tasks. And i would hate to run out of task slots some months but just not often enough to warrant an upgrade.
I doubt they would implement something like this. Their business model is likely built on a) having regular income and b) many users not using all their tasks per month (i.e. paying for something they aren't using). It's the same reason services like Dropbox don't offer a pay-for-what-you-use plan - the majority of their income comes from people paying the set monthly fees but not using anywhere near the maximum storage/bandwidth.
Sure, but there's no reason you can't offer a non-monthly plan at the true operating cost * 1.(your markup). It might be slightly (or vastly) more expensive per request than the monthly plan, but guys like me would still buy 20 or 30, instead of having no revenue from us at all...
Its actually very funny, to me, that you suggested this.
In my previous job, this was precisely the structure the firm evolved to give to certain customers who were on the fence about the service. (B2B - financial Services)
We had one tweak to it, and once people used it, they never got out.
It looks like the HN bot killed tedroden's comment because it might have looked like a spammy promotion (e.g. we get up to 15% off flower purchases), though clearly it wasn't.
Here's the whole comment:
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).
Interesting - one more question : If I do not live in the US, can I still purchase for some item and have it shipped where I live (international shipping?) provided I pay for the delivery costs? Is that something you do ?
From the site it seems like they are setup reasonably well for international customers but since all the staff is in the US some things like calling them or having them call people will be less than ideal. Also i can imagine that they have some partners and go-to solutions setup for requests in the US which they simply would not have for european customers.
The website is confusing. They can buy things for you. I'm not sure how it works exactly (but I used it to signup for a $30 race).. I think they billed it to their own credit card and will charge me for it at the end of the month?
I am probably reacting too quickly, but I note about 3 other places (not including the sibling comment to this one) where people have asked you whether or not you charge a markup and purchases, and you've not answered.
Granted, it's only been an hour, but that silence doesn't make me feel good.
Nope, at this point, we don't take any percentage or fee. We even pass along any discounts we receive (we get up to 15% off flower some purchases for example and we pass that along to you).
Both bottons look elegant. Probably your botton was posted at a wrong time of a day. That's why I've made an app that tells you when it's good time to post a story. Today 9am, a lot of newest stories were upvoted quickly - biggest peak in over two weeks.
It would be nice if clicking the button made you a watcher.
I think the reason for the difference is this one was so simple. From the title, I knew what it was going to be. With yours it was a little over complicated. From the title of HN post, to the website
RavenDB http://ravendb.net/ is an excellent document database written in .NET. It leverages lots of LINQ and C# 4.0's dynamic abilities to provide a really clean API. I'm sure it'll soon be taking advantage of the new async stuff coming in C# 5.0 as well.
I see a big problems in web testing caused trying to test drive from outside of the browser. I'm currently working on a solution that has tests written in javascript that run inside the browser. The test runner puts your web app into an iframe, so the test code can use jQuery, for example, to easily automate and assert over the UI.
JavaScript also makes creating a very clean testing-focused DSL easy.
I'm hoping to open source the project soon. If anyone would like to know more give me a shout (@andrewdavey).
This is the approach that Selenium 1 took, and there be many dragons down that path. It's workable (we've done a ton of cool stuff at Sauce Labs making it work), but it takes an usual mix of skills and insight to get it to really gel together. Selenium 2 was built with all that mind.
That said, it's not the important part. Selenium (and watir, windmill, etc.) is an execution tool, it doesn't help you avoid some very, very large pitfalls waiting for you down the road. Too often your tests are tightly coupled with the dom, data and selectors are strewn all about, you have manual pauses and timeouts set by someone who left years ago, and you have so many that the whole thing takes two weeks to run (yes, I've seen this a number of times).
Basically, I don't care about the tool to execute the tests anymore. They'll all become interchangeable with Selenium 2 anyway. The much more valuable piece here is in creating tests that are maintainable and a joy to work with.
Certainly best of luck, please be sure to share you experiences and insights! There's always more to be learned.
Reducing tight coupling is definitely a concern I'm looking into. I can't see there being any silver bullets, but a good framework should certainly encourage a sustainable way of working.
I've developed a rather nice asynchronous, sequential, execution model for test code. So they avoid the callback-hell you'd see with multi-step async tests. The spin assert idea mentioned in the article is very useful, and I'll be borrowing it for sure! :)
I'm wary of running tests in parallel, due to concurrency issues. However, I guess spinning up multiple web servers and in-memory databases would work fine.
I can see privacy being a issue. I think at least I will need to add a message to the form to inform the user. Having a checkbox to enable/disable the snapshot may be a useful option too. So then the user can still send a message, but without the snapshot.
I will need to have a closer look at the canvas API and see what actually works across different browsers. It could well be a simpler way to generate images - even if IE6/7/8 will miss out.
We're small, fully bootstrapped, software as a service company. Our main product is an assessment tracking web app for primary schools. We currently have over 360 schools nationally and are growing rapidly.
Our customers love the system and send us great feedback! https://www.insighttracking.com/testimonials
We're a four-person team, focused on delivering excellent customer support. You'd be working closely with our main developer, as well as the customer support team. There are plenty of new features to build and existing things to improve.
From a tech point of view, the server-side runs on a mixture of ASP.NET MVC and Web API, which talk to RavenDB and SQL Server. The front-end has a legacy Angular UI, but newer screens are built using React.
We're not bogged down by bureaucracy and meetings. We aim to keep the process lightweight, with a focus on rapidly delivering great software.
Being based in the seaside town of Hayle means we're close to the beach and the countryside. It's a chilled out town, with good connections to other parts of Cornwall. Remote work is also a possibility, however being UK-based would be preferred.
Skills we need: Experience with C# and .NET, especially ASP.NET; Experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; Basic knowledge of SQL Server; Basic knowledge of Git
Perks: Your choice of computer hardware; Sit/stand desk and ergonomic chair; Full-time here is just 30 hours a week (flexi-time); In addition to the usual 28 days holiday plus bank holidays, take unlimited unpaid leave during school summer holidays; Regular team outings (recently we've completed an Escape; Room, played Skittles, learned to make Easter Eggs and spent the day in VR); Work-place pension, with up to 15% matched contributions; Free snacks, coffee, etc; Close to the beach!
Email [email protected]