First, the jobs:  We’re looking for sys admins, jboss admins, or technical ATG folks (architects, deployment specialists, etc…) to join our sys ops and support/deployment/load testing/performance tuning/troubleshooting teams in Boston (Chelmsford, MA) and Seattle (Redmond, WA).  You can read more about what skills we’re looking for here: Spark::red Oracle ATG Commerce Hosting Careers.  Don’t worry about the which location for which job, we’re looking to fill the roles in either city.

Why would you want to work with us?  Here’s a list:

• Amazing team of smart, talented, driven, funny people
• Working with a combination of Fortune 1000s, Internet Retailer 500s, emerging retailers, hip companies, international trendsetters, and Hollywood award shows!
• Working with happy clients!  We love our clients and they love us.
• Great salaries – we want to get and keep the best in the business
• Great benefits
• Flexibility, power, huge career growth potential!
• Large scale infrastructure
• Interesting problems to solve
• Halo!
• You get to work with me:)

Let’s start with the job: Senior ATG Lead Developer

Sure, you’re thinking there’s a TON of open ATG positions, and not nearly enough people to fill them, so why this one?  Here’s why:

It’s based in sunny Los Angeles (Marina Del Rey).  Great weather, great cars, great people, great surf.

I’ve had the good fortune to tour the office.  It’s one of the nicest, if not THE nicest, offices I’ve ever been to.  It has a ton of open space, slides to get down from the second floor, a barista, lots of dogs, and a great courtyard with picnic tables, cabanas, and ping pong tables.  Unlike most of the companies that talk about their great office or their game tables, at TOMS there are actually smiling happy laughing people playing ping pong.  The grassy courtyard is filled with people working on their laptops in the sun, or eating lunch outside.  I was really inspired by the office.

The company isn’t your standard retailer.  They are on a mission to give to children in need.  Read about TOMS One for One program here.  And again, it’s not just a tagline given lip service, it’s a passionate commitment that everyone I spoke with there shares.

The job gets you in at the ground floor of a new ATG implementation.  This is huge.  FIrst off you won’t be wrestling with 5 years of organically developed spaghetti code.  You get to start from a clean slate and you get to build the core functionality of the site, not just little tweaks.  I think you’ll also have a great opportunity to grow into a mentor or maybe architect role.

This is one of the better ATG positions I’ve seen around in ages.  Drop Jason an email and tell him I sent you!

Inspired by a few well known folks in the tech and entrepreneur scenes, I’ve decided to make myself available to anyone to discuss just about anything. While I’m not famous, and I certainly don’t know everything, perhaps I might have some advice that might help someone.

How does it work? If you’re interested in picking my brain there’s a couple of options. If you’re Boston area local, grabbing a cup of coffee in Chelmsford is a good option. I think in person discussions are the best kind. If you’re not local, I’m happy to setup FaceTime, Skype, or an old-fashion phone call. I’m pretty busy these days, so you’ll have to work with me schedule-wise, but I’m sure we can work something out.

What do I know? More than I did 10 years ago. I’m a technologist who has specialized in enterprise eCommerce, working with ATG/Oracle Commerce for 14+ years and working with many Fortune 1000s on their eCommerce systems and architectures. I’ve also started several businesses, including my current venture Spark::red, providing managed hosting for ATG/Oracle Commerce applications. Over the past five years I’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned a ton about building and running a small business.

Want to pick my brain about cache tuning in ATG/Oracle Commerce? Want advice on starting or growing your business from someone who has boot strapped a multi-million dollar company, with no VC and no debt? Want get advice on scalable architectures? Want to talk about the pros and cons of dedicated servers versus VMs? Want a sanity check on some application design decision? Just let me know!

What does it cost? Nothing. It’s free. I’m limiting it to 1 hour per person initially, and will probably only be able to do about 5 hours in a month. But I’m making myself available.

Why am I doing this? A have a few motivations here. I’d like to meet and connect with interesting people working on interesting problems and projects. I’d like to share what I have managed to learn over the past 15+ years; to share my knowledge, my experience, and give back to the tech and entrepreneur communities, from which I’ve learned so much. I wonder how much I might have benefitted from a similar offer 10 or 15 years ago. Long term, when I have a bit more time, I’d love to be a mentor/advisor to a tech startup, and this is my way of dipping my toe in the water.

If you’re interested, drop me an email at devon@digitalsanctuary.com with Office Hours in the subject line. Thanks!

Let’s Talk Speed!

I’m excited to be presenting at another Boston Web Performance Group Meetup.  On Tuesday September 18th, 2012 I will be co-presenting with my co-worker Steve Hall on Load Testing and Performance Analytics with JMeter and New Relic.  We work together at Spark::red providing very FAST managed ATG Oracle Commerce Hosting.

Steve will be showing how to generate load testing traffic using JMeter, and how you can use Cloud VM instances to spin up as many load generation nodes as you need, located anywhere in the world you want to be generating traffic from.

Then I’ll be showing how you can use New Relic to identify performance statistics and rapidly identify bottlenecks in your web application based on real user traffic or in this case simulated load.

It should be an interesting and hopefully enlightening evening with hands on real life demonstrations of the tools and how to apply them to increase your web application performance.  There will also be some awesome giveaways in addition to the standard pizza and excellent company that the Boston Web Performance Meetups offer.  So sign up and come on by!  I hope to see you there!

1. $1,000 per hour is my rate.
2. Minimum of 5 hours per SOW.
3. Maximum of 5 hours per week.

But gee Devon, that’s CRAZY!

Yes, it probably is.  But to re-iterate I’m both busy and happy, so it would take something very unusual for me to pick up any consulting work.

That’s a LOT of money!

Yes it is.  You shouldn’t have me write code for that sort of money.  However if you have a big eCommerce site, ATG or not, and I can help get your end user performance improved by 20% or more, then the increased conversions are probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  Or if you have an interesting architecture problem you could use some perspective on, $5,000 is pretty cheap.  Anyhow, while 99% of work isn’t a good fit for this model, most companies have problems which are easily worth $5,000-$20,000 to solve.

If you’re interested: email me at devon@digitalsanctuary.com.  Otherwise I’m not available for normal consulting or work.  Thanks!