Drupalize.Me is Hiring!

Update Sept. 24, 2014: We've updated the position to a trainer and developer position, instead of just a developer. I've revised the position description in my post below to explain more about that role on our team, and some additional travel requirements. 

 

Drupalize.Me is looking for a Drupal developer and trainer to join our team. You can skip to the summary and application form, but here's a little more context and information about what it's like to work here:

 

As the Director of Education at Lullabot, our parent company, I live and breathe Drupalize.Me. I have the pleasure of working with seven other people who challenge and support me, and Drupalize.Me, on a daily basis. Our team is 100% focused on this site, the tutorials we produce, and our members. We're passionate and hard-working, we believe in a good laugh, and making sure that we balance work with the other important things in our lives. Above all, my number one reason for working here is the warm, smart, imaginative people I'm surrounded by. It's an inspiration to go to work every day. We thrive on sharing, and being focused on education with our product, we are particularly fond of learning new things and disseminating that knowledge in many different ways. Whether it is colleagues sharing a new tool or idea with each other, or with the world, we take joy in exploring the unknown and inviting others along for the ride.

 

Working on a product, instead of providing services to clients, means that we are our own client. We can work at a sane pace and take the time to get things right. Even more importantly, since we are always working on this project, we get to truly understand all of the moving pieces and refine, refine, and refine, both the work we produce, and the processes we use to get our work done. We're not afraid to challenge the "way we've always done it" and try new things out when we see room for improvement. While I'm the director, and therefore the product owner, many decisions for Drupalize.Me are made by the team as a whole. We're all in this together, and each person brings their own experience and passion to the conversation to make Drupalize.Me what it is.

 

For the day-to-day work as a developer we're in our Github queue, fixing bugs, hashing out the finer points of an implementation, and doing code reviews of each others work. At the same time we are brainstorming and working on bigger improvements to the site, like completely re-thinking our video delivery and player, or figuring out how to migrate our podcasts into the site. If you'd like to understand our development workflow and project management philosophy, you can read a process blog post from earlier this year about it. We've already iterated on this process to add some improvements, related to our move to Github, but the gist of the process is still the same.

 

As a Drupalize.Me trainer, we spend part of our time learning new things, working with the other trainers to develop curriculum, writing out lesson plans, and yes, sitting down in front of a camera to share what we've learned. All of the trainers are constantly learning and helping each other improve, and just like with our development processes, we are always striving to improve our curriculum and production methods. The balance between trainer work and development shifts based on team priorities, but generally each person has set responsibilities in each quarter and how we alot the time to get our work done is largely up to us.

 

We communicate regularly through written form on IRC, Github issues, hackpads, and email. To keep in touch more on the human side, we have a weekly team hangout to touch base and discuss big things on the team's radar, in addition to two weekly Lullabot company-wide calls. Of course, there are a smattering of other calls or hangouts as well, depending on what we're working on, what projects need brainstorming, or if we just feel like catching up with each other. In addition to site-building and development work, everyone on the team writes regular blog posts (most often on Drupal 8 these days) and spends part of one day a week chatting with our members through customer support.

 

Our work days and times are pretty flexible, in that as long as you can make the phone calls we have scheduled, and be around to answer questions for part of the day, you're pretty much free to work when and where you want. We don't log time since we don't have clients to bill, and we trust everyone to get their work done. Being that our team is spread out from US Pacific to Central European time zones, we generally use US east coast time as our baseline time and schedule most calls in the middle of the US east coast day to find a middle ground in our schedules. That means that some, like me living in Copenhagen, work earlier in the US day, and others, like Amber living in Portland, work later, but we still have several hours of overlap between everyone on the team. There's more information about working at a distributed company on the Lullabot.com jobs page.

 

Since nothing beats real face time with human beings we also gather together several times a year. As a trainer on our team you'll have to travel at least six times a year, and more likely eight times. At a minimum, for the entire team, we have the annual Lullabot all-company retreat, a Drupalize.Me team retreat, a Lullabot Developer and Designer retreat, and the whole Drupalize.Me team attends DrupalCon North America. In addition, trainers also attend several content sprints each year, where we hash out training and content issues together, which are variable but number from two to four in a given year. Lullabot also provides an event and education budget for every employee, so you can use that to travel to even more events, if you really love to travel. Alternatively, you can use that to attend online conferences, buy books, pay for online courses, etc., from the comfort of home. (You can read more about benefits on Lullabot.com.)

 

If you love learning, sharing what you learn, and you've got solid Drupal development experience, then you really should check out our job posting and introduce yourself. I look forward to meeting you.