Intrigo has a temp position open for the next few weeks, $10/hr. Michael asked that I spread the word.

I need a note taker to accompany me to client meetings over the next couple weeks. This individual must type fast, listen well, and act professional at all times. Meetings will occur sporadically between 8-5pm. The position starts at $10/hour.

Please contact me (Michael Kelly) via phone 520-225-9504 or email: michael@intrigomedia.com

Good grief. On the same day that the BBC published a story on the seemingly embarrasing difference between Chinese and English math comprehension requirements (which I mentioned earlier here), they report that students are actually being encouraged to drop higher math courses in order to inflate the university’s standing on league tables.

Update: the link to sztywny’s blog entry has been fixed. Use the link in this summary rather than the one on Slashdot, which is outdated

My summary of a great blog post by “sztywny”, a young Polish computer science blogger, that made it to the frontpage of Slashdot.

Many of the questions that make it to the Ask Slashdot pages come from young and aspiring programmers wanting to know the role math and education play in the profession, or what makes certain programmers so much more productive than others, or what the future of the craft will look like. One young programmer by the name of Jarosaw “sztywny” Rzeszótko decided to ask these types of questions (and more) to the programmers he admired the most who also, it turns out, happen to be some of the most influential computer scientists and programmers of the last several decades. The result? Most of them happily responded. The results include the following: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Tim Bray (XML, Atom), Guido Van Rossum (Python), Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmer), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails Framework), and Googlers Steve Yegge and Peter Norvig.

You can either be glad that you didn’t take math in China, or lament the waning educational systems of the West. This BBC article shows the stunning difference between a Chinese undergraduate entrance exam question and an English university’s exam question for first year students. Ouch.

It’s come to my attention recently that I hate server administration. Ok, so maybe that occurred to me not-so-recently. I just know that I would rather spend the rest of the entirety of my life coding than spend the rest of my week configuring Apache. Ok, so that’s a lie, too. But only kind of.

In any case, while I don’t really spend that much time inside of Linux configuration files, it’s enough to annoy me, and if past performance is any indication of future growth (which it’s not, just humor me) then my work time is about to get a lot more configurey. (I’m vying for the worst made up word ever, how’d I do?).

So, I’m entertaining the idea of bringing on a part-time Linux server admin to take over the crap that I hate doing to play an important and appreciated role on the Intrigo team. Our needs are fairly modest: we make web applications, mostly for small businesses. We have just a few servers, some internally to support our staff, development and testing and some outsourced to host our clients’ applications. It’s been a little over a year since we started, however, and the limitations of our setup are… *ehem* starting to show.

So, if you or anyone you know (forward this on to geeky friends looking for work) might have what we’re looking for, let Michael or I know! Also, we’re always looking for highly skilled programmers (especially those already trained in web development).

And oh yeah, here’s as close to a ‘job description’ as I’m going to write tonight:

Position Info

Intrigo is looking to hire someone part time (or as a contractor) to manage our internal Linux installations. We need someone who has experience or can easily pick up:

Subversion. Our developers use it for source control, but we want to add Apache WebDAV support for our non-technical staff and make it integrate seamlessly into Windows/OSX (both OSes seem to support this, sort of).

Apache/PHP - pretty typical installation. Currently we outsource our web hosting (dedicated boxes, but no root). We’re considering putting a couple of our clients on our own boxes (either in house or co-location), mostly because our clients’ applications are outgrowing our dedicated boxes (and even then our host is not what I would call a ‘dedicated box specialist’) but also because we want the extra flexibility that comes with being able to configure our environment. We’re also considering virtualization, but have limited experience with it, so if you have experience there (good or bad!) we’d love to hear about it.

MySQL - just the basics here, though we anticipate needing rudimentary replication and/or clustering within 6 months.

Shell Automation - If you’re really good at shell scripting and process automation that’s a huge plus.

Also, probably some really esoteric and critical piece of software that I’m forgetting.

Commitment would probably be 10 hours a week or intermittently as new things arise. 20-30 hrs/week if we get some really big ideas or if things on our current hardware gets out of hand more quickly than expected.

Send emails to Michael Kelly (michael@intrigomedia.com) or myself (nathan@intrigomedia.com)!