At my new job … HiiDef / Goodsie

It’s been too long (as usual) between my posts. But I honestly hope to remedy that now. For the last year-ish of my life I’ve made very scant blog posts. Primarily because I was working at Zend as Editor-in-Chief of DevZone and the bulk of my creative writing juices were being spent there. It’s amazingly hard to focus on writing in two places at once.

But as of 2 weeks ago, I started my new job and I’ve been very excited about it so far. I’ve joined the team over at HiiDef, which is a web incubator/holding company for lack of a better description. Basically they come up with some great web 2.0 styled websites, so far, more focused in nature, and they bring them to life. It’s a very eclectic team of people that are 100% remote though mostly clustered on the East Coast of the US. They’ve focused on hiring the ‘right people’ regardless of what technology base said people used. And hence with their three projects they currently have going, one is Python/Django, one is Ruby on Rails and the other, is PHP.

That’s where I came in. Their newest product is Goodsie, which is built on PHP/MySQL. It’s a website that’s designed to make it easy for people to create a storefront online and sell their goods. But to offer an easy way to truly configure that website to be a custom storefront, versus other options (Ebay, Etsy), where things are far more cookie cutter.

It’s “[pretty close]” to launching. Though without a firm date. I was brought on board to take over as Lead Developer for the project which had previously been worked on by a part-time contractor, so that they could have a full-time guy to take it from 80% to launch and beyond.

Anyway, it’s been an exciting first couple weeks and everyone here is a great attitude about how a company should be run and the value of employees.

The future is looking bright. (Though a bit covered in snow at the moment)