Making the move from PHP to Rails

What we couldn’t have foreseen was that in bringing on a new developer we would actually completely review our entire code base and reevaluate the platform we had been building on. With the keen insight of Eric Junker, a PHP developer at Dice.com by day, the Flaggpole team pulled the plug on our PHP-based application and has been hard at work rewriting everything for Ruby on Rails. What we’ve ended up with is a snappier application that has a great future ahead of it.

The future of our application is what brings us to this post. While our team has been heads down on this new version of Flaggpole for the past several months, we’ve still got a long way to go. That’s where you (or someone you know) comes in.

Calling all Rails developers!

If you are a developer with Rails (or another dynamic language) experience that is looking for a challenge and a chance to be part of something exciting, we’d like to talk to you. We would love to add another developer (or two!) to our growing team in an effort to speed up the development process and get our application out to our users quicker.

If this sort of thing sounds interesting to you, please review the “official” requirements below and send an email to aaron@flaggpole.com.

Seeking Rails/Web Developer experience

Flaggpole is a place-based social network that connects people through important places. This startup, founded by employees at Amazon and Google, is seeking a web developer interested in helping a new startup get off the ground.

Skills needed:

• Ruby on Rails
• MySQL
• jQuery Javascript
• CSS

The team at Flaggpole has members in both Seattle, Washington and Des Moines, Iowa, and would prefer to work with someone located in either of these cities.

Now that we have enough code in place to prove the functionality of our site, we are looking for an additional web developer who can help take us to the next level – fast.

For the official details, see the posting below:

Seeking PHP developer, Code Igniter experience

Flaggpole is a place-based social network that connects people through important places. This startup, founded by employees at Amazon and Google, is seeking a web developer interested in helping a new startup get off the ground.

Skills needed:

• PHP
• Code Igniter framework
• MySQL
• jQuery Javascript
• CSS

The team at Flaggpole has members in both Seattle, Washington and Des Moines, Iowa, and would prefer to work with someone located in either of these cities.

If you are interested in working with us, please email your credentials to feedback[at]flaggpole.com

Nate explained the basic concept of Flaggpole and how we are utilizing integration with Twitter to notify people of things happening in their neighborhood.

Twitter Road Trip is a project by Mark Simonds, a recently laid off web developer and social media strategist. Mark was laid off in March 2009 and is using his newfound spare time to road trip across the nation interviewing people and companies who are on Twitter and have interesting stories to tell.

140: The Twitter Conference

140 is a Twitter-focused conference organized by the Parnassus Group, taking place May 26-27 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Parnassus is bringing in the top industry gurus to discuss all things Twitter, from understanding its business value to exploring what makes a great Twitter app.

While the conference is largely focused on panel discussions and keynote speakers, there is also a special portion of the conference dedicated to the Launchpad Session, where eight presenting applications will have five minutes each to demo their product and pitch their idea.

In good company with seven other applications

Flaggpole was selected as one of those eight finalists and has been given a chance to participate. One of our co-founders, Nate Heinrich, will be giving our presentation to event attendees. If you’ve not yet registered on Flaggpole, this will be a great time for you to learn more about our platform.

If you are a user on the site, this presentation will still be beneficial to you, as it should outline where the future of Flaggpole is headed and what features are on the near horizon.

We look forward to presenting during the launchpad session and are excited about getting to know the conference attendees. If you see Nate walking around, please grab him and introduce yourself.