Squarespace Looking for Full-time Scaling Expert

Interested in helping a cutting-edge, high-growth startup scale? Squarespace, which was profiled here last year in Squarespace Architecture - A Grid Handles Hundreds of Millions of Requests a Month and also hosts this blog, is currently in the market for a crack scalability engineer to help build out its cloud infrastructure. Squarespace is very excited about finding a full-time scaling expert.

Interested applicants should go to http://www.squarespace.com/jobs-software-engineer for more information.



If you would like to advertise your critical, hard to fill job opeinings on HighScalability, please contact us and we'll get it setup for you.

Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of Release Candidate 2 for ASP.NET MVC 2.

After receiving feedback from our last release candidate back in December, we decided it would be prudent to have one more release candidate that incorporated the feedback. You can read the release notes for everything that changed, there’s not a whole lot.

The biggest change in this release was described by Brad Wilson in his blog post on Input Validation vs. Model Validation in ASP.NET MVC. Also included in this release are an assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements.

The window to provide feedback on this release is going to be very short as we are closing in on the RTM. If you want to provide input into this release, please do take the bits for a spin as soon as possible. I’m pretty excited about this release as I can see the end of the tunnel fast approaching. :)

At this point, we’ll only be taking recall class bugs for ASP.NET MVC 2. All other bug reports will be filed against ASP.NET MVC 3. Sometime in the near future, I’ll start sharing some of our planning around that. How exciting!

Oh, and if you missed the link to the Download Details page at the beginning of this post, here it is again.

We also posted the source code and futures assembly on our Codeplex Site.

In the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If you hire sales and marketing staff too early, they don’t really get much traction, and you may start to think that sales and marketing are a waste of time. This led me, in the early years, to believe that a healthy software company should have a lot of real software developers and maybe no sales and marketing.

At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer... even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify. In the US Marines everyone, even the cooks, is a rifleman. Of course that’s because the cooks are in friggin Afghanistan getting shot at so they better be riflemen, whereas our receptionist almost never has to drop into the source code and bang out a class. Almost never.

Over time, though, as your product gets better and better, the more sales and marketing people you hire, the more you sell.

That’s because programmers multiply salespeople, and vice-versa.

I’m a nerd, so I’ll be real math-y about this. Define the quality of your code on a scale from 0 to 1.

0 means your product solves absolutely no problems for anybody so nobody in their right mind would ever buy it. Microsoft Bob.

1 means that every single person on Earth, if they bought your software, would be net happier, even after paying your fee.

Your software starts at 0 and slowly climbs up the hill.

If everybody in the world knew about your software and was encouraged to evaluate it, the number that would buy it would be (Earth population) x Quality.

Sales and marketing functions exist to encourage earthlings to find out about your software and evaluate it. These functions will have no effect on sales if your quality is extremely low. But as the quality gets higher, the value of sales and marketing goes up, commensurately. Double the quality, and the same sales effort yields double the revenue.

The population of the planet is so large, and the effect of sales and marketing so hard to scale, that by the time your product is really great, the optimal ratio might be very heavily tilted in favor of sales and marketing. Large software companies might have 5 or 10 or 20 people in the sales organization for every developer.

This explains, among other things, why US software companies can’t expect to get sustainable advantage by offshoring software development to cheaper countries. If a developer in Russia, India, or China costs 50% as much as a developer in Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston, but software development is only 10% of your costs, you can only get a 5% advantage from offshoring development. The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed.

It is not the case (as commonly believed by nerds) that marketing is a substitute for code quality. The best marketing in the world cannot force people to pay for a useless product.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

This is an excerpt from my article Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing in the Ambient Cloud.

As I was writing an article on the architecture of the Storm Botnet, I couldn't help but notice the deep similarity of how Storm works and changes we're seeing in the evolution of political systems. In particular, the rise of the virtual-state. As crazy as this may sound, I think this is also the direction applications will need follow to survive in a complex world of billions of compute devices.

You may have already heard of virtual corporations. Virtual corporations are companies with limited office space, a distributed workforce, and production facilities located wherever it is profitable to locate them. The idea is to stay lean and compete using the rapid development and introduction of new products into high value-added markets. If you spot a market opportunity with a small time window, building your own factories and hiring and engineering team simply isn't an option. Building factories is a bit old fashioned and is left to the select few. These days you get an idea for a product and contract out everything else you possibly can. It doesn't really matter where you are located or where any of your partners are located. If part of your product requires a specialized microprocessor, for example, you'll contract out the R&D and the design. The manufacture will be contracted out to a virtual fab, then the chip will be sent to a contract manufacturing service for integration. Look ma, no hands.

Futurists say land doesn't matter anymore. Nations don't matter anymore. Entire relationships are abstractly represented by flows of money, contracts, information, and products between all these different agents. Interestingly enough, what technology is the absolute master of managing flows? Applications! But we are getting ahead of ourselves here.