neodude

A lot of YC non-profits produce "actual software". I know Watsi does, because I run the product and engineering team there.

Watsi (YCW13) / SF / Full-stack engineers (onsite)

Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform that enables anyone to directly fund healthcare for people around the world.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

We’re a team of engineers, designers, doctors, and marketers working at Watsi because we believe that everyone, everywhere deserves access to healthcare. We move fast, take risks, and come to work every day excited about building an organization that matters more than we do.

We’re looking for a full-stack engineer to join our eight-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate is a self-directed, product-focused generalist who’s excited to work on whatever is needed to bring healthcare to the world – everything from optimizing donation flows to designing a patient management system for hospitals.

If this sounds interesting to you, please send us an email at jobs@watsi.org, include your linkedin, github, etc, and tell us a little about yourself.

For more about what we do and what it’s like to work at Watsi, check out our recent trips to Guatemala (http://exposure.watsi.org/saying-yes), Cambodia (http://exposure.watsi.org/rehabilitation-nation), and East Africa (http://exposure.watsi.org/a-dose-of-perspective)

Hey there, Thomas from Watsi here. We actually used to have a "Donate monthly" checkout during the one-time donation flow, but in the several months that the checkbox was live, I think exactly one person ever checked it. We also have a link to the Universal Fund after you make a one-time donation, and that's seen good conversions.

That said, I definitely agree that there are other ways to solicit a donor to join the Universal Fund during / after a one-time donation. Our next idea for a test is to add a quick option immediately after a one-time donation that let's you sign up right there, something like, "Donate $5 every month! [Yes] / [No]".

No worries - I'll fix that for you right now! Look for an email in your inbox shortly.

Running out of money is the most common way for a startup to die, so successfully living in SF on the cheap certainly mitigates that.

A quick clarification here: joining the Universal Fund doesn't mean that we charge your credit card an amount every month and you have no idea where or who your donation is going towards. Every month, we automatically pick a patient your donation goes towards, and you get an email with the patient's story, and an update email after the patient's medical procedure.

Thomas from Watsi here! When we were initially building the recurring donation feature, we experimented with using Stripe's recurring billing functionality, but we ended up building our own monthly charging (still through Stripe's API). Stripe's feature is more designed for fixed-price "plans" that folks can sign up for - i.e., SaaS products, rather than the Universal Fund's pick-your-own-amount recurring charge.

Where do you draw the line between "creating new software" and a "large scale project"? Every large scale project starts as a small project, so at some point you must decide to start writing tests; and then you have the burden of backfilling 'em.

Watsi – http://watsi.org – San Francisco, CA; FULLTIME, possible VISA

Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform that enables anyone to directly fund healthcare for people around the world.

~~~~~~~~~~

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

~~~~~~~~~~

We’re a team of developers, designers, doctors, and marketers working at Watsi because we believe that everyone, everywhere deserves access to healthcare. We move fast, take risks, and come to work every day excited about building an organization that matters more than we do.

We’re looking for a full-stack developer (engineer #2) to join our five-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate is an experienced, product-focused generalist who wants to use their skills to bring healthcare to the world. Our stack is Rails, Backbone.js, SCSS, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Heroku, RSpec, and Jasmine. You don't have to be familiar with our stack, but you do need to learn fast :)

If you’re interested in learning more, please send whatever info you have (linkedin, github, personal site) to jobs@watsi.org.

For more info, check out our recent trip to East Africa - http://exposure.watsi.org/a-dose-of-perspective.

Mike, I'm curious if you think Sidekiq suffers from a similar issue on Heroku, and what the solutions - ideas or already implemented - look like?

San Francisco, CA Pivotal Labs - FULLTIME, REMOTE, H1B. We're one of the best agile development consultancies around. We're looking for sharp, empathetic software developers, mainly working on web (Rails, JS) and mobile (iPhone, Android) projects. Past clients include Groupon, Twitter, Google, Gowalla. We also build Pivotal Tracker, an agile project management tool. You don't have to be an expert in Rails or the mobile frameworks to get a job here - as long as you are pleasant to work with and willing to learn, that's good enough. Since we pair every day, you'll pick up what you need to know very quickly. After just a month at Pivotal I felt I had improved leaps and bounds as a developer and learnt a tremendous amount about Rails that I didn't know before. Give me a ping - thomas@pivotallabs.com. Read more about how we work: http://pivotallabs.com/jobs/welcome

The company is doing great, has a solid growth strategy and headed for an IPO. Why wouldn't you invest in a company like that?

Not all VCs are early-stage, high-risk investors.

San Francisco, CA

Pivotal Labs - FULLTIME, INTERN, REMOTE, H1B.

We're one of the best agile development consultancies around. We're looking for sharp, empathetic software developers, mainly working in web (Rails) and mobile (iPhone, Android) projects. Past clients include Groupon, Twitter, Google, Gowalla. We also build Pivotal Tracker, an agile project management tool.

You don't have to be an expert in Rails or the mobile frameworks to get a job here - as long as you are pleasant to work with and willing to learn, that's good enough. Since we pair every day, you'll pick up what you need to know very quickly. After just a month at Pivotal I felt I had improved leaps and bounds as a developer and learnt a tremendous amount about Rails that I didn't know before.

Give me a ping - thomas@pivotallabs.com. Read more about how we work: http://pivotallabs.com/jobs/welcome

From the author's about page, he says he went to Southern Illinois University.

Just because you pre-install something on my phone doesn't mean I'm going to use it. Think pre-installing AOL on those Dell laptops..

A short list from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_ca...

If you're only developing one application, I believe you can just buy the $80 license. That's amazingly inexpensive for such a stellar piece of software.

The challenge for Orbs is to come up with a way to be profitable without make it too expensive for casual use.

Counter-anecdote: I just got rejected from a startup because I was too inexperienced, despite having 4+ years of professional experience under my belt. They said there's no reason why I wouldn't be awesome, but I've just done too little for them to know for sure.

Quora's job postings set a very high bar for applicants: http://www.quora.com/jobs

If SMrF cares to share, I'd be curious to hear how his compulsion affected his relationship with his wife. Did she agree with the crazy hours? What did she do when you were crying yourself to sleep? It sounds like a horrible experience to watch a loved one go through.

It's nice to see so many gay geeks 'come out' on this thread. I had assumed I was the only one. Sexuality is such an infrequent topic on HN.

@asym - are you in San Francisco? I've gone (and am still going) through some similar issues. I see you rock climb too, we should hit the gym together sometime and chat face-to-face.

windsurfer, are you trying to find startup ideas? ;)

One of the questions you need to ask is: what you are going to do with all that data? If all you need is to store the data and never read it again except sequentially, then flat log files are probably the best way. But if you ever need to, say, calculate aggregates or do any kind of visualization, a database would probably be a better initial choice.

You'll want to keep in mind that whatever you choose should be pretty flexible, because as you discover more about the analytics you're providing, you'll need to slice and dice that data differently. You won't know what data and how it will answer the questions until you know the questions.

Iridesco, the company behind Harvest (a time-tracking app), also made something similar, called Coop - http://coopapp.com

I'm Thomas, and I work at New Relic. I wore a green jacket. New Relic is looking for Rails engineers, so give me a ping if you're interested.

and 100x the market?

So you're saying that randomly hooking up with many people is like BitTorrent?

I'm taking the summer quarter off from Monday, so I'll see what happens. I definitely agree with your grandfather, though - I have been in college for two years, and I've witnessed the polishing on myself.

I've been talking to a lot (4+) of people with PhDs, both counselor and not, regularly for over a year now. I think I understand what you mean by getting in touch with my feelings. It's difficult to do it myself, and since I have so many theories, difficult to do with anyone else, as well.

I've been a little obsessive in the replying. I certainly don't mean to be rude! I think I'm too impulsive, and trying to have the wrong kind of conversation here.

Thanks, though, for your time.