TAKE THE PROGRAMMING CHALLENGE
Resumes are a bit, well, meh.
Real code?
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Every developer at Art+Logic has written a clean, elegant solution to our Programming Challenge.
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10 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT
ART+LOGIC
The best software is a marriage of business goals, design, and code. We specialize in multi-faceted, cross-platform projects with complex technical requirements, beautiful design, and grand business goals.
1. We craft beautiful custom software for great clients
2. We work with developers distributed across the US and Canada
We like to say that we don’t telecommute, because there’s no place for us to telecommute to. If you’ve had bad experiences working remotely in the past because you’ve been left out of what was happening in ‘the office’ — we’re different. The tools, infrastructure, and work practices that we’ve adopted over the years let us work together effectively, efficiently, and very collaboratively without regard to the physical distances between any two of us.
3. We work with an extensive range of languages and technologies
There’s a great opportunity for developers who are intent on staying current and expanding their skills.
4. We're generalists (in general)
You’ve probably worked with someone who tries to meet every request with the same response, whether because it’s what they learned a decade ago and they haven’t kept up with the field, or because they’re always looking for excuses to use the latest bit of shiny tech that’s not really ready for use in production. We don’t have room for those developers.
5. We develop applications, even when we're developing for the web
6. We staff our projects using small, developer-driven teams
7. We thrive on long-term relationships
8. We seek and value awesomeness
9. What you can do + What you've done before
This is why every developer who works at Art+Logic had to complete and submit code that completes the Programming Challenge. It’s not a puzzle — we don’t care if you know why manhole covers are round or how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. So far, none of our clients have hired us to solve puzzles.
Instead, the Programming Challenge is a short set of programming tasks that aren’t that different from ones that might be assigned as part of a real project, so you have an opportunity to audition for us under something similar to actual project conditions. Solutions must not only work correctly according to the requirements laid out in the challenge instructions, but the code itself needs to be impressive enough to the developer reviewing it that she recommends moving you forward in the process.
10. We look for a different kind of programmer, differently
We don’t do that.
We’re always looking for great developers, whether we have an immediate place for them or not. Our recruiting process runs continuously in the background, identifying people we’d like to work with as soon as an appropriate opportunity surfaces. When the rate of new projects starting exceeds the rate of existing projects being completed, we reach out to that group of already vetted developers, looking for the best match of skills, availability, and likelihood of long-term success at Art+Logic.
WORKING AT ART+LOGIC
We’re a small, friendly and talented team. We craft beautiful digital solutions for awesome clients across all platforms.
HOURS & LOCATION
Art+Logic developers all work remotely from across the US and Canada. Most of us work from our home offices, but some of us prefer to rent office space or work at a coworking facility. We do our best to accommodate the unique schedule and work-style requirements of our people, but because our work is highly collaborative within project teams, it’s important that everyone have a reasonable amount of overlap with traditional middle-of-the-day business hours. This means that we’re not a suitable option for anyone looking to pick up a handful of night & weekend moonlighting hours. We’re only considering developers who are able to regularly work 30 or more billable hours per week.
TOOLS & INFRASTRUCTURE
Being a distributed company is built into Art+Logic’s DNA — since being founded in 1991, we’ve acquired, built, and stumbled across tools and practices that let us work efficiently and productively, even though no two of us are in the same location.
For most of our collaboration, we rely on the suite of tools provided as part of Google Apps for Business — we use Docs for shared documents, Groups for project-specific communications (both within the team and between Art+Logic and clients), and Hangouts/GChat for real-time voice/video communication.
After evaluating all of the open source and commercial project management and task/bug tracking systems, we decided to build a homemade system called Trantor to handle these issues, as well as less visible, but crucial things like invoicing clients for the work we’ve done. We use git for source control.
COLLABORATION & TEAMS
We prefer to work with relatively small project teams at Art+Logic. Every project consists of at least a project manager/developer, with additional assistance from our QA and design departments as needed. Projects scale up from there, typically maxing out somewhere between 5-7 developers.
Project Managers are responsible for:
- All technical communications with the client
- Collaborating with clients to define and specify the project’s requirements
- Breaking milestone requirements into higher level features, and further subdividing features into well-defined development tasks
- Assigning tasks to developers on the team (and verifying that tasks are completed correctly and completely)
- Working with the client to sequence the feature requirements into a series of iterative milestone plans
- Managing the project’s budget
Additional support is provided on each project by an Account Manager, who is responsible for maintaining a healthy business relationship with the client and a Project Supervisor, who helps ensure that each project runs smoothly, whether from a standpoint of verifying that Art+Logic practices and policies are being followed or ensuring that the project is adequately staffed for its actual needs.
PRACTICES & PHILOSOPHY
All code written for Art+Logic projects follows a programming style guide that traces its roots back to a style guide agreed on by our founders in 1991. By following a common Art+Logic style on all of our projects, it becomes much easier for developers to move between projects. There’s little time wasted when joining a project team wondering where certain types of files should be stored, or rehashing the tired debate of tabs-vs-spaces. Even though we typically move from client to client when moving between projects, working on each of those projects should feel like working on an Art+Logic project.
You can read our Programming Style Guide and also our Development Practices Manifesto, which establishes our overall ethos of how software development should be approached.
We want to be the place where you can do the best work of your career.
Art+Logic is an EEO advocate. We don’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, national origin, age (over 40), or other protected veteran status.