Just after my first post I was seriously looking for work. I had been looking since around october 2008, but for some strange reason the larger companies weren’t hiring (Global Financial Hype Crisis?). So I had to spread my search a bit thinner and a bit lower than I would have liked. Turns out that was a good decision.
tjoos.com is a start up company in Sydney, Australia which aims to provide the best quantity and quality index of online coupon codes to the world. At the moment the world consists of the United States and the United Kingdom, but we are hoping to expand greatly in this regard. In fact we have lots of great plans for where we can take the website in the future.
Working at tjoos since March has been a blast. There are daily foosball competitions with our room mates Grad Connection and we have a tonne of extras that you would only really expect at a larger company, not a startup of 4 people (so far).
In addition to the awesome work place, we have developed some cool technologies that make our lives easier in terms of site management. One thing to note is that the site is developed entirely in javascript, including on the server side. Not many people know this about ASP Classic, but you can specify the use of the JScript scripting engine as the type of scripting environment for your web pages. And at tjoos we use this to create a web page model that runs on both the server and the client. While we have not pushed a version of the site that runs entirely in javascript on the client live, the ability to do so has gone into the design of our custom web framework.
In fact we are working hard on the second iteration of this framework, which at some later stage we hope to open source (and attempt to provide some compatibility with other server environments, not just IIS/ASP). Because of this immersion in javascript, I feel I have come to appreciate this misunderstood programming language for what it is underneath its java/c like skin, a functional OO language.
This is no longer an endorsement of tjoos.com (which was acquired, and then re-acquired). While working there was fun for a while, taking on the online coupon space is not what I want to do with my life going forward. I am also glad to see that server side javascript has found a proper place with the node.js project.