When I was in America, I had the pleasure of talking to a lot of Americans. Americans are fun. As soon as they hear the Australian accent they say something along the lines of “Oh, you’re from Australia?! I love Australia!”.
While I was there, I was thinking that there’s just so much work out in the world. So many people doing super interesting things. I started to think that perhaps I should take a break from “shotgun consulting” again, but only if I could find one thing that I was super passionate about.
I was courted by so many different companies when I was at GoGaRuco and Strangeloop and while I was in Chicago. Stuff ranging from a joking “Screw those guys, come work for us!” to more serious “We’ll do whatever it takes you get you on board”. You know what’s a really good feeling? Being wanted. It’s so amazing. So thanks to those companies and their employees for their offers.
While I was in Chicago, I got into some serious-type discussions with two companies. One of them was Groupon, where I sat for about a week doing work remotely for RubyX. I think they have an amazing team at Groupon (including people like Bo Jeanes, who I am very good friends with), but it’s a bit too large for what I wanted to do.
On the very same day that these serious-type discussions happened with Groupon, the same kind of discussions started with a slightly smaller company called Spree Commerce. Sean and I started talking about a Community Manager position that he wanted to fill, a position that involves full-time open source work and talking with members of the community seeing to their needs. Spree has $1.1 million dollars of funding, which will go into some pretty exciting projects.
That is precisely the thing I am passionate about: making a product and the community around it better. Spree has a great platform and it will only get better with time.
For instance, we have just undertaken work to move all of Spree’s functionality into a namespace. This will be merged back into themaster branch next week. This means that if you want to have a Product model in your application and still want to use Spree’s then that’s entirely possible. I go into more information in this lengthy post on the Google Group about what the namespacing means.
I’m excited to start officially at Spree next week and I wish RubyX all the best for their future endeavours. If you want a crack team people to build your Rails application, RubyX is that team.