Candidature - Matjaz Gregoric

Loic Dachary suggests to complete coverage on jquery.cardstories.js http://tickets.farsides.com/issues/120

============   Questions ============

== Intro/background ==

* Can you describe yourself briefly? What did you work on so far ?

I have a B.S in Physics. I have been working as a software developer full time ever since I graduated. I have been programming for the web most of the time. At the beginning of my career I worked mostly with Python and the TurboGears framework, but switched to using Ruby on Rails about 2 years ago. Lately I have been very interested in Clojure but unfortunately didn't yet get a chance to use it professionally.

* Why are you looking at a new job? And why with Farsides?

I am looking for a new job because I not satisfied with my current full-time position. The salary is low, the management prefers quickly produced code over well-developed and tested code, and I feel like I would be stagnating professionally if I didn't move further. One of the main things that drives me is trying to constantly improve my professional skills and learn new concepts and technologies and I feel I've reached a point where I wouldn't be improving much if I stayed with my current employer much longer.

I can imagine developing games being a lot of fun. I enjoy working as a software developer, but some extra fun never hurts. Since I never developed games before, this also means I would learn something new, which would make me happy.

I am very pleased to know that you work transparently and publish your code under a Free license. I like the OSS community and my current employer hasn't been very supportive in this area.

I have spent most of my career working in an agile environment, most of the time working from home, so your decentralised model would suit me very well.

* Are you looking for a part time or a full time ? If part time, how many days or half days per week ?

I am looking for full time eventually, although wouldn't mind if I start out part time to see how well we can work together. At first, I could do 3 half days, but we can also discuss other arrangements.

* How much were you earning in your last job ?

I currently earn about 13 EUR/hour at my full time regular job.

* How much do you wish to earn at Farsides ?

I would be happy with 20 EUR/hour.

* Are you currently a freelancer ?

No, I have a full-time regular job. I do manage to occasionally work on some extra projects, although since my baby son was born (six months ago) I didn't have a lot of extra time

* Where do you live ?

I live in Slovenia, a small country in Europe.

== Technical ==

Don't worry if you don't have experience in some areas - working is more fun when we have something to learn : )

* What is the operating system you have the most experience with?

That's an interesting question :) I use a ThinkPad laptop which came preinstalled with Windows Vista. Despite Vista's bad reputation it has been the most stable system I have ever used, so I never really found a reason to switch to another OS. I am however also familiar with linux - most of the projects I have done have been deployed on linux.

* What are your favorites development languages/frameworks?

I mostly use Ruby on Rails professionally, but I am also a fan of Sinatra (which is small Ruby web framework). I am currently very excited about Clojure and the web development ecosystem has been growing around it (Ring, Compojure, Aleph...).

* Did you contribute to free software projects already (code or other) ? (if yes, please include a link)

Yes, I did make small contributions to various libraries, most can be seen from my github profile:

https://github.com/mtyaka

I made the most substantial contributions to leiningen, which is a build tool for Clojure. I have been making sure it works well on Windows (Windows support was very poor when I began using leiningen):

https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/contributors

My favorite contribution to any OSS project is probably a patch for a JRuby issue that caused Rails sessions to fail under certain circumstances (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-4442 and http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JRUBY-3530): https://github.com/mtyaka/jruby/commit/62c53837907da206e2915a8f357b813dc4167ae3

* What is your experience with the following - Object oriented development:

I am experienced with OOP concepts.

- git:

I use git daily.

- Symfony:

I have no experience with Symfony, and although I have used PHP on a couple of projects, I cannot say that I am a PHP expert.

- Facebook/social network APIs:

I don't have much experience in this area, but would enjoy getting more familiar with it.

- Unit tests:

I write unit tests and believe all production-quality code should come with an extensive test suite.

- Online communities

Some of the applications that I've built did require some social network type functionality, although I never worked on an application that would be completely centered around a community, but this is something that I am very interested in.

- Games:

When I was learning JavaScript, I wrote a half functioning toy implementation of Tetris. I don't have any other game developing experience beyond that, but again this is something that I would like to experience.

- SCRUM:

I have been working in an agile environment for my entire career, but I've never really practiced any formal methodologies, such as SCRUM. I don't think it would be hard for me to get used to it, though.