Web Developer Person Specification

Background Dextrous Web produce exemplary websites for the public sector.

Dextrous Web was founded with a specific mission in mind. We want to build exemplary, smart web projects for the public sector. We think that Government can get much more out of the web than it does, and create much better websites than it has, and we want to help make that happen.

We've spent the last couple of years doing all sorts of things: from building simple but important websites for consultations and programmes to crowdsourcing datasets for MySociety, munging PDFs into XML to make interactive consultation tools and helping Government departments to put RDFa into their web pages.

Job Specification: Web Developer

Title: Developer

Salary: Negotiable

Start Date: August 2010

The Dextrous Web is looking for a programmer to work on a wide variety of projects for clients. You'll be creating world-class websites for a variety of clients in the public sector.

Responsibilities This role's responsibilities are:

 Work as required on various projects for our clients  Maintain and enhance existing projects  Maintain and enhance the various exciting development tools we've produced

Person Specification The successful candidate will be an intelligent, motivated and web-savvy person with a public service ethos. They are a first-class programmer with a technical mind and an eye for detail and precision. They enjoy experimenting with new tools and ideas and are able to learn quickly. They combine a love of elegant solutions with a pragmatic attitude, and understand that developing in a commercial environment brings constraints.

t: 020 7940 4780 e: [email protected] w: http://thedextrousweb.com address: Langdale House, 11 Marshalsea Rd, SE1 1EN The Dextrous Web Ltd, registered in England and Wales no. 6617101. Registered office: 11 Tufnell Mansions, 73 Anson Road, N7 0AT

Page 1 of 3 Skills and Abilities The successful candidate must:

 Be organised, motivated and capable of independent work  Have excellent written and spoken English  Be able to create production-quality code with minimal assistance, using: ◦ PHP and Ruby ◦ Git ◦ SQL, preferably with MySQL and/or Postgres ◦ (X)HTML/CSS ◦ Javascript ◦ Apache and general linux sysadmin

Successful candidates will probably:

 Be able to assist clients directly when they experience problems. This requires patience and an ability to see things from the client's perspective, and describe complex things in simple terms  Be familiar with: ◦ Cucumber ◦ Capistrano ◦ Haml/Sass ◦ JSON, YAML, ATOM/RSS, etc ◦ RESTful architectures and the HTTP protocol

Qualifications & Experience The successful candidate must:

 Be a savvy web-native who uses online tools daily

Successful candidates will probably:

 Be a graduate  Have some interest in government and public service  Have been developing things for the web or desktop for some time, professionally or otherwise

Page 2 of 3 Character and Personal Qualities The successful candidate must:

 Be enthusiastic about learning new things and enjoy grappling with difficult problems and solving them  Have a “starter-finisher” personality  Be pragmatic as well as having an eye for elegant solutions  Have a technical mind and an eye for detail and precision

Successful candidates will probably:

 Be able to relate to non-technical people and help them understand things  Be excited by the prospect working within a young and growing company  Intend to remain in the role for 2-3 years

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