​IxDF seeks a Senior Full Stack Developer to shape the future of design education

by Ekin Öcalan | | 9 min read
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The Interaction Design Foundation is the world's most prestigious community and course platform for User Experience designers. We've spent the last 14 years building our community and course platform from scratch – based on a brilliant technology stack. And now we need you to help us build pure awesomeness in version 7, 8, 9, etc! We would love to work with you if you're a senior full stack developer with sublime programming skills acquired from 5+ years of experience.

This is a paid full-time (or possibly part-time) position. You'll be location independent and free to work from wherever you want.

We can offer you:

  • To work in an international team where we truly care about great code, great documentation, great architecture, etc.

  • To have uninterrupted, focused and concentrated time every day to build pure awesomeness and thus accelerate your learning curve.

  • To help shape the future of design education for the benefit of millions of people.

  • To work with the best developers and designers in the world. And learn from them.

  • The ability to work from anywhere - as long as your internet connection allows you to have video-based contact with your colleagues every day.

  • To work with true perfectionists! The development team is a small, high-powered team of 5 full-time staff. In addition, we have 2 Software Testers/QA engineers, and inputs/help from an additional 4 people – as well as from a large community.

  • To meet up with the rest of the team several times a year at interesting destinations like an exotic Thai island or the mountains of Patagonia in Argentina and Chile (see our pictures below).

About you:

  • You love to learn and push your skills to new levels.

  • You have 5+ years of experience working professionally with primarily PHP (OO) and MySQL and secondarily things like HTML5/CSS3/OO JavaScript/JQuery/MVC/GitHub.

  • You write clean, modular, robust code to implement the desired requirements with little or no supervision.

  • You want to help us take our educational platform to the next level: Gamified learning, social features, better mobile version, "little big details", and much more.

  • You want to help build a rock-solid and perfectly architected and documented codebase.

  • You are truly ambitious, result-oriented, friendly, and like to continually improve.

  • You are self-motivated and love to see tangible results.

  • You speak and write acceptable English – not perfect English, just acceptable – since you will be working with people from Turkey, England, Denmark, Russia, Brazil among others.

  • It's a plus if you have worked with at least one statically typed programming language like C, C++, Java, etc.

About the technology stack

We believe we have an awesome technology stack and we have a great (and agile) development process to back that up. You don’t have to be an expert in all of these things. The most important thing is your programming skills and experience and then a lot of experience from other projects.

The technology stack is currently:

  • An awesome PHP Framework (we will let you guess) :-)

  • A fairly clean separation between front-end and back-end code.

  • Flexbox, RequireJS, LESS, and Gulp and some more (we’re open to further suggestions)

  • Nginx with HTTP2 enabled (and thus the ability to architect your JS code more flexibly)

  • Composer

  • GitHub

  • Vagrant (with VirtualBox) and seamless CI and deployment infrastructure.

  • ..and well… lots more

About our work culture

  • We love results, productivity, focus and efficiency – achieved through an approach of "working smarter not harder", a love of what we do, and taking great care of each other and our community.

  • We’re also friendly, compassionate, supportive and bring a sense of fun to the things we do.

  • We value concentration and believe that interruptions, meetings, and egos can kill productivity. That's why work often does not happen at work.

  • We believe awesome results are produced when being in flow. That's why we value location independent work.

  • We celebrate each other’s work and consider what we do a labor of love.

  • We get inspiration from books like this one and this one.

Here is an example chat message from one of the IxDF team members, which shows how we love to continually try to reach new levels of learning and perfection:

“I always try to increase my productivity because I have lots and lots of things which I want to do, and there isn’t enough time, both in professional and private life. Mads’ suggestion of shutting off Skype, my mobile phone and all other communication platforms was simple but powerful and now I’m trying to make it a habit. :-) - Along with doing as much work as possible early in the morning. That way, my most powerful mental time will be spent on the work, and I will be ahead of the day (which is one of the greatest things psychologically — it allows me to be even more productive). No interruptions and clear, finite, fun tasks. Beautiful work conditions. :-) “

About Interaction Design Foundation, IxDF

  • We are based in Denmark with the stated goal of lowering the cost of high-quality design education globally. You can read about us at https://www.interaction-design.org/about

  • We reach around 4 million design-interested people every month on social media.

  • We help hundreds of thousands of professional designers improve their skills and careers.

  • Our educational materials are used in hundreds – if not thousands – of universities around the world.

How to apply

  • Please send an application to Rikke Friis Dam at rikke.friis.dam@interaction-design.org

  • Please tell us why you want to put your heart, mind and hard work into this job. And please tell us the 3 productivity tips/methods/tricks that work best for you.

  • Please apply as soon as you can – we’re firm believers that “the sooner, the better”. We’re looking forward to working with you !

Pictures from team trips

The team meets regularly in exotic locations around the world; these are some photos from our last meeting in Koh Ngai, Thailand and from Dubai. We have other awesome locations planned for future meetings. Not having an office doesn’t mean that we don’t have a strong team ethic – quite the reverse, it means we have a team that is dedicated to working together, everywhere and all the time.

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Open Access—Link to us!

We believe in Open Access and the democratization of knowledge. Unfortunately, world-class educational materials such as this page are normally hidden behind paywalls or in expensive textbooks.

If you want this to change, , link to us, or join us to help us democratize design knowledge!