Hiring is usually a long and difficult process - in order to streamline and simply it, I use Kanban to manage the whole process. I believe, hiring should be as lean and agile as our development process.
My Kanban board for hiring (we just started hiring at SitePoint!):
A couple of days ago, a blog post titled “First employee of startup? You are probably getting screwed!” has made to the Hacker News front page and has spawned some great discussion and debate.
Since I had just been screwed recently, I thought it might be a good opportunity for me to share what I’ve learnt.
After my story got picked up by Hacker News and some other sites, I was contacted by my client. It was a very interesting and surreal experience which included keywords such as sue, settle, donation and disappearance. I am however going to spare you the details and instead, going to focus on the things I have learnt.
Today is my last day at Envato. I have been working here for a year and half and it has been, without a doubt the most fulfilling experience I have ever had in my professional career.
I was hired as a PHP developer initially. Who knew, several months into the job I was ‘converted’ voluntarily to a full time Ruby developer - and it has been the highlight of my career progression. It is hard to imagine what I would have become if it wasn’t for Envato’s support behind my conversion.
During my time at Envato, I had the opportunity to work with some of the most talented people in the web industry, from both inside Envato and externally. I am extremely grateful for the experience and I hope to work with them again in the future.
The decision of moving on from Envato was not made easily. As a matter of fact, I have always been passionate about online education (e.g. the Tuts+ network) and I sincerely hope the project will be taken to the next level.
Grew up in Shanghai, China, I quickly became interested in computers and the Internet at the age of 13. I started off by creating simple websites using basic HTML I learnt from reading computer magazines. Later on I worked in online publishing, marketing and web hosting while studying in high school. After being a 'webmaster' for a few years, I began my career in web development and design. I studied Bachelor of Information Technology and Systems at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. I worked as a web developer at places such as Envato and PlayUp before joining SitePoint.
I am primarily a Ruby and PHP developer as well as a front-end/UI developer. In my spare time I also try to do as much creative designs as I could in order to keep my design skills polished. I also focus strongly on user experience and user interface design.
I am a passionate open source developer who contributes to many of the projects on GitHub, including Ruby on Rails.
Please feel free to shoot me an email if you would like to get in touch. I am also happy to provide estimates and consultancy to any web based projects. You may write to me in English or in Chinese. :)
I am the author of the following projects.
I am the co-author of the following projects.
I also made contribution to the following projects.
Web Development, Web Design, Entrepreneurship
Copyright © 2010-2012, Fred Wu
