Today’s guest post is by Brien Wheeler, Currensee’s Director of Engineering. He’s too modest to say it, but he’s awesome and he needs more awesome people on his awesome team. So read his awesome blog post, and if you’re awesome too, read our awesome UI Engineer and Flex/AS/JS Developer job postings and send your awesome resume. Don’t delay, we’re interviewing now.
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I love building things. As a kid, I drove my parents crazy taking apart everything in the house to see how it worked. As I got older, I got better at putting things back together, but it must have been very hard on my parents in the earlier years.
When I discovered computers and programming, I realized there were entire worlds waiting to be built. Software is a blank slate, and the sky is literally the limit. Unlike working with physical tools and toys such as an Erector set, programmers are only limited by their imaginations and the current state of technology, especially for interacting with people.
Programmers can create games, personal productivity tools, scientific simulations, virtual worlds, or anything else someone needs or wants. Of course, the last decades have also seen the development of a lot of unneeded, unwanted software (mail order dog food, anyone?), but that’s the result of millions of creative types trying to build better mousetraps.
Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the computer revolution, no one could foresee or understand the extent to which computers would become entwined with people’s lives. Early computer scientists believed that computer technology would remain unwieldy and prohibitively expensive, restricting its application to the domains of governments and huge corporations. They never imagined people carrying around miniaturized computers that could understand a person’s physical location, give directions to nearby locations, and provide a way to determine which restaurants were worth visiting. Not to mention being able to call the restaurant and make a reservation. (Science fiction writers certainly imagined this and more, leaving us to wonder which of their yet-to-be-realized visions will come true in the coming decades.)
So computers are now everywhere, for all the good and bad implied by that (it drives me crazy when I’m told by a cashier that I can’t hand them a $20 bill to buy something because “the computers are down” — since when is a computer needed to make change?).
As computers and networks became pervasive, it was inevitable that people would begin using them to connect with other like-minded people. E-commerce was the first wave of this new web world, connecting manufacturers and vendors with people interested in their products. Social networking and user-generated content is the second wave of technology bringing people together outside the purchasing arena — this is why it is called Web 2.0.
It is just and fitting that software has evolved to the purpose of bringing people together — software is first and foremost a people business. I know that to non-programmers software seems as if it’s all about “bits and bytes,” but that’s like saying a bridge is about steel and concrete, not the people who envisioned, designed, built, and maintain it. Good software is designed and built by talented people working together effectively.
In my personal experience, I have never seen good user experience or good software products come from organizations that are uninspired, uncooperative, demotivated, staffed with mediocre people, or dysfunctional in some other way. All the stars of “people, process, and product” have to align to result in excellence, which is why it is so rare in the world of computers and the world in general.
At Currensee, we’re passionate about bringing people together, giving them insight and tools they can’t get elsewhere, and then seeing how far the intelligence and drive of our community can go. We love hearing our members say things like, “This site is fantastic….I have been searching for something like this for a long time!”
I’m very fortunate to lead the Currensee Engineering team, which is stocked with super-talented, self-motivated people who want to make things happen. We “engineer” in the best sense of the term, finding the best, quickest, and most elegant way to achieve our goals.
Since we want to focus on creating new value for our members and not re-inventing the wheel, we leverage best-of-breed open source and commercial software such as the Spring Framework, YUI, amCharts, and more to provide a platform on which we create unique and exciting offerings within the Forex market. We’ll gladly take pre-existing solutions to all the boring parts of building a world-class web site (after all, who really wants to implement a new MVC framework?) so that we can tackle the interesting bits ourselves.
I love showing the Currensee site to users, partners, and others. They are invariably impressed with the breadth of functionality, the quality of the experience, and the clean look and feel. I’m often asked, “How did you accomplish this with so few developers and QA engineers?”
The answer is that our people rock. It’s that simple.
Despite the high level of talent, we have no prima donnas — everyone at Currensee helps cross train others and pitches in on the necessary grunt work so that everyone is successful.
Think you have what it takes to match up to the team we already have? The expectations are high, the work is challenging, but it’s never boring. You will learn from others, you will teach others, and you will see your work used and appreciated greatly by our members. Send us your resume and let’s see…
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