We are doing too good a job: the customers keep coming! We’re agile programmers, so we can react fast to customer requests and they like it. The core “lizard web” python+django+mapnik+openlayers+matplotlib product is pretty attractive to water boards (Dutch: waterschappen), municipalities and so on.
The customers keep coming, so we’d like some extra colleagues :-) Being the most well known django-cms programmer in the Netherlands sure helps to get yourself a job, but beginners are also fine. One thing we do need: continual learning and improvement. Improve yourself, learn new technologies, figure out things.
To get an idea, this is a summary of things we work with. No need to know all/most of them, this is just to give an impression. I don’t want to scare you away. If you get to list every technology you’ve ever read an article on in your CV, I get to put a list here, right? :-)
Lots and lots of open source. Most of our products are open source themselves. Ubuntu on the server and on most of the IT laptops (I’m personally trying to get an apple, but that’s a different story :-)
Python, Django. Apart from one java project and some R script, everything is python. We love it. And most of our stuff is weboriented and that’s all Django.
Quite a lot of websites have django-cms now. Many projects need a bunch of regular pages and some news items to explain the project itself. Django-cms is a handy way to get that working quickly.
Loads of maps. Openlayers for the interface. Mapnik (the openstreetmap engine) for making the map layers. Jquery interaction. Lots of data sources (plain databases, postgis, netcdf files, etc).
Some things that are on my personal wish list for next year:
Improved test coverage. It is not bad, but not good either. Often 50-70% code coverage. I want a consistent 90-98%.
Good public documentation. The README in our products is already OK, but I’ve added sphinx here and there to start real proper documentation, however.
Look at nosql databases to see if they’re useful (and fun!) for us.
More and better and more consistent i18n.
Look at REST more, both for internal code structure and perhaps even for an external partial API.
Some practical info:
I’ve got two previous entries about jobs at Nelen & Schuurmans.
You might want to browse my entries tagged with Nelen & Schuurmans.
If you’re not Dutch: make sure you’re allowed to work in The Netherlands. We cannot practically arrange a work permit ourselves if you’re not from the EU. Regarding language: well, everyone speaks Dutch all the time at the moment. Except our fresh Australian. If you don’t speak Dutch, you’ll at least have to learn to understand it.
See the official job description at our website.
The next Dutch python usergroup meeting will be at our office (16 February 2011).
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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