August 12, 2004

WANTED: World’s Greatest Web Designer

Okay, here’s the deal. My company (well, not my company, but the company I work for) may be looking for a few uber-talented folk to add to our team. If you are interested in designing web from an adrenaline-junkie town named Bend, Oregon (pronounced “bend o’er again”) near 10,000 foot mountains with great climbing, biking, skiing and bowling, read on. If not, well, bummer.

Alpine Internet Solutions is a web design / development / services company that specializes in delivering kick-ass websites that offer our customers a strategic platform from which to launch their most extreme marketing desires. Some of our recent work includes Continental Mills, BendFilm and Bev Sherrer. Please judge us not by our clothes, but by the hard work we do for others. Our own website is a little bit stale.

As a company, we aren’t very big (there’s seven of us who work full-time), very formal (we wear sandals and bring our dogs to work), or very sophisticated (we just recently got rid of our garage door). If you’re looking to work for El Corpor-O Inc. and slave away with the well-dressed code nymphs of Silicon Valley, you best keep walkin’. We throw Friday afternoon barbeques in the parking lot.

What we are is passionate and courteous. We want our customers to be successful on the web. We run on equal parts quality, service and Red Bull.

Do you have what we’re lookin’ for? What are we lookin’ for, anyway? That’s a good question, and one that waxes and wanes with the phases of the moon. Like a skilled climber Alpine is lightweight and flexible, and we are always searching for new and better ways to serve our customers. There are definitely some core skills that we would love to see in our applicants, but sufficient passion, vision and creativity can trump all.

But enough of that. You wanna know the grit, eh?

  1. Alpine’s delivery model is based on web standards, and we make every attempt to take advantage of the benefits that they can offer to our customers. With that, a strong versing in XHTML and CSS is very much desired. If you’re still using transparent gifs and more than one table to house a design, there isn’t much we can do for you. However, If you can look at the code for this website and say to yourself, “That ain’t no thang,” we’d love to chat.
  2. Alpine runs a home-brewed robust and powerful content management system that is used on nearly all of our client sites. This work of art has been lovingly crafted using PHP and MySQL, and it purrs away on our FreeBSD machines. Personally, I am an XHTML/CSS junkie who gets a contact high from the PHP / MySQL / FreeBSD / Apache mix, and I’m sure that there are those of you out there who could take me to school on this schizzle. Knowledge and passion about scripting, programming and databases will earn you a gold star.
  3. Many Alpine employees work under what we call “The John Galt Incentive Program.” If you help our company quickly and efficiently deliver great websites to our customers, you will be rewarded accordingly. If you spend most of the day updating your weblog and reading Slashdot, you will be rewarded accordingly. We run a lean machine, and the intense environment that can result isn’t for everybody.
  4. Alpine is always on the lookout for creative folk, and a common misconception is that if you don’t paint landscapes or build canoes or play the kazoo, you can’t be creative. Untrue. More than anything, creativity is a problem-solving process by which one is able to generate numerous alternative solutions before deciding on a course of action. If you were asked to build a website, and the only tools we provided were a toaster and a cuttlefish, could you do it? Huh? Could ya?
  5. Flash? Flash is good. Everyone loves Flash, especially when it’s wrapped in HTML that validates. If you’ve got some l33t fl45h sk1llz to show off, by all means, Flash away.

So, how does that all sound? Wanna give it a shot? Fire off an email to “jobs at alpineinternet dot com” or fill out the form at our website.

First things first, however. Pause. Take a deep breath. Now exhale. I’m sure you’re all hot and heavy about it now, but will you feel the same way tomorrow morning? Have you warmed up your kazoo chops? Are you truly prepared to face the cuttlefish?

Are you ready for some all-terrain bowling?

I can do, like, all of that stuff and XHTML and CSS are cool. I mean I hope you have some form of wysiwyg if you want code that validates.. I do my stuff by hand and folks bitch at me for leaving off the doctype thingy, but truth is I’ve got better things to do than memorize strings like “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” and “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd” (haven’t dtd’s been replaced by schema’s yet anyway?) It would be no thang if PITA like that was automated.. of course mostly disenfranchising the whole human-authorable element of the equation. So yea, I’ve been leaving out doctype’s in protest.
Oh yeah and I don’t believe in BR’s 🙂 use DIV’s man. even the <br> variety freaks me out.
I kind of made bend.com, but don’t let that freak you out, it was in infitessimally tiny project increments over years.. so no major overhauls could ever be accomplished. It was like building a termite colony so it looks ugly. Style sheets and js are not externally linked, for instance, because that used to crash some ancient NS browser.. on like a macintosh.. or caused a race condition or something.
I can flash, I made gravity and have tiltball and hunt the wumpus laying around half done somewhere. I made bend.com’s on-page IM system. I made a C app that translated ESRI shape files into swf’s for use in a dynamic map viewer project that died of taking-longer-than-8-hours-to-complete syndrome. I’ve lost motivation to complete an app that translates swfs into xml files (that describe all the inner details of the swf) (intant decompiler! just add encouragement).
But I would wager that Alp1n3 probably has an E.R. atmosphere and if three projects fall in your lap and you can’t complete all of them before they actually make lap-contact then you’re faaahred, and sued into the stone age and egged. The two things I can’t do are develope original artwork (but I feel comfortable critiquing or editing it) and focus on more than one thing at a time.
Besides, aren’t you guys like out in sisters or something?

Huh. I was going to poke fun at “cuddlefish,” but it turns out it does seem to be a legitimate alternative spelling to “cuttlefish.”
It kind of conjurs up a different mind image, doesn’t it though?

Huh. Apparently it is, but only when spelled “cuddle fish”. The Duluth News Tribune regrets the error.
I need to get more sleep.

1. Leaving off doctypes will make baby Jesus cry. There’s a reason every single operating system on the planet has a cut and paste command, and that is so we can define doctypes without memorizing doctypes. Without defining a doctype you could be coding in grunts and squeals, and the browser will still try to render it in HTML quirks mode.
2. Agreed, BRs are poor abused creatures, but when used properly they can be kinda handy. Just make sure you’ve got them wrapped in a block-level element and you’re happy with the line-height value that you’ve assigned to it.
3. I do all my web browsing in Netscape Navigator 4.75. It’s really fast. I hear that Microsoft might be releasing a browser, though… I hope it doesn’t hurt Netscape…
4. Damn. I wish I invented gravity.
5. Dude, that SWF to XML would be freakin’ sweet. I’ll buy you a bag of gumdrops if you finish it.
6. Things ’round here can be kinda like an ER, only without the pools of blood and screams of agony and crazy people running around the place. Actually, only without the blood.
7. Myself, I have trouble focusing on one thing at a time, and if I’m not multi-tasking I’m asleep and/or dead. I typically don’t remember walking into work in the morning; I just sort of wake up surrounded by my 360 degree desk. I don’t know how I get in and out of there, either. I think there’s a trap door in the floor… with a tunnel that leads to my house… or something…
8. A common misconception is that we are still based in Sisters. We are currently based in Bend, in a bright red shed that used to hold heavy artillery for logging.

I thought you promised me a job, you bastahd! 😛
I toured the place, and got this sickly feeling seeing an iMac on Dane’s desk. YOU HAVE A PURPLE THING ON YOUR DESK!
Bomb to the Diggity… w0rd.

1. I promise nothing. Except in pinecone fights.
2. It’s turquoise.
3. Even skilled web designers are unable to assign a undefined rule to infrastructure.
4. I was born on Jupiter.

If I was even remotely capable of producing clean, compliant code, I’d be all over this, but I just don’t have time so I do what I know (though I would love to be able to spend more time doing beautiful sites). I’d be nice to just focus on Web stuff instead of all the 400-zillion things I have to do here at work.
That, and Kasey was probably right — it probably pays like $9.50 an hour (but if it pays a bunch, you know how to get a hold of me, Dane ;-))