Tag: jobs

Sensational AG is hiring (again)


Sensational AG is the company I founded together with a collegue back in 2000. Ever since then, we had a very nice combination of fun, interesting work and a very successful business.

We’re a very small team – just eight programmers, one business guy, a product designer and a bloody excellent project manager. Me personally, I would love to keep the team as small and tightly-knit as possible as that brings huge advantages: No internal politics, a lot of freedoms for everybody and mind-blowing productivity.

I’m still amazed to see what we manage to do with our small team time and time again and yet still manage to keep the job fun. It’s not just the stuff we do outside of immediate work, like UT2004 matches, Cola Double Blind Tests, Drone Flights directly from the roof of our office, sometimes hosting JSZurich and meetups for the Zurich Clojure User group and much more – it’s also the work itself that we try to make as fun as possible for everybody.

We are looking for a new member to help us with technical support and smaller scale modifications to our main product, though there’s ample opportunity to grow into helping with bigger projects and getting ownership over pieces of our code-base.

Our main product is an ecommernce platform that’s optimized for wholesale customers. We’re not about presenting a small amount of product in the most enticing manner, but we’re into helping our end users to be as efficient and quick as possible to deal with their big orders (up to 400 line items per week).

Our customers have relatively large amounts of data for us to handle (the largest data set is 2.3 TB in size). I’m always calling our field “medium data” – while it might still fit into memory, it’s definitely too big to deal with it in the naïve way, so it’s not quite big-data yet, but it’s certainly in interesting spheres.

We’re in the comfortable position that the data entrusted to us is growing in the speed that we’re able to learn how to deal with it and so is our architecture. What started as a simple PHP-in-front-of-PostgreSQL deal back in 2004 by now has grown to a cluster of about 40 machines: Job queue servers, importer servers, application servers, media servers, event forwarding servers; because we are hosing our infrastructure for our customers, we can afford to go the extra mile to do things technically interesting and exciting.

Speaking of infrastructure: We own the full stack of our product: Our web application, its connected micro services, our phone apps, our barcode reading apps, but also our backend infrastructure (which is kept up to date by Puppet)

While our main application is a beast of 300k lines of PHP code, we still strive to use the best tool for their jobs and in the last years have grown our infrastructure with tools we have written in Rust, Clojure, JavaScript (via Node.js) and of course our mobile apps are written in their native languages Swift and Java with more and more Kotlin.

We try to stay as current as possible even with our core PHP code. We have upgraded to PHP 7.4 the day it came out and we’re already running PHP 8.0 beta 3 in our staging and development environments, ready to upgrade the day PHP 8 will come out – those of us who write PHP are already excited about the new features coming to 8.0.

As strong believers in Open Source, whenever we come across a bug in our dependencies, we fix it and publish it upstream. Many of our team members have had their patches merged into PHP, Rust, Tantivy and others. Giving back is only fair (and of course also helps us with future maintenance).

If this sounds interesting to you and you want to help us make it possible for our end users to leave their workplace earlier because ordering is so much easier, then ping me at jobs@sensational.ch.

You should be familiar with working on bigger Software projects and understanding of software maintainability over the years. We hardly ever start fresh, but we constantly strive to keep what we have modern and up to speed with wherever technology goes.

You will be initially mostly working on our PHP and JS (ES2020) code-base, but if you’re into another language and it will help you solve a problem you’re having or your skill in a language we’re already working with can help us solve a problem, then you’re more than welcome to help.

If you have UNIX shell experience, that’s a bigger plus, though it’s not required, but you will just have to learn the ropes a bit.

All our work is tracked in git and we’re extremely into beautiful commit histories and thus heavy users of the full feature-set that git offers. But don’t worry – so far, we’ve helped everybody get up to speed.

And finally: As a mostly male team – after all, we only have one woman working on our team of developers, we’d especially love if more women would find their way into our team. All of us are very aware how difficult it is for minorities to find a comfortable working environment they can add their experiences to and where they can be themselves.

sensational ag is hiring an iOS developer

Sensational AG is the company I founded together with a collegue back in 2000. Ever since then, we had a very nice combination of fun, interesting work and a very successful business.

We’re a very small team – just six programmers, one business guy and a product designer. Me personally, I would love to keep the team as small and tightly-knit as possible as that brings huge advantages: No politics, a lot of freedoms for everybody and mind-blowing productivity.

I’m still amazed to see what we manage to do with our small team time and time again and yet still manage to keep the job fun. It’s not just the stuff we do outside of immediate work, like UT2004 matches, Cola Double Blind Tests, Drone Flights directly from the roof of our office, sometimes hosting JSZurich and meetups for the Zurich Clojure User group and much more – it’s also the work itself that we try to make as fun as possible for everybody.

Sure – sometimes, work just has to be done, but we try as much as possible to distribute the fun parts of the work between everybody. Nobody has to be a pure code monkey; nobody constanly pulls the “change this logo there for the customer” card (though, that card certainly exists to be pulled – we just try to distribute it).

Most of the work we do flows into our big eCommerce project: Whenever you order food in a restaurant here in Switzerland, if the restaurant is big enough for them to get the food delivered to them, the stuff you eat will have been ordered using the product of ours.

Whenever you visit a dentist, the things they put in your mouth likely have been ordered using the product of ours.

The work we do helps countless people daily to get their job done more quickly allowing them to go home earlier. The work we do is essential for the operations of many, many companies here in Switzerland, in Germany and in Austria.

From a technical perspective, the work we do is very interesting too: While the main part of the application is a web application, there are many components around it: Barcode Scanners, native Smartphone applications and our very own highly available cluster (real, physical hardware) that hosts the application for the majority of our customers.

As even our end users slowly start to use their mobile phones more and more, so do our native mobile applications gain in importance to the point where we really have to focus a lot more resources on them.

This is where you come in: In order to provide the best possible user experience, we have decided to develop our offlline-first, native mobile applications separately for both iOS and Android and while we have Android pretty much covered, iOS is lagging behind a bit

If you’re interested to help us out with iOS, here’s what you will be working with.

  • The application is written in Swift, so you’ll likely use a lot of Swift during your day, however, we don’t mind if you decide you prefer to use something else.
  • The native application talks to a web service API of our main web application. But as the API is mostly private, you have the ability to directly influence the application in many cases.
  • As some parts of the process are very customizable, we’re looking into embedding react native views into the existing application.
  • As we maintain our applications for a long time, code-archeology is an important part of our work. And archeology is much more easily done with useful self-contained commits, so you’ll likely have a bit of a culture-shock when you see us use every nook and cranny of git’s feature-set. But don’t worry: We’ll help you get up to speed quickly.
  • We have bi-weekly meetings focussed on development practices and challenges we’ve overcome. You will have the direct ability to influence how we work together.

The platform we use to develop on is everybodys own choice. Everybody here uses Macs, but whatever you are most productive with is what you use, though as we’re talking mostly iOS development here, you’re probably going to use a Mac. Be it an iMac or a MacBook Pro – you tell us what you need and we’ll make it possible.

All of the code that we work with daily is home-grown (minus some libraries, of course). We control all of it and we get to play with all the components of the big thing. No component can’t be changed, though we certainly prefer changing some over the others :-)

Between the Cola tests and the technical versatility and challenges described above: If I can interest you, dear reader, to join our crazy productive team in order to improve one hell of a suite of applications, then now is your chance to join up: We need more people
to join our team of developers.

Also, if your particular problem is better solved in $LANGUAGE of your choice, feel free to just do it. Part of the secret behind our productivity is that we know our tools and know when to use them. Good code is readable in any language (though I’d hve to brush up my lisp if you chose to go that route).

Interested? I would love to hear from you at
phofstetter@sensational.ch.