What a Developer Job Posting Should Look Like
A developer job? It sounds like support/sysadmin.<p>A pay pal transaction not completing due to a network outage is an ops issue not a dev issue.<p>Also, what's the pay? When you talk to actual developers the biggest issue is the problems finding out what the job actually pays. I hate talking to recruiters that won't tell me what it pays. When you don't tell me what it pays that clicking sound you hear is me clicking the back button. It's a job, I go there to get paid, not take shitty pay to hear platitudes about how we're doing what we love.<p>If I want to take a chunk of my salary to have people go blow smoke up my ass I'd rather see a professional of my choosing.<p>As far as the gerbil thing is concerned, it's called producer/consumer. You use a message queue (SQS?) to store the work and you use the gerbils to 'consume' it. You store the state of the books in something called a "database" and you store the "master book" encrypted publicly on a CDN. The server puts a message in the queue telling the gerbil how to customize the book along with the URL for the master and the key to decrypt it. For pragmatic programmers they sure go out of there way to obscure that it's a simple producer / consumer model using SVN and a bunch of caches as a message queue / database monstrosity.<p>As for the coderay thing I'd rather just use the F# syntax parser from F# and decorate the AST as F# is my favorite language and it would take a couple hours to do it that way. As a pragmatic programmer I don't much care to implement a half assed parser in another language.