We're looking for a talented back-end developer to join our team. This roles requires that you work with the designers and front-end developers to ensure that the approved interactions and designs are implemented true to their original intent.

This position is in our Philadelphia office, so we prefer that you live in the area. If you don't, we hope you're close, because you'd have to relocate

Responsibilities

As a back-end developer you will have your hands in every aspect of the site build and launch. Critical to this position is an ability to understand client feedback and requirements (implied or documented) and translate those into functional code. You should have good written and oral communications skills to facilitate that translation and a demeanor that welcomes the client into a relationship that may be more technical than with which they are comfortable.

In addition to coding your responsibilities include:

• Participating in client meetings (by phone and in-person)
• Understanding the entire project scope
• Participate in project definition, UX and design phases of the project
• Meeting both internal and client deadlines
• Keeping on top of new back-end development languages, methods and technologies
• Speaking up and being part of the team
• Writing thorough and articulate internal and client-facing communication
• Helping maintain and support internal Happy Cog systems, such as the company website, internal projects, products and services.

Skills & Experience

• 3+ years experience in back-end development (server side programming such as Ruby, Python, or PHP)
• 2+ years experience in front-end development (client side programming such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript)
• A solid understanding of the MVC paradigm as well as object oriented programming
• Comfort around computer science topics such quick sort, modified preorder tree traversal, repository pattern
• Experience working with PHP
• A working library of handmade custom code (for profit or fun)
• Experience working on a team
• Mastery of Git or a comparable SCM
• Experience working with client teams
• Experience working on CMS implementations, where a CMS is predefined
• Comfort teaching technical topics to a group
• Solid organization and efficient time management skills.
• Able to collaborate in a cross-discipline environment.
• Acute attention to detail.
• A problem-solver who brings answers and ideas to the table at the same time as challenges
• Must be highly organized and able to juggle multiple tasks and requests
• Ability to prioritize and work well under pressure and tight timelines
• A problem solver who thinks differently, sometimes taking the longer approach because it carries more benefits in the end

If you think you're the one, please send a cover letter, your resume, and work samples to jobs@happycog.com. Any submission missing those three requirements will not be considered.

Have you heard the news? Lanyrd is making it easier for you to find the speakers you want to see most with new Lanyrd Pro pages. One of Happy Cog’s most important principles is education. We seek every opportunity to write, teach, and speak about what we do. With our new Lanyard Pro page, it’s easier to see when and where we’ll be speaking. 

If you’ve taken a look at our page, you’ll see many of us are heading to Columbia, SC for Converge SE. Greg Hoy and Jenn Lukas will be speaking along with a ton of other talented folks from around the country.

Converge SE is unique because it brings designers, developers, business owners, and everyone in between together at one event. For us, it’s also unique because a number of people from Happy Cog are attending. We’re looking forward to learning new things and getting out of the office as a group. 

Make sure to check out our Lanyard Pro page to see all of the events we’ll be speaking at and attending this year, including the Digital PM Summit. If you haven’t heard, we’re hosting an event for digital project managers this October. Visit the website and sign up for the mailing list for more details. 

Happy Cog has received Webby Honoree distinction for two of our 2012 projects. The Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement and we are super happy that these projects received the recognition:

• Fonts.com received an official Webby Honoree in the Professional Services category
• MTV O Music Awards received an official Webby Honoree in the Celebrity/Fan and Media Streaming categories

Rock the Vote

Our work with MTV for the O Music Awards has also been nominated to be considered for a Webby Award in the Music category.

While the academy ultimately determines the Webby Award winners, announced April 30th, there’s an opportunity for your voice to be heard. Our nomination also includes eligibility in the people’s choice portion of the competition. This People’s Voice Award is chosen by you, the online voting public. The polls close on April 25th, so get to voting for your favorites and please consider giving Happy Cog your vote!

Get Ready to Rock, Period.

We love our multi-year collaboration with MTV and the O Music Awards. For the past three years we’ve reinvented the site, drawing on the previous project and experiences. We invite you to take a look at our latest case study for the 3rd Annual O Music Awards. We guide you through each stage of the celebration and the transformation within the responsive site. If you love the work as much as we do, we’d appreciate your vote.

We’re already hard at work on O Music Awards 4. Wait until you see what we’re cooking up with MTV Networks this time!

You may remember back in the fall we posted a survey to gauge interest in a conference for dedicated to digital project managers. We received twice as many responses as we thought we would, and the results all led to the same conclusion: project managers deserve their own event. 

So, we got to work, and after many months of research, planning, and logistics, we're pleased to announce that it's a reality.

Announcing The Inaugural Digital PM Summit.

The Digital PM Summit is two days of engaging presentations and conversations from a variety of PM perspectives. We'll share the secrets of keeping things moving, keeping clients happy, keeping teams engaged, and keeping budgets intact.

The summit will take place on October 14 and 15th, 2013 in Philadelphia, PA at the amazing studios of public broadcasting station WHYY.

Tickets will be limited to 150 attendees. We'll provide registration access to our email subscribers first, so make sure you and your fellow digital PM colleagues subscribe to our mailing list for the best chance to score seats.

And if project management isn’t your thing, please help us spread the word by following us on Twitter and tracking us on Lanyrd.

Brought To You By Something New!

The Digital PM Summit is being produced by the Bureau of Digital Affairs, created by Greg Hoy and Greg Storey of Happy Cog to produce events, create products, and deliver services that help you become a better digital professional.

The Bureau of Digital Affairs is managed in partnership with Happy Cog. 

At Happy Cog, we've always been about helping the design and development community as much as we have been about providing great solutions for our own clients. Today, we take another step forward to help you increase your own awesomeness.

Today, we're giddy to announce our partnership with Mijingo, an independent publisher of training products and services for folks just like you.

Established in 2008, Mijingo began with a series of screencasts for ExpressionEngine development. Since then, it has expanded to include training for much wider range of topics. It also publishes its own online magazine called EE Insider.

"We are joining forces with Mijingo in order to provide a platform upon which Happy Cog can build a comprehensive library of training products and services. Mijingo has established itself as a trusted niche player, and speaks directly to the audiences Happy Cog serves," said Happy Cog CEO Greg Hoy.

For Mijingo, the partnership with Happy Cog will expose the company's products and services to a broader audience, enabling more professionals to benefit from the highly specialized offerings they provide. It also enables Mijingo to grow under our umbrella, because we'll be investing in its success. Mijingo now has direct access to our expanding team of thought leaders in every discipline relating to digital design, development, and strategy.

"Mijingo can now tap into the experts at Happy Cog to help fulfill its mission of creating high quality, useful training materials for web designers and developers," said Mijingo founder Ryan Irelan.

"Happy Cog will not only continue to provide the kind of thought leadership you typically see from us from our writings and speaking engagements," says Hoy, "but through new products and services as well. The opportunity to learn will be everywhere."

Work is nearly complete on a new production studio in our Austin office. A sister facility in Philadelphia will be complete sometime in mid-2013. Keep your eyes peeled for what we have in store. It'll be awesome.

Yesenia Perez-Cruz

• The Real Responsive Process?
• March 10, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
• Austin Convention Center, Ballroom BC

Designer Yesenia Perez-Cruz, will discuss a fluid process for responsive design along with Aaron Gustafson, Samantha Warren, and Steve Fisher. The panel will also explore recent successes and failures while establishing why a responsive process is a responsible process.

Sophie Shepherd

• Responsive Design from Every Angle
• March 10, 3:30 - 4:30 pm
• Radisson Town Lake, Town Lake Ballroom

Designer Sophie Shepherd will join Emily Wengert, Jacob Surber, and Trent Walton in discussing challenges responsive designers face. They’ll cover how to gather requirements, how to communicate goals to teams and customers, and how deliver successful responsive projects.

You might know we have an office around the corner. That means in addition to speaking, we’ll also be hanging around Austin. So if you see us, make sure to say howdy.

All too often, the focus within our industry is on the end product, not the journey. The fact is, the journey is what makes the product. Those journeys are charted, literally and figuratively, by people playing project manager roles. But you know what stinks? No one has publicly shared secrets that make this crucial role tick, and no one has provided a venue for PMs to simply vent. Until now.

After managing projects for over a decade, we are excited to start sharing, and we'd like you to be a part of it. We're currently researching the precise kind of event specifically for digital project managers, and we'd like to get your input to help shape this thing.

Please take a few minutes to complete our survey, and share it with your peers and colleagues. We'll keep this open from November 9 - 21, 2012. After we analyze the results, we'll be announcing something special for the few, the proud, the project managers.

Happy Cog and MTV Networks were awarded the big prize, winning the Webby for the "Celebrity/Fan" category for the 2nd Annual MTV O Music Awards website. Check out the latest incarnation of the O Music Awards site, which is an evolution of our award-winning work.

Happy Cog also received additional awards in 2012 for its work with both Harvard University and MTV Networks:

• Happy Cog and Harvard University were selected as Official Honorees in the "school/university" category for the redesign of Harvard's main website.
• Happy Cog and MTV Networks were selected as Official Honorees in the "events" category for the 2nd annual O Music Awards website.

The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement.

Hailed as the "Internet's highest honor" by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising & media, online film & video, and mobile & apps. Established in 1996, the 16th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards is presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

With the industry changes that have occurred, we've seen our business change too. Not so much with respect to our core philosophy, but with the way we talk about ourselves and the work we do. And we started to feel that our brand was falling a bit out of sync with those changes.

In the fall of 2011, we decided the time was right to consider what was next for our brand. We wanted to work with a small, top-tier studio that would understand our heritage, and could relate to our culture and values. It was also important to find a studio with a sound process and uncompromising attention to detail. We were looking for a firm like our own.

We found everything we wanted and needed with Christian Helms and his Austin-based studio Helms Workshop.

"We were well-aware of Happy Cog's history in the industry and their stellar reputation," said Helms. "The opportunity to help them refine a slightly dated brand identity was particularly exciting for us."

Helms employed a collaborative and iterative design approach, very familiar to us, which made working with their design team seamless.

Christian and his team were very flexible in designing a process that accommodated our specific requirements. We progressed through multiple ideas and iterations, and the work was scrutinized by both Happy Cog's principals and design team.

"There is always anxiety around working with a completely new creative team," said Happy Cog President Greg Storey. "Especially when the result is so important. Christian and his team put us at ease from day one."

When describing what his team was striving for, Helms added, "With so many different ventures, from development to publishing to entrepreneurism, it was important to craft an identity that is not descriptive, but more emblematic. It should reinforce their values and heritage but be applicable to support future endeavors as well."

The results of this comprehensive work is debuted on Happy Cog's newly redesigned website, launched on February 10, 2012.

The entire Happy Cog team is thrilled with the new brand identity and excited to share it with the industry.

"I'm very pleased where things ended up," said Happy Cog President Greg Hoy. "The Happy Cog brand is highly regarded by our industry. It was paramount that Helms Workshop understand why that is, and in the new work, to make sure that our hallmarks of thought leadership and roll-up-your-sleeves craftsmanship came through. It did."