We’re looking to add a senior developer to the Laminar Research team in the coming weeks.

As an X-Plane developer, you would work on both our desktop and mobile simulators, and you’d have quite a bit of latitude to work on the projects you find most interesting. At various points, you might find yourself doing things like:

• UI development
• Low-level performance optimization
• Improvements to the X-Plane SDK used by third parties
• Networking
• Rendering engine work
• Platform-specific OS integrations

(We don’t expect you to come into the role with deep knowledge of all those things. We like to hire “T-shaped developers,” people with deep knowledge in one or two areas, who can be flexible and pick up new stuff in other areas as the need arises.)

Why Work for Laminar Research?

As a member of our team, you would:

• Work on stuff that matters. Real pilots fly safer because of training in X-Plane, and real aerospace organizations (like Boeing, Cessna, and NASA, to name just a few) prototype aircraft in X-Plane before they build them in the real world.
• Work on a product that millions of people will see. You’ll get feedback from users, and that feedback will drive future development.
• Have tremendous input on the direction of the product. Because X-Plane is an exceedingly small team, every team member has a lot of say about what we work on and how we make the simulator better for our users.
• Set your own schedule. As far as we’re concerned, if you’re shipping features and fixing bugs, it’s your business when you do so.
• Work remote. No commute, no cubicles, nothing to impede you from doing great work. (But the rest of the team is just a Slack conversation away!)
• Work on a variety of technologies and products. At various points, you might work on X-Plane, Plane Maker, WED, the X-Plane installer, or the MMO server.

Qualifications

A qualified candidate will:

• Have experience shipping major features in production applications with minimal oversight.
• Be a quick learner—we expect much of what you need to know to be learned on the job.
• Have the self-discipline to work from home and set your own schedule. (It’s not for everyone.)
• Have excellent English communication skills.

It’s a bonus—but not strictly necessary!—if you have specific experience relevant to X-Plane. There’s no exhaustive list of skills we could use, but some possible examples include:

• Real-time graphics
• Real-time C++ development
• Mobile development
• Game development
• GIS data processing
• Networking
• The X-Plane plugin system

Our Interview Process

Here’s a rough sketch of what the interview process will look like for the candidate we hire. (We might decline to proceed further with a candidate at any stage—don’t take that as a snub, as we may have simply found applicants with more relevant experience.)

1. Intro email, maybe with some “screener” questions as follow-up
2. Invitation to complete a “take-home” coding project.
   • Our take-home project is designed to be done in 3-4 hours for candidates with lots of experience in C++ native app development, but it will take longer if you’re new to this sort of thing.
   • The project is designed to be as similar as possible to the real work you’d be doing day-to-day. (It’s pulled from real features we’ve shipped in the past.) This helps us understand if you’d be a good fit for the role, but it can also help you decide if you’d like the work.
   • We don’t want to waste your time, so we won’t ask you to do the take-home project unless we think there’s a good chance you’ll succeed.
3. One or more remote interviews with the team—this will include at least Ben, our project manager on the desktop sim, and Chris, our project manager on mobile. We’ll talk to you about your experience, how you approached challenges in your past, and so on. There’s nothing to prepare here—you’ll just need to be yourself.

Things that are intentionally not included in our interview process:

• Flying you halfway across the world for an in-person interview
• Solving “puzzles” unrelated to real programming
• Answering silly “CS trivia” questions
• Writing code that bears no resemblance to something you would actually need on the job (e.g., “reverse a linked list”)
• Writing code under pressure, or with someone looking over your shoulder

In general, we don’t believe that subjecting candidates to a stressful interview process makes the process any better—we’ll do our best to make sure you’re comfortable.

How to Apply

Send an email introduction to hiring at X-Plane.com that includes:

• A brief overview of a project (or projects) you’ve enjoyed working on
• Discussion of projects you have not enjoyed working on
• Why you think you’d be a great fit for X-Plane
• Optional: a resume, links to GitHub/StackOverflow/your blog/etc.—anything you think will help us understand who you are as a developer

Please do not attempt to apply in the comments.

(Not sure if this is a good fit for you? Email me anyway and we can talk. )

We’re looking to hire pretty quickly, so we’ll stop taking new applicants on the February 19th, 2021.

The post We’re Hiring a Senior Developer (Apply by Feb. 19) appeared first on X-Plane Developer.

This would be part time (ideally about 10 hours a week) and remote, working whatever hours you prefer. We’d like to start by dividing your time in half between WordPress and Node, but we may shift that balance as time goes on.

This is something we have an ongoing need for, so if you’re a freelancer, this is an easy way to add some stability to your schedule for potentially years.

About the sites you’d be working on

• On the WordPress side, we version the themes and all essential plugins in Git, and deploy them via Git push to WP Engine’s servers. We have automated tests in place for a lot of the essential sales functionality, so that you can deploy to a staging environment, test it, then deploy to production once all the tests pass. Our sales site runs on WooCommerce, with a small handful of custom plugins to deal with weird stuff specific to our business.
• Our Node app (the Scenery Gateway) is a glorified CRUD frontend for users to upload scenery for the flight simulator. We have a reasonable amount of documentation on the organization of this app and its integration tests—see the README for more info.

Qualifications

A qualified candidate will have:

• Outstanding judgement and ability to self-direct. We won’t be looking over your shoulder constantly, so we’ll expect you to be able to prioritize issues, manage your time, and make responsible decisions on the future of these projects.
• Experience working remotely.
• Experience in both JavaScript and WordPress development. (You don’t need to have written Node.js or Angular.js specifically—experience with React, Ember, Knockout, Vue, <insert JS flavor of the week> are fine.)
• Excellent written communication skills in English.
• Long-term availability for roughly 10 hours a week.

What to expect from us

We won’t be doing any sort of grueling interviews for this position—we expect to hire based solely on seeing your past experience, plus maybe a Slack chat or two.

We do our best to cultivate long-term relationships with contractors—we want you to love working with us. With that in mind, we will:

• Pay you competitively.
• Pay you on time, every time.
• Respect you as a professional.

How to apply

If this is sounds like a good fit for you, please shoot me an email with the following (my email is my first name at X-Plane.com):

1. Some code samples/a GitHub link/your Stack Overflow account/etc.—anything that would demonstrate your knowledge of both WordPress & JavaScript stuff.
2. One or more references we could contact about past freelancing work you’ve done (doesn’t have to be web related)—we’re basically looking to have a third party confirm that you have good judgement, good communication skills, etc.

Fair warning: I expect to get an absolute flood of emails here, so I won’t be able to respond to every one. I’m planning to make a hiring decision two weeks from today (on May 13th), so if you’re interested, please let me know ASAP.

The post We’re Hiring a Part-Time Web Dev appeared first on X-Plane Developer.

Daily Activities

Your day will include:

• External communication – using email tools to answer customer requests for help
• Internal communication – collaborating with team members to facilitate customer service
• Taking opportunities to improve documentation as needed
• Reporting and documenting technical issues for resolution
• Building positive customer relationships

Some relevant experience for these tasks are:

• Excellent written communication in English
• Familiarity with both Mac and Windows
• Passion for assisting people
• Ability to self-manage

Bonus points for experience in:

• Using X-Plane
• Technical writing
• WordPress, JIRA, and / or HelpScout systems

Why work for us?

As a member of our team, you would:

• Work on stuff that matters. Real pilots fly safer because of training in X-Plane, and real aerospace organizations (like Boeing, Cessna, and NASA, to name just a few) prototype aircraft in X-Plane before they build them in the real world. Working in customer support is a great opportunity to empower our users to unlock the full potential of X-Plane.
• Work remotely. No commute, no cubicles, nothing to impede you from doing great work. (But the rest of the team is just a Slack call away!)
• Have the opportunity to follow your interests into other aspects of the business.

How to apply

If this sounds like a good fit for you – we’d love to hear from you! You can submit this form to apply.

The post We’re hiring…for support! appeared first on X-Plane Developer.

About the position

We need a junior developer to come do user interface work for us. As you may know, the Plane Maker and Airfoil Maker user interfaces did not get the same overhaul that X-Plane itself did for version 11, and we’d like to change that. That’s a major undertaking, and you, dear applicant, could be responsible for it in its entirety.

Beyond that, X-Plane itself has a “long tail” of UI improvements that we’d like to see. You could be the one to move these improvements from “The Glorious Future” schedule into reality.

Our UI is built on a custom widget-based framework that is only now starting to reach maturity. So, while a lot of your work will involve putting together existing pieces, there will definitely be problems you can only solve by writing completely new UI components.

Why work for us?

As a member of our team, you would:

• Work on stuff that matters. Real pilots fly safer because of training in X-Plane, and real aerospace organizations (like Boeing, Cessna, and NASA, to name just a few) prototype aircraft in X-Plane before they build them in the real world.
• Work on a product that millions of people will see. You’ll get feedback from users, and that feedback will drive future development.
• Have tremendous input on the direction of the product. Because X-Plane is an exceedingly small team, every team member has a lot of say about what we work on and how we make the product better for our users.
• Set your own schedule. As far as we’re concerned, if you’re shipping features and fixing bugs, it’s your business when you do so.
• Work remote. No commute, no cubicles, nothing to impede you from doing great work. (But the rest of the team is just a Slack call away!)
• Work on a variety of technologies and products. At various points, you might work on X-Plane, Plane Maker, WED, the X-Plane installer, the Scenery Gateway web app, or even the X-Plane.com web site. We are not the kind of place where you get hired for one aspect of the product, and are then forbidden from touching anything else.

Qualifications

A qualified candidate will:

• Have a computer science degree or equivalent real-world experience.
• Be a quick learner. We expect most of what you need to know (beyond computer science fundamentals) to be learned on the job.
• Have the self-discipline to work from home and set your own schedule. (It’s not for everyone.)
• Have excellent communication skills in English.
• Be interested in UI/UX.
• Be available for full-time work.

Bonus points for:

• Experience using X-Plane or Plane Maker.
• Experience using widget-based front-end frameworks (e.g., Qt, Swing, wxWidgets, GTK+)—the specific frameworks don’t matter much, since X-Plane uses a custom GUI framework internally.
• Experience writing C++.
• Experience writing games or doing other graphics programming.
• Strong command of object-oriented programming & design.

How to apply

Send an email introduction to me that includes:

• A brief overview of a project (or projects) you’ve enjoyed working on
• Discussion of projects you have not enjoyed working on
• Anything else you’d like me to know about your skills & experience

The introduction is really just a means for me to get a handle on who you are as a developer, so do not stress over it!

My email is my first name at X-Plane.com. Please do not attempt to apply in the comments!

(Not sure if this is a good fit for you? Email me anyway and we can talk. 🙂 )

I’m going to plan to respond to all candidates we want to move forward with in mid- to late-September. I’m expecting a larger volume of email than I can respond to individually, so if you don’t get a response, please know that it’s because I’m overwhelmed, not because I’m trying to be rude.

The post We’re Hiring (Again) appeared first on X-Plane Developer.

As a member of our team, you would:

• Work on stuff that matters. Real pilots fly safer because of training in X-Plane, and real aerospace organizations (like Boeing, Cessna, and NASA, to name just a few) prototype aircraft in X-Plane before they build them in the real world.
• Work on a product that millions of people will see. You’ll get feedback from users, and that feedback will drive future development.
• Have tremendous input on the direction of the product. Because X-Plane is an exceedingly small team, every team member has a lot of say about what we work on and how we make the simulator better for our users.
• Set your own schedule. As far as we’re concerned, if you’re shipping features and fixing bugs, it’s your business when you do so.
• Work remote. No commute, no cubicles, nothing to impede you from doing great work. (But the rest of the team is just a Skype call away!)
• Work on a variety of technologies and products. At various points, you might work on X-Plane, Plane Maker, WED, the X-Plane installer, the Scenery Gateway web app, or even the X-Plane.com web site.

Qualifications

A qualified junior candidate will:

• Have a computer science degree.
• Be a quick learner. We expect most of what you need to know (beyond computer science fundamentals) to be learned on the job.
• Have the self-discipline to work from home and set your own schedule. (It’s not for everyone.)

In additions to the above, a qualified senior candidate will:

• Have experience shipping major features in production applications with minimal oversight.
• Have specific experience relevant to X-Plane. There’s no exhaustive list of skills we could use, but some possible examples include:
  • Real-time graphics
  • Real-time C++ development
  • Mobile development
  • Game development
  • GIS data processing
  • Networking
  • The X-Plane plugin system

How to Apply

Send an email introduction to me that includes:

• Which position you want to apply for
• A brief overview of a project (or projects) you’ve enjoyed working on
• Discussion of projects you have not enjoyed working on

The introduction is really just a means for me to get a handle on who you are as a developer, so do not stress over it!

My email is my first name at X-Plane.com. Please do not attempt to apply in comments!

(Not sure if this is a good fit for you? Email me anyway and we can talk. )

The post We’re hiring! appeared first on X-Plane Developer.