Senior Rails Developer – Join the Brightbox team! 24 Aug 09

We’re currently looking for an experienced and motivated Senior Rails Developer/Project Manager to join our development team here at Brightbox.

You’ll work closely both with our Development and Technical Teams to develop our customer control panel and other backend systems. We’re looking for someone who, in addition to being a great coder, will be an integral part of the team and an organised and enthusiastic project manager.

The role is full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both (the rest of us do a bit of both).

Send a hello, a CV and salary expectations to jobs at the Brightbox UK domain. CVs should be in an open format, preferably PDF or plain text. Closing date is Friday 11th September 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost
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Join the Brightbox team! 12 May 09

Brightbox is looking for two new people to join the systems team, a Senior Linux Systems Administrator and a Linux/Rails System Support person. Both roles are full-time and you can work from home, from our office in Leeds, or a bit of both.

Send a hello, a CV and salary expectations to jobs at the Brightbox UK domain. CVs should be in an open format, preferably PDF or plain text. Closing date is 31^st May 2009.

As always, recruitment agents should e-mail our special recruitment company email address: root@localhost

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Beta testers required to trial new Content Delivery Network (CDN) service 5 Nov 08

We’re currently working on offering a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service for Brightbox customers.  This will accelerate the serving of your static assets, distributing them around the globe and serving from the closest server to the user.  We’re trialling a partnership with Panther Express to provide this service, who provide CDN services for some pretty huge sites, such as LiveJournal, The Guardian and Shopping.com.

It can be used with the built-in Rails asset host system too, so no heavy modifications or fancy plugins.  We’re looking for some beta-testers, so if you’re interested please drop us an email to hello at the brightbox address and provide us details of your current static asset bandwidth usages if possible. All customers are welcome!

Brightbox at Barcamp Manchester UK 1 Mar 08

Jeremy and I went to Barcamp Manchester last Saturday – our photos are on Flickr as usual.  It turned out to be six months to the day since we went live with Brightbox too!

We ran a competition on the day: people had to tell us what they’d do with a Brightbox virtual machine and the best suggestion (as judged by us) kwould win a years hosting on one.  Throughout the day people wrote their ideas on post-it notes and we sifted through them at the end.

Here are some of the suggestions:

• A service to archive scans of old maps for Open Street Map
• Twitter wall app – @replies aggregated in the style of facebook’s wall-to-wall messages
• Start a rails hosting company
• Learn PHP
• Hosting for Deb
• Slowly ticking countdown timer to cause paranoia
• App to mix samples from fiction books to make new fiction
• Run a free hosting competition
• Flame retardant killer robots
• “Anything! They’re so flexible and scalable the possibilities are endless! We love Brightbox!”
• “Dye your hair orange”

The winner was Chris Maltby, who said he’d use it to host a web-based multiplayer turn-based strategy game. This made our geeky senses tingle.

Rob Lee also suggested we open source our management tools – which we already do! I guess we just don’t make a big enough deal about it. Expect to see us making a bigger deal about it soon.