Quite often when people ask me about new features on mapme.at they get what is becoming a stock answer of “it’s on the list”. In most cases this really is true, the problem is that the list is very very long and I’m getting very little time to work on it. I’ve decided that I need to sort this out and the way I’m going to do this is by recruiting some help. In a previous job in Manchester we worked with the University of Manchester to recruit their second year students on summer internships, and in later years even full sandwich year placements. This was a great experience for both the students and for us who had to train them and work with them. I’m looking to this as a possible solution to my problem on mapme.at.

Firstly - the unpaid bit - at the moment mapme.at is not generating any revenue. I’m fine with that and am fully intending to take my own sweet time to push it in that direction. That does mean that any money spent on it comes out of my own pocket. I think that working on mapme.at could be a great opportunity for someone beginning a career in software development. They would be working on a popular site getting plenty of traffic and API usage. They would also get the opportunity to work with me, a software developer and entrepreneur who has worked on leading websites in a career spanning over ten years.

What would you be working on? Well mapme.at is a popular and successful location based social networking site. The site started in June 2007 and since then has added many users who make use of the various functionality offered. The site interacts with many other services including Twitter, Foursquare and Google Latitude to give a single central store for users’ location history. It offers users the ability to restrict what level of detail they show to different contacts and also gives interesting and useful visualisations of their data. The API allows anyone to build an app that interacts with the data, querying or even updating many aspects of a user’s data, with their permission of course.

So what am I looking for? When I’ve done this before I’ve worked with 2nd year Computer Science students giving them an opportunity to work during the summer holiday. This is the type of person that I’m expecting to hear from. It’s quite possible that people in different stages of their career will be interested, perhaps a school leaver that’s not looking to go to University or someone who’s already been working in the field and is looking for a change. Recent graduates would also be likely candidates. I really need someone who has experience working with software development and can demonstrate an aptitude for it. They don’t necessarily have to have used Ruby on Rails before but some experience of web based development and use of relational databases would be expected. I will expect to provide some basic training and support, though I’d also hope that they will be the type of person to pick up new technologies quickly.

As I’ve mentioned the ideal would be for someone to come in and work for me unpaid over the summer for a few months. They will gain some great experience in working on a web startup and I’ll get some development done on mapme.at. I definitely wouldn’t want to leave anyone out of pocket though. I’d certainly be willing to pay someone’s expenses if they’re going to have to travel to get to Liverpool each day, though I wouldn’t go so far as to pay for someone’s accommodation so they’re definitely going to need to live somewhere nearby. I should also mention now that I will be expecting this person to work with me on-site in an office in central Liverpool so I’m not looking to work with anyone remotely.

So, are you interested or do you know anyone who might be? If so get in touch by emailing me at my first name “at” my second name dot net, or just by leaving a comment on this posting.