We're looking for a motivated and independent software developer who's passionate about building software for music lovers. This is an opportunity to join us in developing an application that reaches over 20 million users annually.
In this role, you will eventually be responsible for the end-to-end development of a Windows Store Application built using the C#/Xaml/WinRT stack. You will be working closely with UI/UX and graphic designers to bring a highly bespoke user experience to life.
At Meridian, we have a strong developer-driven project management culture and a track record of on-time delivery without trashing our weekends. We constantly iterate on the development process to keep things running smoothly.
While you will be working out of our New York office, our culture is extremely casual, and our office hours and work-from-home policies are flexible.
Skills & Requirements
Requirements:
- Experience with Windows 8/8.1 App development using C#/Xaml and Visual Studio
- Strong fluency in C#, Xaml, and WPF
- Experience communicating with services built using JSON, HTTP, REST, OAuth, etc
- Experience working closely with graphic designers to build applications
Preferred Skills:
- Experience with Android or iOS development
- UI Design experience
- Photoshop familiarity
About Meridian Audio
In 2000, unsatisfied with the music products that existed in the world, a few rabid music fans got together to create something better. We built Sooloos because we wanted its features for ourselves: the ability to browse huge music libraries and stream audio to multiple rooms. We built touchscreen kiosks and put them in our friends' houses and in our favorite bars. We kept our day jobs, but in our own time we relentlessly pursued the world's coolest music listening experience.
After a few years, we were surprised that other products in the space were still unable to meet our needs, so we turned our hobby into a company and shipped our first product in 2006. We built our own hardware using studio-grade audio components and packaged Sooloos as a high-end music server for the audiophile market, which received us with open arms.
In late 2008 we were acquired by Meridian Audio, which had a culture of innovation in audio hardware and DSP that matched our own in UX and streaming. In addition to manufacturing the gold standard of high-performance multi-zone music solutions, we also develop software music products for Jaguar Land Rover, Hewlett Packard, and a variety of audio OEMs.
Five years post acquisition, everyone on our original development team is still with us. Our reference product serves a community of 10,000 specialty users, and we have 10 million activations and 1.5 million monthly actives for HP Connected Music, the product we bundle on nearly 20 million PCs annually. We work with the biggest services in the business including Last.fm, AllMusic Guide, Rhapsody, Deezer, TuneIn, iHeart Radio, Spotify, 7digital, Songkick, Musicbrainz, LyricFind, and Qobuz.
Our team is headquartered in Meridian's New York office in Soho (home to the most amazing digital theater ever) but we routinely work remotely, sometimes on four continents at once. Our flat structure relies on the initiative and accountability of everyone on the team; we all own projects (and in some cases product) and our output speaks for itself.
The best thing is to replace the unreadable code with readable code while preserving or improving its performance characteristics.
Optimized code is often unreadable because the initial implementation didn't forsee the future optimization. A re-write that takes both into account at once is usually at least as fast and much more readable.
Some kinds of work are much easier in person, like brainstorming and high-level product design. Many other kinds of work--the ones that take up the bulk of the time in my experience--are best done alone. This includes most of the hashing-out-the-details stuff like coding, graphic design, and copy-writing.
The most important thing is finding people independent enough to function remotely. There some also work to be done in breaking down social boundaries--remote workers need to be willing to reach out immediately when they are stuck, have ideas, or need to talk something through. Many introverted people have trouble with this idea, especially at first.
The emulator sucks on all platforms, not just mac. I suspect that at google, most android app development happens on real hardware and the emulator there to tick a box.
I spent about five minutes with it before concluding that productivity was going to require some real hardware. The emulator really only gets fired up when reproducing bugs on old os versions.
The emulator project is probably under-resourced and as such they don't care about minor usability issues with known workarounds. I'm not seeing this as being some kind of jihad against mac users.
I have a lot of experience using mono on mobile platforms, including webos, ios, and android. We also port to mac/windows and a number of other ARM-based linux platforms.
If you go with mono, the most striking thing you will notice is increased startup time. On iOS with full AOT this effect is less pronounced, but on webos/android even tiny mono apps have 1-3 seconds of black screen at startup since there's a lot of JIT/metadata work to be done.
On darwin platforms, we've found that mono's garbage collector pauses unmanaged threads at inconvenient times and were forced to move audio playback into a separate process to prevent glitches. This only mattered with large numbers of live objects (>500k), but it did come into play. The new SGen collector may fix this, but it still (as of 2.10.2) crashes too often to be used.
Memory usage is noticeably higher than for comparable objective-c apps, but is not the end of the world.
Once your app is up and running, the mono runtime is plenty fast enough for most things. We even do some light DSP in C# on these platforms. It's better than you would think.
On a related note, just because you're using C#/.net doesn't mean that you can code like you're in the desktop/server world. You still need to focus on doing as little work possible per screen displayed to get the snappiest possible user experience.
There's plenty of room in a startup for the programmer + business guy to be different people...I think for a company to go far they almost have to be different people. While learning something about programming may be educational to you, I doubt you're going to become the kind of cream-of-the-crop programmer you want building your technology.
If you're good at business, do what good business people do--design product, hire talent, scare up money, and bulid relationships.
Job Description
We're looking for a motivated and independent software developer who's passionate about building software for music lovers. This is an opportunity to join us in developing an application that reaches over 20 million users annually.
In this role, you will eventually be responsible for the end-to-end development of a Windows Store Application built using the C#/Xaml/WinRT stack. You will be working closely with UI/UX and graphic designers to bring a highly bespoke user experience to life.
At Meridian, we have a strong developer-driven project management culture and a track record of on-time delivery without trashing our weekends. We constantly iterate on the development process to keep things running smoothly.
While you will be working out of our New York office, our culture is extremely casual, and our office hours and work-from-home policies are flexible.
Skills & Requirements
Requirements: - Experience with Windows 8/8.1 App development using C#/Xaml and Visual Studio - Strong fluency in C#, Xaml, and WPF - Experience communicating with services built using JSON, HTTP, REST, OAuth, etc - Experience working closely with graphic designers to build applications
Preferred Skills: - Experience with Android or iOS development - UI Design experience - Photoshop familiarity
About Meridian Audio
In 2000, unsatisfied with the music products that existed in the world, a few rabid music fans got together to create something better. We built Sooloos because we wanted its features for ourselves: the ability to browse huge music libraries and stream audio to multiple rooms. We built touchscreen kiosks and put them in our friends' houses and in our favorite bars. We kept our day jobs, but in our own time we relentlessly pursued the world's coolest music listening experience.
After a few years, we were surprised that other products in the space were still unable to meet our needs, so we turned our hobby into a company and shipped our first product in 2006. We built our own hardware using studio-grade audio components and packaged Sooloos as a high-end music server for the audiophile market, which received us with open arms.
In late 2008 we were acquired by Meridian Audio, which had a culture of innovation in audio hardware and DSP that matched our own in UX and streaming. In addition to manufacturing the gold standard of high-performance multi-zone music solutions, we also develop software music products for Jaguar Land Rover, Hewlett Packard, and a variety of audio OEMs.
Five years post acquisition, everyone on our original development team is still with us. Our reference product serves a community of 10,000 specialty users, and we have 10 million activations and 1.5 million monthly actives for HP Connected Music, the product we bundle on nearly 20 million PCs annually. We work with the biggest services in the business including Last.fm, AllMusic Guide, Rhapsody, Deezer, TuneIn, iHeart Radio, Spotify, 7digital, Songkick, Musicbrainz, LyricFind, and Qobuz.
Our team is headquartered in Meridian's New York office in Soho (home to the most amazing digital theater ever) but we routinely work remotely, sometimes on four continents at once. Our flat structure relies on the initiative and accountability of everyone on the team; we all own projects (and in some cases product) and our output speaks for itself.
Please contact [email protected] if you're interested