Quizlet app

Hello Quizlet API Developer,

Since you've signed up as a Quizlet developer, we thought we'd run this opportunity by you to see if you or anyone you know might be interested. We're looking for a couple good PHP / JavaScript developers to join our team in San Francisco. More details about the job are below.

Please let me know if you or anyone you know might be a good fit.

Thanks, ________________________ Phil Freo, Jr. Product Manager / Developer phil@quizlet.com Quizlet.com

What is Quizlet?

Quizlet.com is the best way online to study languages, vocabulary, or almost anything. We're building educational tools and study games to help students learn in a fun and effective way.

We've got a lot of traction, with over 1 million registered users, and are growing quickly. We're a small, fast-moving team looking for 1 or 2 smart developers to join us as we build some exciting stuff!

You'd be a key part of our development team and would help brainstorm, design, and implement new features.

You should be really great at:

   * PHP5 (object-oriented)
   * MySQL
   * JavaScript / Ajax
   * XHTML or HTML5, CSS

It's also a bonus to love any of these:

   * Dealing with scalability issues
   * UI / UX: making things look good and be really usable
   * Performance optimization - shaving off milliseconds
   * Beautiful, maintainable code
   * Source control (SVN or Git)
   * UNIX sysadmin - managing servers
   * Education - helping students learn!

Check out our Jobs page, with a live activity feed of our users: http://quizlet.com/jobs/

Or our About page, with some stats: http://quizlet.com/about/

You must be in the SF Bay Area and be able to commute to our SOMA office in San Francisco (full-time, on-site only). We are very close to MUNI / light rail, and BART.

We want the best and we'll pay competitively.

Hi Phil,

I like your company and feel it is poised to be a major player in the huge untapped social network called the education system. It would seem the next logical step would be to expand from your definition/term model and take millions of users with you.

I have been using your 'you should be really great at' technologies + jquery to build tools for my classes. On one hand I am motivated by the idea that students can have the opportunity to create their own knowledge. They can create questions and move freely between academic contexts and their normal discourse enough times and in enough ways for new words and ideas to become part of who they are. On the other hand there is the new reality of national standards and top down testing. The opportunity here is to parlay national standards into products that every teacher and student in the US will want to use. Every suggested piece of literature, every mathematical concept in the standards is a potential data point in a suite of tools.

Visual Thesaurus uses its growing collection of words and contexts in an interesting manner in their 'vocabgrabber' script, pulling out words out of any source and cross-referencing them to lists, categories and metadata, selecting for you queries like: 'all the words that have shown up on SAT tests'. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

As an educator I bear witness to the increasing meaninglessness of education to my classically under-performing students of a troubled urban school system. The more top-down education becomes the less they care to play in the game. Quizlet represents one small place where students can take some control over their own education. The world is ready for a bottom-up revolution in education. Arming students and teachers with tools, there is the potential to turn the tables. Moving from hosting lists to hosting more complex classroom interaction seems to be a logical next step.

I am interested in the job. I bring skills if software development, I am an educator and I have a background in project management. Thank you for the opportunity to apply.

Tim,

Thanks for the email and sending your resume. Great to see a teacher passionate about technology in education!

Just curious, where'd you come across our job post? Have you been using Quizlet in the classroom?

We're looking for someone with significant experience in web development. Can you send some examples of projects you've worked on?

Are you up for moving to San Francisco and working at an internet company? That's a big change from teaching in Boston :)

Thanks, Phil

Hi Phil,

You sent me an email since I had been checking out your API and must have been on some list. My user name on quizlet is mcktim. My students can take a quizlet as many times as they want and report to me their best score. Up until this year we were a 1 to 1 laptop school, at least for my classes. This year my students have yet to see a laptop. Boston is dis-investing in its commonwealth, selling off schools to private corporations, taking a hatchet to the staffs, there are no books any more, the pool is empty, there are no janitors, the copy machine works 2 days a week. I'm ready to move. My family seems to be slowly migrating west, I have a son in Portland, and another who plans on moving to Seattle. I love San Francisco.

Computer science to me has always been a way to create magic. When I would build houses it would take physical work and time, but when the Lisp programs I wrote in Autocad took the architects plan, turned it into a wireframe and dropped into it 3d objects for joists, beams, studs and lintels, the model would build itself and provide me my cutlists and stock lists and working drawings instantaneously .

In physics I wrote to control the lab instrumentation and stream the data. As a PhD student in cognitive systems we would create models of learning, memory and recognition and test them in MATLAB simulations running all night on whatever machines at Boston University we could SSH into.

The same is true now; I write for a purpose. Software is a way to empower my students. It is intimately related to the problems in education I have to solve. I have many more ideas than I have time to implement and nothing is in a nice package, lots of scripts that accomplish specific goals.

Some examples:

If we are studying some article I'll use vocabgrabber to create a list of words and contexts, then, one by one, mine the generated source sending each word to answers.com where I read the meta tags and pull the definitions. From there I pump it all into a relational MYSQL DB. Now I have to jump in and manually verify if the automated definition is the right meaning so I go through the lists with this program. This is javascript with jquery ui (type 'mac' into the box before 'getSubSource'(then click that)) which asynchronously feeds an OO PHP script that interacts with the DB, does the paging and creates the XML that the XSL turn into a page. AJAX lets me modify the data row by row or field by field. The clean data goes to a number of places: a quizlet bulk import file or into a file that gets imported into a smartboard to use with those personal response things or here to create an html form test combining vocab questions with comprehension questions. (multi-entry jquery autocomplete (type 'mac' in each box)).

My students have historically kept all of their writing, notes, collected stuff and group work in a subdirectory structure off their own user pages on the class Mediawiki wiki. I have been fooling with the mediawiki API and can now inject pages into that structure allowing me to customize writing prompts question lists and other stuff. This holds a lot of promise as a way to programatically access content data. This is a little harder to demonstrate and uncover from behind protected directories.

There is a lot of content in the class wikis now and I can pretty much grab what I need, turn it into data that I can then use to create multiple choice comprehension questions, for example. Right now I am studying what makes a good multiple choice content question and reviewing the question types on the state tests, the SAT, and the Accuplacer. My practice is changing and I'm working on ways to turn open response study guide questions into quality multiple choice questions quickly and easily. Once I know what that looks like I'll develop an environment that will make that painless as a web app that might use the GIFT question format.

What makes this cool is that you are now creating good questions that help the kids to refine their sense of what precise understanding of reading looks like and your are doing it, not with some random text from some test company, but out of essential questions coming out of what happens in your classroom every day.

PHP is the easy part.

Thanks for your consideration,

Tim McKenna