Looking for Titan Network Developers

Hey all, the good news is that the constant changes and improvements in City of Heroes makes the game exciting and fun to play. The bad news is that it is making our volunteer jobs here at the Titan Network a bit challenging at times to keep up with everything.

We're currently looking to recruit a few developers to help us out. Specifically, we need people who have some good experience developing web sites and applications using PHP, CSS, and JavaScript running on Linux against a MySQL database back-end. We've got several existing more-or-less static projects that need occasional maintenance as well as marginal improvements, such as Faces. We also have our most frenetically changing project, City Info Tracker, that needs updates with almost every new Issue (and sometimes in between) due to mechanics changes. Last but not least, we are in the planning stages of an overhaul and revamp of the entire Titan Network.

This is a volunteer project, but we're really trying hard to not make it an amateur project. That means that if you're on our team, you'll get a fair amount of leeway in release schedules and such since we're all doing this in our spare time. However, we do have standards that we either are adhering to or are working to improve, such as using a version control system and a trouble ticket system. While you don't necessarily have to be a guru to join the team, we are looking for people who have more than just a passing experience in web site development, people who have been instrumental in rubber meeting road.

"So Tony, this sounds kind of hard. If I don't get paid, why would I do something like this?" Well, a few reasons. First of all, the Titan Network is arguably the most respected and well-known set of City of Heroes web sites out there. Both City Info Tracker and the Paragon Wiki get between two and three million page loads per month each and are used by over 30,000 people each month. Being involved with it is something to be proud of, and especially being an active developer on one of its projects generally gets respect and gratitude from the community.

On a more practical note, it's also something you can put on your résumé. Yes, just because you don't get paid for it doesn't mean that you can't show it off to potential employers, people who will pay you gobs of money if you have a proven track record, such as helping to design and maintain a popular gaming web site getting millions of page loads every month.

Last, but not least, it's cool. Using CIT, for example, is really neat. Actually getting to design CIT so that it suits your exact specifications, now that's just plain nifty. You would no longer have to think, "I wish they would [insert feature we're missing now]!" You would have the power to make it happen. (After reasonable discussion and testing, of course.)

So how about it? Do you want to work with a team of interesting and smart folks who share your interest in the game? Do you want to be able to tell your friends, "I made that."? Do you want the catgirls or catboys (or both!) falling at your feet and swooning in reverence? Drop me a PM or send me an e-mail at tonyv@cohtitan.com, and we'll talk about how you can fit in!

Just to chime in:

One thing that I always tell people who are asking about how to get into the gaming industry (aside from the requisite ARE YOU CRAZY) is the following:

Do everything you can do to get noticed. Fansite development, app or addon development, basically any sort of Community involvement. Remember that these are the things that make your exceptional candidate stand out from your average one.

Projects like this are a great way to be involved with the Community, especially if you eventually want to try to make games for a career.

Just sent you an email, TonyV. Unfortunately my vid skills won't be much good, but I've got 10+ years as an editor/technical writer.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

If I wasn't already running/maintaining VirtueVerse and UnionVerse on my own I'd offer up some help with front end web dev. But the wiki's already have my up to my eyeballs, so good luck finding people.

I love CiT and ParagonWiki, makes me wish I knew anything about those things you need help with. I'm good with HTML, and I know some vague things about CSS and Javascript, but that's as far as my knowledge goes.

I'll just stick to editing the wiki and hope you find some competent people.

We have some new recruits that we're talking to (yay!), but we're also still looking for one particular skill set that would come in very handy.

We need one or two good web page designers. These would be people who may not necessarily be back-end coding gurus, but who can set up decent prototype layouts. We need people who are very familiar with HTML standards and CSS, who can do things like design spiffy-looking tables and divs, fluid columns, position elements, and so on. It's also really important to be able to operate within the confines of standards; code would have to be able to run cleanly through the W3C (X)HTML Validator and W3C CSS Validator.

We do try to avoid code designed by WYSIWYG tools. It's not that we hate such tools. For getting an initial design they're fine, but personally, I've found that they tend to mangle things up with redundant code, glitchy CSS, and so on more than they help design things. We do target the sites to be compatible with IE 8+ and Firefox 3.5+. You don't have to worry about compatibilities with ancient browsers. We use the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype on our sites, though at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll probably migrate to the HTML 5 doctype.

If that fits your description and you're interested, give us a holler, we could sure use your help!