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Loren wants to work at Airbnb

lorenburton.com

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#61
post #7

See, now, this is great stuff. How do you not hire this guy? A near-perfect example of the form: * It's gorgeous * It's simple * It's precisely targeted and relevant My only critique is that he didn't find a way to work Pocket into it; the story about his six-year-old sister using it is a winner. Anyone want to put odds on how long Loren stays on the market? I give it a week. :)

I suppose the Matasano version would be the same thing, but it'd be on your intranet? ;-)

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#62
post #61
post #7

See, now, this is great stuff. How do you not hire this guy? A near-perfect example of the form: * It's gorgeous * It's simple * It's precisely targeted and relevant My only critique is that he didn't find a way to work Pocket into it; the story about his six-year-old sister using it is a winner. Anyone want to put odds on how long Loren stays on the market? I give it a week. :)

I suppose the Matasano version would be the same thing, but it'd be on your intranet? ;-)

Well played, sir. Hats off.

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#63
post #52

The ROI on these in terms of career growth absolutely ROFLstomps effort at improving a traditional resume and playing spray-and-pray. (The ROI of networking is probably better than both but, hey, what can you do.)

This is maybe closer to networking than it is to a traditional resume.

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#64

Nice. And renders on a few browsers I tried. I'm always surprised with how many people consider themselves professional web devs, but can't bother to get IE to work properly.

with his narrowly targeted audience I would venture a guess that excluding IE was a safe move.

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#66

Nice. And renders on a few browsers I tried. I'm always surprised with how many people consider themselves professional web devs, but can't bother to get IE to work properly.

with his narrowly targeted audience I would venture a guess that excluding IE was a safe move.

To be clear it worked on IE. I was praising him for getting it to work with IE, since a lot of links on HN don't render properly on IE.

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#67
post #14
post #4

I just emailed the founders. I expect they'll contact you soon.

I assume you won't be willing to but... any chance you'd shed light on how you worded your email, ranging from just a link to "you have to hire.."?

The page speaks for itself; there's really not much of a pragmatic difference between pg emailing the link and pg emailing the link as well as pointing out the obvious.

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#68
I was interested in working for Airbnb too. Last January I tweeted out about how much I love them, and through the tweet I ended up visiting their offices and chatting with Joe, one of their founders. They were very generous with their time.

Took me 10 seconds writing out the tweet, but the face time I got out of it was very valuable. This is another thing one might look into to get the attention of companies.

http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23146168087224320

http://twitter.com/newinyork/status/23154242558623744

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#69
Hey, I hate to be "that guy"...but since you're applying for a front-end job, here goes:

- You're loading scripts in your head tag, and a crap-ton of them. At least some of these could be concat'd together. HTTP request carry a lot of overhead, so fewer is better. I bet at least some could be moved to the bottom as well, with some CSS/JS to avoid the dreaded Flash Of UnBehavioured Content.

- In a similar vein, you're loading a lot of images, more overhead again. At least some of these (like the clouds) could probably be combined into one file and then separated out with CSS.

- You're not setting long expire headers on your resources, bad for caching.

- You don't seem to be serving up gzipped resources.

- Some of the scripts aren't even minified.

Take clouds.js for example, you use a whole HTTP request on this one file, and it's small. It's also not very DRY, you have a bunch of repeats of basically the same code, it probably could have been re-written to something like:

    $('.clouds').each(function(){
      $(this).animate({
           /* ...  */
      });
    })

I realize some of this stuff is not entirely necessarily on a site like this, but considering how easy it is and the fact that you're applying for a front-end engineering job, I'd think you'd want to follow best practices.

Overall it's a cool idea, very fun and nice looking. Good job.

(BTW, I'm available for work. If anyone from Airbnb is reading this, I can haz Job plz? )

Re: Loren wants to work at Airbnb

#70

Hey, I hate to be "that guy"...but since you're applying for a front-end job, here goes: - You're loading scripts in your head tag, and a crap-ton of them. At least some of these could be concat'd together. HTTP request carry a lot of overhead, so fewer is better. I bet at least some could be moved to the bottom as well, with some CSS/JS to avoid the dreaded Flash Of UnBehavioured Content. - In a similar vein, you're…

Perhaps it was a conscious decision not to minify and concat. - to show how he works when developing.. in which case, a comment acknowledging so might have been extra-cool. Also, although not the be all and end all in Front end decision making.. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lorenburt... just food for thought. Most are to do with unescaped ampersands in links.
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