Move to Whistler For A Career In Software Engineering With PayrollHero

Posted on May 7, 2013 by

If you were to ask most people in town why they moved to Whistler, British Columbia they would reel off answers like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and summer nights by the lake; the rest would say they were on a gap-year and most on a career break, but very few (if any) would say they moved for the perfect job.

With such a transient community Whistler has a bit of bad reputation for employment, but it’s PayrollHero’s goal to change that…one well-paid happy, adventurous employee at a time.

Just in case you still have doubts, later on we’ll introduce you to our most recent success story – Florent Lamoureux, all the way from historic Bordeaux, France.

Keep on reading this post for why more and more career-focused people are moving to Whistler and how, together, we could make it happen for you.

Work to live and live to play

CEB uncovered that one of the top 5 reasons an employee would quit his/her job in 2012 would be to pursue a better ‘work-life balance’. So if you’re already feeling underwhelmed with your current work-life situation, the only way is up when you move to somewhere as recreation-focussed as Whistler, British Columbia.

Swap your stressful highway commute for a walk or a bike ride through acres of lush green coastal temperate rainforest; and on the way home you could even stop for a game of beach volleyball or an evening BBQ at one of four lake-side beaches.

* Does this look like the life you’d like? You should get in touch and tell us a little about yourself. Maybe we could work together.

But isn’t moving stressful?

Psychiatrists Holmes and Rahe listed changing working conditions and moving house in their top 43 most stressful life events for adults. We know moving is never going to be easy, but there are a few things PayrollHero can do to help ease the ‘typical’ stresses of relocation.

#1 Stress: Finding a house

PayrollHero has staff housing for our new-into-town employees. On arrival Florent and his girlfriend moved into their own apartment right in Whistler village to help them get orientated as quickly as possible.

#2 Stress: That awkward gap between pay checks

In our PayrollHero staff housing, Florent received his first month rent free, second month at 70% off and third month at 50% off! We also have an office meals program to help keep everyone happy and healthy. Our commitment to happy employees doesn’t just stop there, our aim to also to have the highest average wage in Whistler. All added up, that should give you a few months of financial ease to help you settle in.

#3 Stress: Settling in and making friends

Making friends is easy in Whistler because everyone is here for the same reason – to have fun in the outdoors while striking a sustainable work-life balance in the mountains. Our employees enjoy regular activities paid for by PayrollHero, annual staff retreats and access to some of the world’s best biking and hiking trails right outside of our office.

My Move to Whistler: Florent Lamoureux

Name: Florent Lamoureux,

Social: @Flrent, Florent on LinkedIn, GitHub

Age: 22

Home: Bordeaux, France

Education: Masters Degree in Computer Sciences

School: SUPINFO International University

Reason for moving to Canada: To spend more time in the great outdoors and perfect his English.

What Florent thinks about his move to Whistler and PayrollHero:

“The slogan of Payroll Hero is ‘optimizing work with happiness’ and that’s something I felt with the company and Mike, right away. They made my move (with my girlfriend) very easy – they even came to pick us up from the airport. Since then I have enjoyed a great work environment, free food at the office and company activities in the summer. From the point of view of my work, I can use my JavaScript, web and mobile knowledge, while learning new skills like Ruby, and attending educational conferences with my co- workers, too.”

Do you feel the pull of the mountains, too? Are you our next PayrollHero Adventure Engineer? We’re always open to meeting new happy creatives from all over the world.

What to do now? Drop us and email right here at support[at]payrollhero.com. Be sure to include all the best bits about yourself and why you think you’d be a good fit at PayrollHero.

Post by Payroll Hero.

PayrollHero Adventure Engineering Team Grows By +1

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

It’s not hard to imagine why people love to visit Beautiful British Columbia. With mountains, ocean and dozens of reasons to spend time indoors and out, those of us who live here count ourselves lucky, and those who visit can’t wait to come back.

Andrew Narkewicz joins PayrollHero

PayrollHero‘s newest staff member is Andrew Narkewicz – a Full Stack Ruby Engineer who tends to live in Ops – thrilled with his career move to PayrollHero in Whistler, where we are headquartered. Andrew attended UBC in Computer Science and most recently worked for Versapay as their Lead infrastructure developer.

What’s a typical work day like, at PayrollHero? There is no typical around here! We know that we get the best ideas from our talented recruits by giving them flexibility. Whether it’s 4-days-on and 3-days-off, or working weekends instead of only weekdays to take advantage time on the hill when the snow is best and the lines are shortest, or longer days with extra time banked for that great pow day, or a long weekend every couple of weeks. Flex-time is even more enticing when you live where the activities seem limitless, and your everyday life feels like a vacation… or at least looks like it to the outside world!

Blackcomb Mountain Pow

Whistler is proving to be a fantastic place to build a business: with its reasonable cost of living, rent, and ease of recruiting people to live and work in a veritable paradise. Whistler is a natural choice for Andrew, originally from Colorado. He loves ‘sledding’ (a casual term given to snowmobiling), which Whistler’s backcountry has plenty of room for! Andrew has joined us to live the best “Whistler Lifestyle” he can, taking every opportunity to play outside, with our blessing!

Don’t think we’re not hard at work, here at PayrollHero! Just because we post [seemingly constant] photos of our adventures doesn’t mean we don’t put in our dues! We’re busy at work, but we set up our business to attract and retain the best sales engineers, developers, iOS and Machine learning engineers, and customer service reps, so that we can create, build and maintain a great web-based payroll program.

Are you fit to be our next Whistler Engineering Team Hero? We are always looking for new teammates – at the office and at play! Drop us a line!

Vancouver JS Meetup Recap

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Stephen Jagger

This is a post from PayrollHero Senior Engineer Suman Mukherjee who recently arrived in Whistler, Canada from the Manila, Philippines office. #AdventureEngineer

On February 12th, the PayrollHero dev team in Whistler travelled down to Vancouver to attend the Vancouver JS meetup. We reached town a bit early, so we spent some time coworking from Launch Academy. Later in the evening, we went to SFU Harbour Center where the event was being held. Around 150 people attended the event. Two top notch speakers presented in the meetup. Robert W. Hurst of Chloi presented a talk on LucidJS and Perter McLachLan of Mobify presented a talk on Mobile performance.

Robert’s talk on Lucid started with giving us some background of event driven programming, how events are emitted and handled and we can structure our javascript around that pattern. Then he introduced LucidJS, a library, that he has been working on. Lucid allows you to set custom event, chain your events and even pipe your events together. Lucid also successfully handles subevents. The event emitters in Lucid also provide meta information about the event bindings and triggering. The library lets you encapsulate any object (not restricted to DOM nodes) and turn it into an event emitter. Specifically when used with DOM elements it allows you to take full advantage of the meta events. Robert’s talk gave us some new insights into the world of event driven programming.

Peter was the second speaker. Peter’s talk was mainly focussed on performances of apps on the mobile browsers. He shared the concept of adaptive websites, one that is not only responsive, but adapts itself based on the device. He discussed several strategies to optimize client side performance like trying to minimize JS and maximize the use of CSS, conditionally loading assets and keeping the DOM tree light so that it is easy to parse, simple CSS selectors, watch out for libraries that generate lengthy CSS selectors etc. Peter shared a list of common JS functions which restructures the DOM and how that affects the performance on mobile devices. He also discussed some other low hanging fruits like gzipping resources and non blocking scripts in the beginning of the page. This can bring returns at the lowest cost. He also showed us how the optimization strategy of domain sharding has become an anti-pattern. He also discussed how in some cases prefetching resources based on a user’s common pattern of navigating a website can be very effective in delivering content faster. Peter’s slides are also available on speakerdeck.

Both the speakers were awesome. It was the first meetup I attended in Vancouver and totally loved it. Those who love JS and are live close to Vancouver can sign up for the VanJS meetup group here.

– Suman.

Couchbase Vancouver Dev Day

Posted on January 30, 2013 by

Last Friday I travelled down to Vancouver for the Couchbase Vancouver Developer Day. Just having joined the PayrollHero dev team, I was keen to learn about the NoSQL style of database, and Couchbase in particular since we currently use it in PayrollHero.

The goal of the day was to introduce developers to Couchbase 2.0, give them a basic understanding of how to set it up and use it, and then tackle some tougher areas such as how to query the data using views. The seminar was run by 3 developers from Couchbase – Technical Evangelists Tugdual Grall & Jasdeep Jaitla, and .NET Developer Advocate John Zablocki. It was interesting to see the mix of developers attending the seminar – most mainstream programming languages were represented including Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Python and even node.js and Go. Amazingly there was some form of SDK for each of these languages, whether official or community created, proving just how much open source community support Couchbase has.

from John Zablocki’s Twitter: http://sdrv.ms/VyHHz4

The morning was spent going through the features found in Couchbase 2.0 with Tugdual. He ran us through the core principles of Couchbase Server – easy scalability, consistent high performance, no downtime and a flexible data model, before discussing the new architecture and features of Couchbase 2.0.

One of the features I found particularly impressive was how Couchbase handles server faults by replicating across nodes in a server cluster. The Couchbase client library detects when requests to a server within your cluster are failing, automatically promotes replicas of the requested documents on the remaining servers in the cluster to be active documents, and then rebalances the documents across the remaining servers. Added to this is the ease in which you can replicate your data across data centers using Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR), meaning if your data center on the west coast of the country goes down entirely, you can ramp up your clusters on the east coast of the country without losing any data whatsoever. An extension of XDCR is the ability to set up an Elastic Search cluster for providing scalable, real-time searching of documents. You can see that a lot of work has gone into making this as painless to set up as possible.

Installing Couchbase 2.0 was just as painless – well at least for us Ruby guys. The PHP guys seemed to have a fair bit more trouble (the price paid for still using PHP!) and any guys running 32-bit Windows were pretty much out of luck. WIth Rails, its as simple as downloading and running the server, installing the libcouchbase library, and installing the couchbase gem. Done.

After everyone had Couchbase 2.0 installed and set up for their various environments, we started to run through some labs to teach us the basics of Couchbase – connecting to the database, setting and retrieving documents, using atomic counters and optimistic locking, and observing when data has been pushed to disk and replicated.

Jasdeep – definitely the most vocal and opinionated of the three – used some of this time to proclaim the virtues of a NoSQL solution vs a Relational Database solution. A line that stuck in my head was “I don’t care about duplicate data – I have 10 times the performance!”. And he is definitely right about that. Couchbase, like other NoSQL databases, is blindingly fast compared to MySQL or MS SQL. By caching as many documents as it can in memory, and only caching to disk those that are the least requested, it can maintain request throughput at amazing rates. “No need to write migrations, I can change the schema at anytime through my models since there is no schema”, he proclaims, before following with, “And no more joins! I hate joins.”

from Tugdual Grall’s Twitter: pic.twitter.com/1cmGxgcb

After lunch, John stepped up to take us through the most difficult area of the day – views. By using Map-Reduce views, Couchbase can create indexes of documents for quick querying. He used the ASP .NET MVC framework to take us a through a fairly standard scenario, explaining how to construct views on Couchbase server to pull back subsets of data based on ranges, groupings, counts and more. This was definitely the most brain-intensive part of the seminar, and late in the day few people had made it through the labs unscathed. For most people who are heavily experienced in relational databases, it does take a while to shift your mind into thinking the NoSQL way.

All up it was a very well run and interesting day. I particularly enjoyed hearing how the NoSQL movement evolved and how passionate the Couchbase guys are about their product. PayrollHero already has Couchbase implemented as part of our clocking capture process, and will be looking to use it in other places where we require fast performance due to heavy traffic. I look forward to using Couchbase more and further learning what makes NoSQL such a popular movement.

PayrollHero Welcomes its First Engineer in Residence!

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Michael Stephenson

Dane Natoli is the newest member to join the Payroll Hero team here in Whistler! Dane grew up in Melbourne, Australia but experienced the Whistler lifestyle for the first time in the 09/10 season during the craziness of the Winter Olympics. After the Whistler Olympics he returned home to Melbourne, Australia and re joined his job as the Software Team Lead for the Agile development shop, Lambda Software. This was all made possible by his Computer Science Degree that he received from RMIT 2007. To add to his extensive resume he also has created a website called Yaktracker, which follows his adventurous friends on their journey to drive from London, England to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia.

It’s not all work and no play for Dane! He is a huge fan of the slopes when he’s not found having a brew or enjoying some couch time with his Xbox. Lucky for Dane he is now able to put all his passions to use.

Dane joins us as apart of EIR, Engineers in Residence program. Designed to further the cultivation of one of our Engineering Core Values “Thirst for Learning”. We’ve experience that rotating engineers from different cultural backgrounds and experiences brings more to the table and enables us to continue to be agile and introduces us to different lines of thinking.

We are overjoyed to welcome Dane to our team, he is going to be a huge help. We look forward to having Dane be apart of our team and bring his personal ‘land from down under’ approach to his work life.

Oh.. what’s the deal with boots? We thought it was funny that it is common form in Whistler to leave your winter boots at the door and swap into slippers just like Mr. Rogers – no one wants a puddle at their desk.

Wanna explore a fit with the Whistler Engineering Team? We are always looking for new teammates to learn, explore and adventure with; be it at one of our offices and when playing outside! Just drop me a line and let’s chat.

AWS re:Invent

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Piotr Banasik

Drive from Whistler to Bellingham ~200km

Last week we went to AWS re:Invent Conference, we thought that once we get there the fun stuff will begin, but even the trip down there itself was an adventure.

We left Whistler early in the morning, to make it down to Bellingham for our 11am flight. Arrived at the airport at around 9am, stood in the line indefinitely until around 11am, we were told that the plane is late (duh), and that it will not be here for another 4h or so, great …

We packed our bags back into the cars and went to grab lunch and waste some time.

We were checking the airline website the whole time to see what the new estimated time was. Anyways, we did finally get to fly out, it was around 4pm by the time we left and around 7pm by the time we got to Vegas, we imagined our day a bit diffrently 😉

Anyways, that was Monday.

On Tuesday, I went to my Workshop session. It was a whole day security session, presented jointly by RightScale and Trend Micro. RightScale showcased their product to get everyone up to speed on how to use it and Trend Micro showcased two of their products, Deep Security and SecureCloud. Overall I didn’t get that much value from the first half, since Ubertor has been with RightScale for years and I’m pretty famillar with it. The second half was a bit more useful for me since I’ve never seen any of Trend’s products, altho I’m not sure if/when we’ll make use of them. Still it was good to understand options. A nice bonus from this session was that it came with a $200 AWS credit code, so it technically made the session cost only $300 not $500.

Wednesday was the first day of the conference. During the keynote AWS announced further reductions in S3 pricing and the introduction of their new RedShift product, which is a large scale data warehousing solution, seemingly backed by Postgesql technology. They also summarized that they have released ~100 new features last year, and they expect to double that in 2013.

(from the keynote #1 video on YouTube)

They mentioned a crazy statistic: AWS adds more servers DAILY, than Amazon owned entirely in 2003.

At the end of the day was the big re:Play party. AWS kept us well inebriated and fed throughout the event so kudos for that.

Sorry about the blurry pic 😉

Thursday was the second day of the conf. During the second keynote, the Data Pipeline service which allows easily grabbing data from a bunch of sources, churning it through a massive array of map reduce instances and dumping the result somewhere else. All this can be configured through a gui workflow builder and overall seems pretty neat. I’m not sure what we specifically can do with it, but I can definitely see applications for it if you do any log processing or whatnot daily.

Over the two days of the conf, I mostly went to security and architecture talks. My main takeaway was a bucket list of little security tweaks here and there that should make our system even more secure than it already is. As for the architecture talks; Netflix has a bit of an insane setup. They have 100’s of little applications, all managed by different teams, all at different uptime standards. Its pretty amazing what systems they put in place to basically allow any of these pieces to fail and their system to continue working.

Netflix setup looks something like this: (grabbed from their slideshare deck)

I’m looking forward to next years’s re:Invent. The cloud landscape keeps maturing every year, I remember just a few years ago the whole idea of “Cloud” didn’t even exist ….

PayrollHero’s “Adventure Engineers”

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

We have ramped up our search for engineers looking to take on a role within a company that is not only programming focused, but also adventure focused. We are in search of engineers who want to work with a company on a big mission, while seeing some of the world along the way. Do you fit the bill of an “Adventure Engineer” ?

Reach out and let us know why you should work at PayrollHero.

PayrollHero Team Retreat – Saigon, Vietnam

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Stephen Jagger

Ad-ven-ture En-gi-neer-ing
Noun: An unusual and exciting, experience or activity built around a flexible work schedule.

The PayrollHero team had a retreat this weekend in Saigon, Vietnam. Vietnam is a quick flight from Manila and a fantastic place to visit. We brought our Whistler team and Manila team together and popped over to Saigon.

At PayrollHero, we believe in “Adventure Engineering” and are committed to not only offering flexible work schedules so that team members can take advantage of “snow days” in Whistler or take “long” weekends to bounce around Southeast Asia but to see the world together. (more on adventure engineering below)

This weekend in Saigon, we fed monkeys and alligators, rode scooters, crawled through the Cu Chi Tunnels, ate frogs, saw the war museum and so much more.

We flew photographer Kris Krug in from Vancouver to document our journey through his lens. Kris is a rockstar photographer and this is not the first time we have brought him along on a PayrollHero trip. Last time we did this was to LAUNCH in San Francisco.

Here are just a couple of his photos from Saigon, but to see the whole collection, pop over to our Facebook page and check them out. Let us know which is your favorite!

PayrollHero Co-Founders Stephen Jagger and Michael Stephenson

Most of the PayrollHero team

Adventure Engineering – We figure there is a small segment of engineers out there who value a challenging and adventurous life. These people tend to share a lot of our core values which we try and reflect in our company with Adventure Engineering:

Work from Whistler or Manila (Mountains and Beach / Snow Cones and Mango’s).
Have a very flexible schedule so you can explore and play. (Snow and surf days).
Learn a ton by travelling and bringing experts to us.
Get outside and play together. Season pass and Physical trainers.
Eat and drink together; meals at the office and offsite pub nights.

Are you looking for an “adventure engineering job”? Get in touch with us to chat more about what we are up to and how you might fit in to our unique environment.

Stephen Jagger on the Vespa Foodie Tour

PayrollHero Lead Engineer Piotr Banasik going down into the Cu Chi Tunnels

Michael Stephenson firing an AK-47

Do You Work to Live or Live to Work?

Posted on October 2, 2012 by Michael Stephenson

I find myself reflecting on past travels from time to time…

Today I was reminded of a vivid bar night that took place while visiting some friends studying at the Sorbonne. It was 4am and I got into a conversation with a Swiss-German Tech Entrepreneur over how Europeans Work to Live while he thought that North Americans Live to Work.

I like to think we build companies with the spirit of Let My People Go Surfing.

So, how does “working to live” get implemented at the PayrollHero.com Whistler Office?

I guess like all things – It all depends…

There are many work schedule options anyone can elect to participate in including:

4×10; three day “weekend” every week.
5×9 and take every other Friday off.
Late morning start so you can ride the powder.
Work weekends and play weekdays when the hills are bare.

Pretty much we’re open for anything as long as you:

Have consensus with your pair if you are pairing on a new critical feature.
You attend the Weekly Engineering Meeting (Monday’s 15:07-16:07).
You present at the daily huddle on the days you are working 16:37-16:52.
If you are working on a new feature; you would be expected to attend all ideation meetings.

We understand and encourage the need for flexibility on snow days in the winter and 30 degree+ days in the summer.

What sort of work schedule would you be interested in?