Earlier, we posted that we were seeking some new PMs for the Relevance team. At that time, I mentioned that we were always looking for great technical folk as well. I think that deserves its own post.

Our team is growing pretty fast. Our combination of technology platforms and deep devotion to the people side of software is resonating really well with our customers and we want to encourage and enable that growth. So what are we looking for? I'm glad you asked.

Are you excellent at Ruby and/or Clojure? Can you work sitting next to somebody who is at least as smart as you, pairing on solutions to wicked problems? Do you want to work on open source or community projects 20% of the time? Can you jump back and forth between small apps for early-stage startups and giant systems for Fortune 100 companies? How good are you at ping pong? Can you demonstrate a history of having an impact on the projects you contribute to? Do you practice TDD and have strong opinions about testing frameworks (we have an ongoing war over Cucumber here, and we need more combatants)? Have you read Cryptonomicon, Daemon or The Black Swan? Do you like to speak at conferences or write awesome blog posts about cool technology? Are you comfortable getting direct feedback about your work? How many of the founders of GitHub can you name?

If you found yourself in the questions above, we want to talk with you. We're looking for full-time or contract technologists. We especially want people who can work in our Durham office, or who live in DC. Come be part of something growing, special and fun.

Drop us a line at jobs@thinkrelevance.com.

New point releases, new projects, and more info about the first clojure-conj. Here are The Relevant Bits from last week's "20%" time:

• Lots of planning and organization on the (first clojure-conj). This is an event you are not going to want to miss! We will be unveiling the fruits of this labor later this week. Keep a close eye on the website for more information.
• David released Incanter 1.2.3.
• Jared released Errbit, the open source error catcher that's Hoptoad API compliant. Read more about it in his recent blog post.
• Rob released watch-me-now 1.9.0
• Jared can't let a week go about without an improvement to PDFKit, this week, announcing PDFKit 0.4.5.
• Stuart S also contributed his weekly improvements to Lazytest.
• Aaron updated labrepl to work with the latest Compojure.

Here at Relevance, we use Hoptoad for tracking exceptions in our Rails apps. It's great because it gives us a heads up when something goes wrong but it doesn't bury us with tons of email. So, when we found out we couldn't use it on one of our client's apps due to firewall and data confidentiality requirements, we were naturally upset, but we worked around it.

We ended up using a mix of Chatterbox and CapGun to track exceptions and deployments. While this works great, it requires a bit more configuration and doesn't have some of the features that we're used to with Hoptoad. What's a developer to do?

Needing a new project to work on for my Open Source Fridays, I decided to try to tackle this problem. As a result, I'm excited to announce Errbit, the open source, self-hosted error catcher.

Errbit is API-compatible with Hoptoad. This means you can just configure your Hoptoad notifier to send errors to your Errbit server.

It is a pretty standard Rails 3 app that uses MongoDB+Mongoid for the persistence layer. If you have experience with MongoDB and deploying Rails apps, it shouldn't be too much of a learning curve to get up and running.

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. In the spirit of open source, feel free to fork it, contribute features, or white label it for a more personalized look that your clients will recognize.

Big thanks to Michael Parenteau for his awesome design work on the UI and of course to Relevance for giving me Fridays to make cool stuff.

Note: After developing Errbit, we discovered that Hoptoad does offer a "Hoptoad behind your firewall" solution. Definitely check it out if you want a fully supported exception notifier that has to sit behind a firewall.

Screenshots

What have we been doing with our "20%" time the past couple weeks? Read on to find out. It's been a busy couple of weeks in the Clojure and Ruby world for us.

• The (first clojure-conj) was announced. This event is being organized by Clojure/core and Relevance, Inc. Make sure to sign up if you are interested in attending this fantastic opportunity.
• Clojure/core released Clojure 1.2. If you've been waiting for the official version to be released, the time is now!
• Alan has been organizing several successful Triangle Hackerspace meetups. Come on by on a Tuesday night if you are in the Triangle area!
• Rob released a very early version of Nachos, a tool to help you keep all the git repos you care about in sync. Currently it just handles your GitHub watched repos, but feature requests are requested.
• Shay organized an awesome DevNation in San Francisco, and even delivered a talk about "Getting to Minimum Viable Product."
• Chris spent a week hanging out at EngineYard hacking on open source software with Carlhuda.
• Aaron & Stuart S modularized Clojure contrib. Especially if you are a Clojure lib author, read this message.
• Jason, Jess & Michael released the Venture Dojo website.
• Stuart S has continued development on Lazytest, his BDD testing framework for Clojure. It is still in an alpha state, but worth checking out to see where he is going with it.
• Michael released dribbble_desktop, a project for scraping rss feeds of shots from Dribbble.
• Chad updated his Vimlander 2 config. In addition to other tweaks, he has brought the best Vim config up to MacVim 7.3 compatibility.
• Aaron, Jon & Stuart H brought labrepl up to Clojure 1.2 goodness. If you are new to Clojure, this is a great way to learn!
• Jared released version 0.4.4 of PDFKit. If you need to create PDFs, definitely take a look at this library.
• Alan created a new project reconfig for Reloading configuration files in Clojure daemons.

Relevance is growing fast. A hale and hearty welcome to our four newest full-time teammates:

Stuart Sierra: Stuart Sierra is an actor/singer/writer/coder who lives in New York City, where he is a regular at both LispNYC and the downtown theatre scene. As technical lead of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School, he developed the groundbreaking legal search engine AltLaw.org. Stuart is the co-author of the book Practical Clojure. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and B.F.A. in Theatre from New York University.

Michael Parenteau: Artist, designer and maker of cool stuff, Michael has devoted most of his life to solving visual problems and exploring creative processes. During his explorations, he has travelled to 49 states leaving a trail of doodles and picking up fantastic stories. When he is not design-thinking or pushing pixels, he may be found with his wife and daughter living in the country... and dreaming of one day visiting Alaska.

Alex Warr: Alex graduated from Duke University with a Bachelors of Science in 2008 after dual-majoring in Psychology and History. He worked for two years as the Arts and Entertainment Managing Editor for The Chronicle, Inc., spent a year in London, UK as a paralegal for Clifford Chance LLP, and first joined the Relevance team as an Office Manager in January, 2010. A strong writer and organizer with a wide breadth of skills, Alex's real value lies in a positive mindset and the ability to enable friends and peers to maximize their potential. He works hard to facilitate both the work hard and play hard aspects of our culture, loves games of wit and skill, and believes the core objective in life is to be in a good mood when it ends.

Jon Distad: Jon has been programming in one form or another for most of his life. After moving from MS-DOS batch scripts to QBASIC and eventually to C++, he decided that there was no reason to know another language and wouldn't even consider using one that didn't compile to native code. Thankfully he was introduced to Scheme and Prolog in college and realized that there were far more interesting ways to write and think about code than he'd ever considered. He eventually learned Ruby and started doing Rails, but his infatuation with LISPs lingered. Now, through Clojure, he can satisfy his academic fascination while also serving a practical end. He is a happy developer. Jon graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2008 with a BA in both Philosophy and Computer Science. He hopes some day to be able to express the former via the latter and feels strongly that functional programming and homoiconic languages will help him get there.

This round of additions solidifies our design competencies, extends our Clojure team even more, and adds some much welcome organizational skill to our growing group. We are truly excited about adding such a great group.