Hello there! My name is Lowell Heddings, and I’m a terrible programmer. Why would anybody let me near the code, you ask?

Well, it’s because I’m the founder and owner of How-To Geek, the best (and biggest) technology how-to site on the internet. And I’m great at hacking things together to make them work, but writing maintainable code? Terrible. Documenting said terrible code? Ironically, also terrible.

Your job, should you choose to accept the awesomeness of it, would be to throw out all of my terrible code (with glee) and create a well-documented, maintainable, secure, and most of all, blazing fast infrastructure. Don’t forget the glee — you’re also required to make fun of my code at every opportunity.

I know, it sounds like loads of fun and you’ve probably already applied, but keep in mind that we’re running a very high-traffic production WordPress-based site — during peak times we’re seeing 30-50 page views per second, and even in the middle of the night, we’re talking about hundreds to thousands of hits every single second of every day.

To handle the huge load of daily visitors, we’re using Fastly’s amazing varnish-based caching servers. That’s right, Fastly is so good they can even overcome my terrible coding. Unless I decide to wipe the Fastly cache in the middle of the day and the source server can’t handle the load to rebuild the cache. That’s when things get interesting. Yes, this happened last Thursday and now Googlebot is mad at us.

Even a small programming error can take down a server when your buggy code is running 500 times per second, and since we don’t even have a QA environment I’m deploying code from my laptop straight to production. Did I mention that you need to help us create proper dev/QA environments, build scripts, and use source control properly? Also, documentation.

Here are just a few of the interesting and challenging projects you’ll work on:

• Completely redoing the site with a clean, fast, trimmed-down, modern, responsive design. And maybe this time it’ll like, validate or something, unlike our current one that’s still using YUI grids CSS from the mid-2000s.
• Rebuilding our internal article editing and scheduling system – we’ve customized WordPress a lot, and racked up a lot of technical debt.
• Building an in-house ad system from the ground up. We’re trying to build friendly, high-quality ads embedded directly in the page without any JavaScript.(This doesn’t necessarily have to be built completely with PHP and WordPress)
• Building a new internal stats and reporting system tied to pageviews and our internal ad system. With hundreds of millions of ad impressions each month, it ends up being a lot of data, making decent reports a very difficult task. (This doesn’t necessarily have to be built with PHP and WordPress)
• Integrating the internal stats and reporting with affiliate vendor reporting so we can more easily count the pennies when people click stuff.
• Building a better, well-documented infrastructure that could be rebuilt quickly in case of total server failure.
• Rebuilding our email newsletter template, which sends to 100k+ people every weekday with a 60% open rate. It doesn’t look great on all devices right now.

There are a lot more important things that we’ll need you to work on, but I’m pretty sure you’ve got the idea.

You’ll get benefits:

401k matching at 4%

free short-term disability insurance

health insurance where we cover 100% of the premium

160 hours of paid vacation a year