Blog

Viewbook is looking for a lead developer

By Rien | October 19th, 2008 | 1 Comment

Update: we found a great developer, this vacancy is closed now.

Viewbook is looking for a freelance or part-time developer/sysadmin who takes the lead in scaling our platform to next levels. We have a small team of developers with three front-end programmers and two back-end (RoR) developers. We’re now looking for someone who has enough experience to take the lead and come up with solid solutions to design and scale our platform.

We think you must have experience in three fields: Architecture, Server and database management and development (in Ruby). Viewbook runs entirely on RESTful webservices built in Ruby on Rails and Merb. We’re also planning to make our API’s public.

Required skills

Architecture / Scaling
* Systems architecture
* Scaling, load balancing
* Optimizing, performance testing, caching
* Image uploads, resizing and storage
* Database design and optimization

Server and database management
* Configuring, maintenance and optimizing Linux servers(Linux, Apach/Ngnix, Mysql, Ruby)
* Monitoring and emergency maintenance
* Scaling databases
* Back-ups / redundancy
* Consultation with hosting parties

Programming
* Significant experience developing and deploying Ruby on Rails applications
* Programming webservices in Ruby on Rails and Merb
* Programming image resizing and storage

Location
We’re located in the Netherlands, it would be very nice if you’re in the area but it is not essential. Our team works from different locations and different countries.

Interested?
Please contact rien@viewbook.com.

7 ways that Viewbook helps creative people show their work

By Rien | October 10th, 2008 | No Comments

You can do more with your images than you think. Keeping them on your hard-drive or e-mail them once in a while is not the best way to promote yourself and your work. Here’s what Viewbook can do for you and your images.

1. A central place to store your images
Viewbook gives you a central place to organize and store your images. You can access your image library wherever there’s an internet connection. After uploading them to your account you have a secure online backup of your original images.

2. Leave a professional impression
Viewbook makes it possible for you to show your work quickly and professionally. It simply makes a good impression when you use a professional tool like Viewbook. The Viewbook galleries look clean and load quickly. They automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and have full screen view. If you want to protect your presentations you can add a password so only people with a valid login can see your work.

3. Make work selections quickly
Once you uploaded your images into Viewbook you can organize them into different presentations (albums) and portfolio pages. This way you can create work selections very easily, and showcase only the works you think are important.

4. Special gallery formats for different kinds of usage
Showing images from a photography shoot is not the same thing as showing web design proposals. That’s why Viewbook created flexible gallery settings to enable or disable only the options you need. Show website and design proposals at their original size, enable thumbnail options for photo albums, or hide all options for a clean embedded gallery.

5. Share your work on Facebook and many other sites
Create a gallery with your best work and add it to your Facebook profile or any other website. When you enable the public share function visitors of your gallery can share your work even further.

6. Keep your portfolio up to date in minutes
Viewbook created a simple but powerful online portfolio page. Not a complete portfolio website, but a functional page optimized to show your work. You can create as many pages as you need for different portfolios or projects and you can connect your portfolio to your own domain name.

7. It’s simple, quick and it works
It always feels good when an application does what it needs to do. Viewbook is focused on simplicity and ease of use. After registration you can have you gallery or portfolio up in several minutes.

Any ideas for new features? Let us know by adding a comment or visit our support forum.