Barcamp + Hiring
I attended Barcamp Atlanta this past weekend and found it to be a great deal of fun. I met a lot of interesting people and heard some great content. I found the sessions lead by Stephen Fleming to be particularly excellent. For my own session I guess introductory database admin/tuning just isn’t very inspiring, i’ll do something appropriately cooler next time. Much of the late night discussion (which unfortunately corresponded in time to a big production issue I had to be distracted by - see previous post if you care to know what issue I hit) was Startup Weekend Atlanta specific and left me wishing i’d known about the signups sooner. I just joined the wait list as a backend developer and/or sysadmin.
There was a fair amount of discussion about the Atlanta startup environment in general and thoughts on what factors prevent it from being better. Though I may not have the year and company counts that more experienced area entrepreneurs hold I have co-founded 2 startups and been employed by 2 more in the last 4ish years and have a lot of thoughts about this. I also realize I have a tremendous amount to learn through future experience.
The biggest issue we’ve faced is finding and keeping talent. We’ve managed to succeed with a mixture of contract and full-time help but in general I think qualified people are in short supply here. Obviously this is not a problem isolated to our company as we’ve lost a few to poaching by other startups. Perhaps going forward we’ll be able to collect advice and guidance from these older/wiser area entrepreneurs instead of painfully unwanted profit increases - they aren’t always a good thing 
I rarely talk about work directly here, but as the newly crowned Minister of Libations at my company, i’d like to mention that we are looking to make several hires in both development and QA. Check out our website at wethecitizens.com and if you might be interested shoot me an e-mail at juhl [at] wethecitizens [dot] com. The code involves Java 1.5, Spring, Hibernate, and DWR (lots of Ajax) running against a stout PostgreSQL database. The interfaces are a mixture of publicly-accessible webpages and a more powerful application exposed to certain users that is delivered through webrunner.
It is a startup and while the work can be tough I also find it to be particularly rewarding. We work on a lot of nontrivial problems and interact with front-page customers and the opportunities ahead are excellent. We’ve been around for a few years, are well funded, have a committed and dedicated board, and as a startup actually have substantive revenue. Competitive salary, stock options, benefits (health and dental), flexible hours, snacks and drinks, proper workstations (Aerons while supplies last + Dual Screen + Laptop or Desktop), beer on Friday at close of business, and a committed core group of people make this a pretty great place to work in my opinion.