Finding Django Developers

As the number of developers increases, it becomes harder to find the person you are looking for. A while ago we added filtering by country, but for large countries such as the US, there are still way too many developer profiles to look through. We now have nearly 700 Django developers on the site and needed to find a better way.

The solution we chose was geocoding the location of each developer so that we can find developers who are close to a given location. Ignoring the technical stuff, it’s very easy to use. Just type in the name of your town or city and get back a list of developers who are nearby.

We’re confident this will make it much easier to find Django developers and may add other search options in future. As always, we’re happy to hear your feedback.

Follow us on Twitter

We’ve also added a Djangogigs Twitter account which you can follow to see the latest gigs as they are added.

It was launched in September 2007 and was designed to give employers and developers a central location to list and respond to job listings, and quickly became popular within the Django community.

Since then, we’ve had about 550 gigs and nearly 800 developers submitted to the site. And even during the downturn in the job market, we’re still getting a similar number of gig submissions as last year – good news for django developers.

Since Scott and I formed Red Robot Studios last year, we wanted to take Djangogigs under the Red Robot Studios banner and take some time to add long-awaited features. Between setting up the company and releasing easyjobboards, this is the first chance we’ve had to dedicate some time to djangogigs and add some much-requested features. This is only the tip of the iceberg and we want to grow and improve the site to help fulfil the community’s needs and make it more useful to all.

New Features

• Gigs can now be edited and removed
• We’ve given the interface a refreshed and made it clearer and more consistent
• You can now use Markdown syntax to structure gig and developer descriptions
• Added dynamic address and location lookup by integrating with Google maps
• Lots of internal improvements to how gigs and developers are approved and managed

We’ve also moved to a faster server and added a feedback widget to help and encourage people to get in touch.

Since we’ve integrated with the Google Maps API, the location details of gigs and developers is now in a common format which will allow us to split, cluster, map and filter listings, making it easier to find what you’re looking for. For example, we will be able to provide fine-grain control: just jobs in San Francisco, and conversely filter by continent or country.

We’ve only added initial support for this (at the country level), but we’d love to hear what you would find useful.

We have lots planned for the future, and intend to integrate parts of our easy-to-use job board application in to djangogigs in the future.

We’d especially like to hear your feedback as to what you think needs to be improved upon to make the site more useful to both developers and employers.

You can send all feedback, issues or suggestions to us at our support page along with anything else you’d like us to address.

Thanks for your support.

Andrew and Scott
The guys from Red Robot Studios