The Frontier Group is a boutique software development company based in West Perth. We have a strong focus on web software, and utilise Ruby on Rails and JavaScript to build web and mobile (specifically iPhone and Android) applications. We’re looking to take on experienced developers to work with our team on our internal and client projects.
Is this you?
You understand the difference between websites and web applications, and you want to write apps that matter for people that care about them.
You’ll have a track record of working on completed projects. You’ll have a few years commercial experience, probably working as part of a team doing solid but under-appreciated work. You will have experience with Mac, Linux or UNIX, but it might not be your daily environment. Similarly you will have an opinion about vi vs. Emacs or Python vs. Ruby, but you’ll understand that they’re just opinions.
You’ll care about your tools and will take real, genuine pride in the quality of the code you create. You won’t consider automated testing and continuous integration as optional components of a project, and will appreciate automated deployment procedures too. Learning new programming languages and getting more out of the languages you already know will excite you. Efficiency will be important too, and you’ll be looking for ways to automate your workflow and push the repetition off to a script.
You’ll be confident in your programming ability, regardless of the language you prefer, yet humble enough to seek guidance when needed. You’ll know how JavaScript can be used to enhance the web, and will have demonstrated experience with a leading JavaScript library. You might even care about SASS and HAML, if you’re really cool.
Using the right tools is important and we realise that. We don’t have a parent company dictating how we do things or what our “standard operating environment” is – you’ll get to make those decisions with us. We all use MacBook Pros for development, but you might want a new iMac, for example. You’ll keep up to date with current trends and care about using modern techniques and practices, as well as tools and technologies.
What we give you
Variable salary, dependent on position (Starting at $63,000 on probation)
9% superannuation (on top of salary)
A MacBook Pro with SSD (yours to keep, replaced every two years) ~$3,500
$1,000 travel allowance per year (parking, bike servicing, public transport)
Internet and mobile allowance ($80 each per month)
Current and relevant books, training, tools and gear
Pay reviews every 6 months with no ceiling on earning potential
Freedom to grow your role with our organisation
What you give us
Agreed units of production (standard working week)
Your creative genius and passion
How to apply
Send a short email to jobs@thefrontiergroup.com.au and reference your Github and Stack Overflow accounts, along with any Open Source projects you’re involved with. Include a resume if it’s three pages or less.
Lately we’ve been working on an app that we are now happy to announce as FlyRight.
FlyRight is a mobile app (with accompanying web site) designed to use the power of real-time services to help improve airline travel, allowing you to be heard by the airlines when you need to be: on the spot.
We want to help make travelling a smoother and more enjoyable experience by giving you power when you need it. If you want to be heard, FlyRight is for you.
We’ll have more updates soon so for now, register your interest at FlyRight to hear all about the launch. You can also keep up to date on FlyRight’s Twitter and Facebook page.
Our DEVOPS team manage a NetApp FAS2020 filer for a customer, and recently our network monitoring systems began reporting an issue connecting to the device’s BMC (Board Management Controller). This is the independent processor that provides the lowest level access to the system. In theory, if everything was to break and the machine was to blow up, we should be able to log into the BMC and find out what is going on. It’s an entirely separate computer tasked with providing a (secure!) back-door to the system in case of catastrophic failure.
Even though NetApp has a phenomenal reputation – at a technical seminar last year, a sales engineer said that no NetApp customer has ever lost data due to a hardware failure – I still don’t feel comfortable without access to the BMC.
Access to the BMC (on other NetApp devices the LOM controller is called a Remote Management Controller, or RMC) is via SSH, using naroot as the username. From here you can move “up the chain” to a system console, and use CTRL-G to move “down the chain” back to the BMC.
mlambie@prime:~$ ssh naroot@ilca-netapp-bmc
naroot@ilca-netapp-bmc's password:
=== OEMCLP v1.0.0 BMC v1.2 ===
bmc shell ->
bmc shell -> system console
Press ^G to enter BMC command shell
Data ONTAP (ilca-netapp.thefrontiergroup.net.au)
login: root
Password:
ilca-netapp> Mon Mar 12 11:40:27 WST [console_login_mgr:info]: root logged in from console
ilca-netapp> <ctrl g>
=== OEMCLP v1.0.0 BMC v1.2 ===
bmc shell ->
The filer also allows management via SSH directly, and not through the BMC. I used this shell to restart the BMC.
ilca-netapp> bmc help status
bmc status
- Display status for a Baseboard Managment Controller (BMC).
ilca-netapp> bmc help reboot
bmc reboot
- Reboot the Baseboard Managment Controller (BMC)
ilca-netapp> bmc reboot
ilca-netapp> The BMC rebooted successfully
It looks like the SSH daemon was simply hung (it had an uptime of 270+ days prior to the reboot) and restarting the BMC through the management console in this way corrected the issues the monitoring systems were reporting.
This week marks the official launch of a project we have been busy working on for the past few months. Since October we have been putting together mobile and web apps for a startup in Perth called Synaptor.
Synaptor is changing the way SMEs in hazardous industries ensure the safety of their people and the environment with innovative mobile and web apps. We’re happy to have been involved in a project for a local company that is going to improve health and safety outcomes in hazardous industries.
We have put together a case study (Synaptor case study) to showcase the products, but here’s a sneak peek below:
Visit the Synaptor website to check out the project, or try out the mobile apps (iPhone/iPad) in the App Store (Observations & Maps)
