Software Developer (Functional Programming)

Jane Street is looking to hire great software developers with an interest in functional programming. OCaml, a statically typed functional programming with similarities to Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, F# and SML, is our language of choice. We’ve got the largest team of OCaml developers in any industrial setting, and probably the world’s largest OCaml codebase. We use OCaml for running our entire business, supporting everything from research to systems administration to trading systems. If you’re interested in seeing how functional programming plays out in the real world, there’s no better place.

The atmosphere is informal and intellectual. There is a focus on education, and people learn about software and trading, both through formal classes and on the job. The work is challenging, and you get to see the practical impact of your efforts in quick and dramatic terms. Jane Street is also small enough that people have the freedom to get involved in many different areas of the business. Compensation is highly competitive, and there’s a lot of room for growth.

Software Developer (Functional Programming)

Jane Street is looking to hire great software developers with an interest in functional programming. OCaml, a statically typed functional programming with similarities to Haskell, Scheme, Erlang, F# and SML, is our language of choice. We’ve got the largest team of OCaml developers in any industrial setting, and probably the world’s largest OCaml codebase. We use OCaml for running our entire business, supporting everything from research to systems administration to trading systems. If you’re interested in seeing how functional programming plays out in the real world, there’s no better place.

The atmosphere is informal and intellectual. There is a focus on education, and people learn about software and trading, both through formal classes and on the job. The work is challenging, and you get to see the practical impact of your efforts in quick and dramatic terms. Jane Street is also small enough that people have the freedom to get involved in many different areas of the business. Compensation is highly competitive, and there’s a lot of room for growth.

You can learn more about Jane Street and our technology from our main site, janestreet.com. You can also look at a a talk given at CMU about why Jane Street uses functional programming (http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61), our programming blog (http://ocaml.janestreet.com), and some papers we’ve written about our experience using functional programming in the real world (http://janestreet.com/technology/articles.php).

We also have extensive benefits, including:

• 90% book reimbursement for work-related books
• 90% tuition reimbursement for continuing education
• Excellent, zero-premium medical and dental insurance
• Free lunch delivered daily from a selection of restaurants
• Catered breakfasts and fresh brewed Peet’s coffee
• An on-site, private gym in New York with towel service
• Kitchens fully stocked with a variety of snack choices
• Full company 401(k) match up to 6% of salary, vests immediately
• Three weeks of paid vacation for new hires in the US
• 16 weeks fully paid maternity/paternity leave for primary caregivers, plus additional unpaid leave

More information at http://janestreet.com/workplace/benefits.php

I’ve spent the last few years using Gnome 2 and xmonad on Ubuntu. Since both Ubuntu and the Gnome foundation have dropped support for Gnome 2 I’m going to be forced to upgrade sooner or later. Fortunately I have a two week holiday followed by a new desktop at my new job, so now is a good time to break things on my laptop.

Choices

Almost all of my work happens in bash, emacs, firefox and xmonad. What these have in common, to various extents, is what Mr Yegge likes to call living software. This breaks down the interaction barrier and allows them to grow beyond point-and-grunt into an extension of my mind. This is what I look for in any system I’m going to spend lots of time with.

Unity has the HUD which is basically a CLI for individual applications. There is plugin support via Compiz but nobody seems to be writing any. It’s also incredibly closely tied to Ubuntu and despite all the good they have done some of their recent decisions have been worrying. Individually, they are each sensible and justified but taken as a whole they make me a little nervous about investing heavily in Unity. It’s a shame, because I would love to use the Ubuntu phone.

I’ve spent the last few years using Gnome 2 and xmonad on Ubuntu. Since both Ubuntu and the Gnome foundation have dropped support for Gnome 2 I’m going to be forced to upgrade sooner or later. Fortunately I have a two week holiday followed by a new desktop at my new job, so now is a good time to break things on my laptop.

Choices

Almost all of my work happens in bash, emacs, firefox and xmonad. What these have in common, to various extents, is what Mr Yegge likes to call living software. This breaks down the interaction barrier and allows them to grow beyond point-and-grunt into an extension of my mind. This is what I look for in any system I’m going to spend lots of time with.

Unity has the HUD which is basically a CLI for individual applications. There is plugin support via Compiz but nobody seems to be writing any. It’s also incredibly closely tied to Ubuntu and despite all the good they have done some of their recent decisions have been worrying. Individually, they are each sensible and justified but taken as a whole they make me a little nervous about investing heavily in Unity. It’s a shame, because I would love to use the Ubuntu phone.

Gnome Shell is largely written in js and is on its way to building a healthy ecosystem of extensions (or will be, if it stops breaking them every version bump). It even has an almost-functional repl which surely can be shoe-horned into running cljs. It’s missing the HUD but most of the applications I use have their own CLI anyway. As proof of its flexibility, it has acquired not one but three tiling window managers: shelltile, shellshape and gtile. Of course, all them were broken by the 3.8 update…

KDE has plasma, which it uses for … uh … desktop widgets. It also has activities which are almost a fantastic idea but it uses them to manage … desktop widgets. I don’t remember the last time I saw my desktop. If I’m being unfair to KDE it stems from frustration – they were way ahead of the game on customisation and inter-application communication and they don’t seem to have done anything useful with it.

There are also a million minimalist desktop environments but I prefer to have most of my work done for me, so long as I have the power to monkey-patch anything I disagree with. Vertical integration can be a beautiful thing when it works.

So it looks like Gnome Shell wins. People complain that it is unusable without extensions. For my purposes that is irrelevant. Most of my favourite software is unusable without customisation (especially emacs). What is important is the potential for sculpting it into something better.

Experience

The Gnome Tweak Tool is absolutely essential. I have a few other extensions installed so far but none are particularly essential. There are a few more I will have to write myself.

I expected to find Gnome Do indispensable. I can’t quite puy my finger on the reason but I instead found it intensely annoying and quickly uninstalled it. I think it’s an uncanny valley thing – it’s almost a real repl. Adding panels to the Overview might be a better option for me.

Most of my setup time was burned on remapping keys. Gnome doesn’t run .xprofile or .Xmodmaprc and adding them to gnome-session doesn’t persist the changes across suspend/hibernate. I spent a while trying to remap keys at the kernel level before eventually realising that Gnome Tweak Tool has a keyboard section. It doesn’t have all the options I want but it does mean I can crib from their remapping code later.

Similarly, Gnome overrides the xorg.conf touchpad settings and its settings dialog doesn’t provide an vertical-edge-scroll option. Fortunately the setting still exists and can be set with dconf-editor under org/gnome/settings-daemon/touchpad. Again, I’m leaning towards configuring this in js in the future to keep all my changes in the same place.

So far I’m impressed at the potential of Gnome Shell, if not the default reality. The overview completion is fast and accurate. The notification system is a big improvement over Gnome 2 (especially the on/off toggle). The animations are smooth even on my integrated graphics. The ui and icons are simple and clear. With the dark theme enabled the shell is beautiful without getting in the way. Beauty is important in anything I spend half my life staring at.

Bonus

I also took the oppurtunuity to switch from Ubuntu to Arch. Partly because of the nervousness I mentioned earlier, but also because Ubuntu keeps fucking overwriting my config files. I’ve given up touching anything beneath the surface because every Ubuntu upgrade breaks everything. Arch seems to be more kindly inclined towards tinkering and customisation and the wiki is a fantastic resource for learning about linux internals. It has a reputation for being unstable but since my new job will be developing in Windows on a fancy desktop the risk of breakage on my laptop isn’t a big deal. And it doesn’t overwrite my config files without asking.

The installation was straight-forward apart from a known mistake in this months iso. My hardware all worked without any configuration. Suspend and hibernate are faster and more reliable than they were in Ubuntu. My battery life is slightly better. Pacmatic somewhat alleviates the fear of breakage. Installing proprietary software (skype, spotify) has not been a problem. I did have to tweak the fonts and I have still have some missing unicode characters in firefox which I haven’t yet looked into.

Next

The next part of this series (which is due at some undetermined point in the future) will probably be writing a hello-world style extension in cljs as the first step towards a document-centric tiling window manager.

While we’re on the subject of backups – like most people, I rely pretty heavily on cloud services. It sort of snuck up on me. I’m generally trying to move towards using cloud services as dumb servers so I can easily replace them. The first step is to be able to export and backup all my data.

I considered using The Locker Project for backing up cloud services, but it appears that Singly have pivoted from ‘control your own data’ to ‘give all your data to us’. Back to the drawing board…

I use OPML Support and Brief to replace google reader and Evolution to back up google mail, calendar and contacts. My address is on my own domain and managed by google apps. I don’t yet use a local mail reader but Evolution looks like a reasonable fallback if I have to drop gmail.

While we’re on the subject of backups – like most people, I rely pretty heavily on cloud services. It sort of snuck up on me. I’m generally trying to move towards using cloud services as dumb servers so I can easily replace them. The first step is to be able to export and backup all my data.

I considered using The Locker Project for backing up cloud services, but it appears that Singly have pivoted from ‘control your own data’ to ‘give all your data to us’. Back to the drawing board…

I use OPML Support and Brief to replace google reader and Evolution to back up google mail, calendar and contacts. My address is on my own domain and managed by google apps. I don’t yet use a local mail reader but Evolution looks like a reasonable fallback if I have to drop gmail.

For music I use Tomahawk with a Spotify Premium account as the main resolver. I create playlists in Tomahawk using both the chart apis and the Echo Nest api and sync them to Spotify to download to my phone. There’s still a little too much manual button pressing in that process but it’s much easier than managing my own collection. Both Tomahawk and Spotify mobile scrobble to my last.fm account which I backup with lastexport.

Facebook is really the only service I couldn’t replace, due to a combination of network effects and poor export tools. I use the builtin export service but unfortunately it seems to be pretty hard to automate. The only non-proprietary solution I could find was ArchiveFacebook which I suppose could be run from the command line somehow. For now I just set a monthly reminder in my calendar.

So now I have all my cloud data synced on my machine where the backup tools from my last post can take care of it.