blueshift Local Do tell! This company is recruiting people in Central America ,Panama, to work from home. Everyone must be very aware of this firm for it is not a legitimate company and it has not reside at the address they h DC, Washington DC

Hey,

It is a noble thing to try and protect other people from companies that are looking to scam honset working people of their time. Unfortunately you jumped the gun on this one :)

I don't see your name in this report, but I belive you are the person who exchanged e-mails with Andrew Ostroff. If I understand correctly you found a job we had posted on Computrabajo.com for a software developer? Also, if I understand correctly, the reason you wrote this report is because when you looked up the address that we have listed it was for an art gallery and not a tech firm?

The address we had listed was actually correct, the Hamiltonian Art Gallery actually does not take up the entire building. The 3rd floow is office space and we had rented out a portion of that floor for 4 of our US-based developers to work. The space was actually quite large, there was also an architectural firm there as well as a few other companies also renting space. Here is the google plus page for the Hamiltonian Art gallery id anyone is interested: https://plus.google.com/115785676128424179871/photos/photo/5747867893023051586?hl=en

Since then we stopped renting space the Hamilton address and all mostly work from home. The principal owner of our company does own a building out in Ashburn, VA and sometimes we go out there, but not often because its about an hour drive from DC and working from home is awesome. Because most of us work from home and communicate on Skype, I would not have listed an address at all for our company on the Computrabajo.com ad, however it required an address, so at the time I was filling the form out, it seemed to make the most sense to put down the address of the place where our onshore developers were working at the time. I apologize for the confusion!

A little bit more about our company:

We do a lot of "near shoring" (I beleive is the correct term?). What I mean by this is that we work with a lot of people outside of the US, but as fellow co-workers not as contractors. Everyone outside the US is in Central and South America so that we are all on the same time zone. We communicate via Skype video chat constantly throughout the day, so it really is like we are all in the same office. Its actually really fun. No commute to work and although we work very hard, we also often get on group video chats and make all kinds of jokes that are way too inappropriate to say in more formal office environment.

I was actally the one at our company to push for this more decentraized structure. Most other people at the company thought that it couldn't be done in a productive way because of horror stories of people sending specs off to India and then getting half-working speghetti code back 6 months later. But I figured if we all got on Skype video chat and did screen sharing sessions, how is that different from a more traditional office setting?? There were still naysayers, but I'm a stubborn mule, so I got my way. Turns out it works great, and its awesome. We have three offshore developers as I am writing this. Two in Costa Rica and one Argentina. Our developer in Argentina was over 20 years experience and is a please sure work with. One guy in Costa Rica has his PhD and the other is getting his masters. I even got to go to Costa Rica and stay at his house for a few days!! 

In all seriosness, it becomes pretty obvious that we are not a "scam" when you start talking  all of us who are in the US and abroad and all have been here for a long time and draw steady pay checks.

We have two related projects:

DoTell.com and a large scale Data Warehouse. Both of which are super interesting.

DoTell.com has a front end written mostly in Backbone, the back end is very much a Big Data problem because the site must handle many thousands of requests per day once it comes out of closed Beta. One the back end, it is mostly written in django. One really interesting thing about this project is that it makes heavy use of Elasticsearch (lucene).

The Data Warehousing project is obviously Big Data. Currently its being hosted on over 60 server instances on Rackspace cloud services. It is mostly written in Python with a little NodeJS. We use  PostgreSQL and Redis, but most of the heavy lifting database-wise is done by a 14 server Cassandra cluster for which we have written an indexing engine layer.

Anyways, if you have any more questions, please hit me up in linked in!

Chris Dutrow

CTO, Blueshift Local Inc

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-dutrow/21/531/a21

http://stackoverflow.com/users/84131/chris-dutrow