Friday, June 29, 2012

redditors Assemble in Over 300 cities for GrMD III & Announcing rDDOS

/r/paris meetup

This Saturday was the 3rd Annual Global reddit Meetup Day and by our non-scientific estimates, there were over 350 different meetups in 70 countries, with approximately 10,000 attendants, which is roughly double last year's turnout. 

To commemorate the glorious day, redditors made special outfits, nail polish art, cocktails, PiƱatas, tacos, desserts, cocktails, Jenga towers, portraits, aluminium castings, various snoo art, and yes, even fire tornados.

Check out all the amazing pics, videos, and DailyDot's coverage. Big shout out to our "horrible" friends at Cards Against Humanity for sending out cards to a lot of the meetups. Big thanks to everyone at /r/SanFrancisco, /r/Chicago, /r/NYC, /r/Houston, /r/LosAngeles, /r/LondonSocialClub, /r/LasVegas, /r/Portland, and /r/Alaska for showing us admins a good time. We must note however, that we were concerned by the number of horsehead masks. Seriously, you all are going to open a damn vortex if you aren't careful. 


/r/halifax meetup
If you missed out on the fun or want to start planning for next year, Global reddit Meetup Day IV will take place on Saturday June 15th, 2013. Hopefully this date will work better for the redditors celebrating midsummer. We are already looking forward to next year! 


We also want to announce a new global meetup event — reddit Dedicated Day of Service (rDDoS), which will be held on September 21, 2012  September 22, 2012. It'll be just like GrMD except replace the drinking with cleaning up local rivers, blood drives, fixing up computers at local schools, or whatever else makes sense in your community.  We'll have some various fun contests and things to encourage participation, but we'll leave it up to local communities and the mods of the realms to figure out what a "dedicated day of service" means in your area. Find your local subreddit HERE and discuss.

/r/singapore
We are all inspired by the wide variety of altruistic projects and events on reddit. The altruistic fundraising events tend to get the most press attention, but /r/assistance, /r/random_acts_of_pizza,  /r/RandomActsofPetFood/r/RandomKindness/r/MeetAndEat, /r/Favors/r/mmfb, /r/mentors, /r/techsupport, /r/Proofreading, /r/PlayItForward,  /r/stopsmoking and many others have built vibrant communities around helping each other in big and small ways every day. We hope rDDoS will help spark similar offline awesomeness and some new friends.


See you September 22nd, 2012 for rDDoS and June 15th, 2013 for GrMD!

/r/washingtondc meetup

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Global reddit Meetup Day III - This Saturday, June 23rd

/r/brisbane
In the spring of 2010, a user had the inspired idea to designate a specific day as Global reddit Meetup Day and encourage redditors around the world to organize meetups in their respective cites, towns, hamlets, fishing villages, and moonbases. A couple years later, there are over 380 events planned in over 60 countries for this Saturday.

Find an Event Near You

For all the easy jokes about having to actually go outside, or the meme of people being socially awkward, or the fear/desire of hearing Call Me Maybe dupstep remixes, reddit meetups are pretty amazing. Seriously. Over the years, reddit meetups have spawned fun, friendships, businesses, bands, marriages, and yes - plenty of hangovers. Based on our admittedly biased experience the people that actually come out to reddit meetups are a welcoming and friendly group.  Check out a local event (or start one in your area) and meet some new folks.  

Remember to upload photos and/or videos from your meetup on redditgifts. There will be trophies. Also, if you'd like your meetup photo to be featured in the new about page slideshow, don't forget to submit them to /r/about!

/r/washingtondc
Huge thanks to all the local subreddit moderators, meetup organizers, and everyone else who is making these events happen.  See you all on Saturday.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

reddit is Hiring! Positions: redditgifts programmer and Controller (finance)

Check out these new reddit jobs!

Controller (Finance):

Dear finance redditor,

We're looking for someone who can keep our books in order, and help develop the financial infrastructure that supports reddit. For the past few years, our accounting and finance were handled by our former parent company.  Now, we’ll be doing it all in-house. We want to run a tight ship and be responsible and conscientious with our finances (and minerals!) .  Are you someone who can help us do this?

We’re looking for someone who understands all manner of financial and accounting systems and processes.  You should be familiar with how “big company accounting” works, because we still sometimes interface with our former parent company, but just as comfortable doing things differently for a tiny company.  You should be comfortable with high level financial strategy as well as willing to take on tasks like data entry.

Your work will include but not be limited to the following:

  • Accounts Payable: You will be posting invoices and expense reimbursements, making check runs and managing vendors.
  • Accounts Receivable: You will be issuing invoices, making collections calls, working with the sales team and maintaining contracts.
  • Accounting: You will be handling bank reconciliations, journal postings, and will be maintaining the General Ledger.
  • Reporting: You will handle the preparation of monthly actual versus budget reporting – and handling monthly closes.
  • Payroll: You will be processing payroll and maintaining employee information.
  • Finance Leadership: You will be working with banks and auditors.
  • Record-keeping: You will maintain files and manage data as necessary.

You must have a degree in accounting and have experience with accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger accounting. Experience in payroll will also be required. As an added bonus, it would be great if you had experience with administrating benefits, options and company records. There is a lot of work to go around.

The position is a full-time job in San Francisco’s fantastic, sunny South Park neighborhood.  We offer great benefits and competitive compensation in both cash and equity.

To apply, send a cover letter and resume -- along with, optionally, a pithy and/or humorous and/or poetic statement about why you are perfect for the role -- to controller-job@reddit.com.

We would greatly prefer to hire from within the reddit community, so if you love reddit and might be a good fit, please let us know!


redditgifts Programmer:

Dear redditgifts enthusiast,

Join us in our quest to make people smile and bring happiness to an increasingly angry and cynical world! Here at redditgifts we started on this quest a little more than two years ago and we have already succeeded in creating record-setting Secret Santas, organizing donation drives, and massive meetup gatherings. We are only scratching the surface of what we can do and how many people we can reach but in order to get there, we need your help!

When you join us we will have all sorts of fun engineering work for you to do. We’ve got a lot of interesting work around the gift exchanges.

For example, can you figure out the most optimal way to match up redditors across the world so that everyone gets matched with someone they will be most likely to give an amazing gift to? Can you invent novel ways to increase participation? Have you ever done payment processing or built a storefront? We even have a new project that could really use your expertise and will be really fun for the reddit community. Your work will require knowledge and mastery of the full web stack. You should be able to set up servers, write (or learn) Python and django, design beautiful, interactive web apps using modern HTML, CSS and Javascript, and when required, you should be able to delve into the internals of Python. We need new ideas and you should have them! We know that is a lot to ask but we also know how skilled you are and we believe in you. Additionally, we hope you've been a redditor for a long time and maybe you've even done some redditgifting.

Now, on to where you will work... redditgifts will have an office in Salt Lake City, Utah, and we hope you will join us there. If you write back soon enough you'll even get to help us find this office and pick the right furniture. It will be fun! If you'd rather work in San Francisco, that is also an option. Most of the reddit team works in a really cool office in SOMA and would be happy for you to join them there as well, but we would prefer that you join us in Salt Lake City.

We hope to hear from you very soon and we hope that reply with enough information about you that we can tell you really want to join us. What do we want exactly?

  • You must reply to this in letter form (to the email address provided below). If you can fit some humor into your letter, we would really like that. It’s important to laugh, especially while you work.
  • Please tell us your favorite gift from our gift gallery and explain why it’s your favorite.
  • Please tell us your favorite holiday and explain why it is your favorite.
  • Please provide a resume or a link to your linkedin profile.
  • Please provide a link to your redditgifts profile.
  • Complete the programming challenge described below, where your task is to write a matching process for participants in a redditgifts gift exchange:


When participants sign up for a gift exchange on redditgifts they specify two properties that are used within our matching process:

  1. Shipping Country (string)
  2. Shipping Preferences - whether or not they are willing to ship internationally (boolean)
Your program needs to find the best possible way to match participants such that:

  • Whenever possible, the participants shipping preferences are adhered to.
  • Whenever possible, participants who send a gift to a country other than their own are more likely to receive a gift from a country other than their own. Participants who indicate that they are willing to ship internationally typically wish to receive internationally, so amongst those who are willing to ship internationally, maximize the number of people who receive a gift from a country other than their own.
  • Whenever possible, participants should not receive a gift from the same person they send a gift to.
  • Every participant must be matched.
  • The matching process should runs efficiently, meaning the execution time is short.

Your program should take 1 parameter as input, a list (array) where each item is a list (array) that represents a participant and has these three elements:

  1. unique id of participant (integer)
  2. shipping country of participant (string)
  3. willing to ship internationally (boolean)
Example: [[234, ‘US’, True], [235, ‘US’, False],]

Your program should return a list (array) where each element is a 2 item list (array) containing:

  • Unique id of participant giving the gift
  • Unique id of participant receiving the gift
  • Example: [[234, 235], [235, 234],]
Your solution should be representative of how you program. You should be able to explain the program and understand its strengths and weaknesses. You may write this program in any language you’d like to, but it needs to be executable (no pseudo code please).

For your reference, here is a spreadsheet containing numbers from Secret Santa 2011 of participants from each country and their shipping preferences. You can use this to generate a dataset that you use for testing.

Send your solution and anything else you think might help show us how rad you are to jobs@redditgifts.com! We like github links, we love reading code, we LOVE seeing examples of previous work, especially if you tell us what you did and why it's a good (or bad) example. Please email us at jobs@redditgifts.com and we will get back to you!

Sincerely,

kickme444 and 5days

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

announcing /r/about and the reddit postcards gallery

Have you ever tried to describe the reddit community to someone? Where would you begin?

As the reddit community grows in size and impact I think it’s increasingly important that we invest a little effort in sharing an outward-facing snapshot of what reddit is and the awesome things that we do.

Today, I’m pleased to announce a couple new pages on reddit: www.reddit.com/about/.

Basically, the idea is to gather things we’d like to show the world when we tell them what reddit’s about. It's a place to introduce reddit in reddit's own words. A place to showcase reddit’s community, culture, and history, and a way to introduce roughly what we’re about to visitors who’ve never been here before.

/r/about

The most important part of the new about page is quotations from redditors and meetup photos. We’ve created a new subreddit for this purpose, /r/about, to share meetup photos, quotes, pontifications, and news clippings about reddit. This leads to what I hope will become a new reddit meetup tradition: sharing your meetup group photos on reddit.

One of the most amazing things about reddit is how it brings people together, and meetup photos are the perfect way to give everyone a chance to literally give a face to the community. However, we care deeply about respecting people’s privacy, and want to ensure that everyone featured in the photos consents to the image being released. In order to do that, we’d like you to take some new meetup photos with the about page in mind.

Are you going to Global reddit Meetup Day on June 23rd? Ask your posse if they’d like to take a group photo for the about page, and submit your photos to /r/about. We’ll feature our favorite shots and their respective meetups in the new slideshow.

new postcards gallery

Since the call for postcards about 2 years ago, reddit has received over 1000 postcards spanning over 100 different countries (including Antarctica and North Korea). Josh, our office artist, has painstakingly scanned every single one and photoshopped out any personal information for display. Here’s a video of him arranging them into a huge mosaic in our office:



We’ve received an amazing range of interesting, silly, and bizarre postcards, and they're a ton of fun to explore. As part of the new about pages, we’ve created an online postcard viewer to share this reddit tradition. You can also now vote and comment on every one at /r/postcards.

As always, if you send us a postcard, you’ll get a free month of reddit gold!

if you've sent us a postcard and would like it removed from the gallery, please send us a message.

open source

The source code for the new about pages are available on GitHub. I'm excited to hear your comments and suggestions in the comments, and am looking forward to seeing your posts in /r/about!