Oh, certainly, I didn't meant to say that non-profits didn't create software, just that they're not primarily software companies, or working in domains that compete with traditional big vendors. Love the work you do at Watsi!
Watsi (YCW13) / SF / Full-stack engineers (onsite)
Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform that enables anyone to directly fund healthcare for people around
the world.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
We’re a team of engineers, designers, doctors, and marketers working at Watsi because we believe that everyone, everywhere deserves access to healthcare. We move fast, take risks, and come to work every day excited about building an organization that matters more than we do.
We’re looking for a full-stack engineer to join our eight-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate is a self-directed, product-focused generalist who’s excited to work on whatever is needed to bring healthcare to the world – everything from optimizing donation flows to designing a patient management system for hospitals.
If this sounds interesting to you, please send us an email at jobs@watsi.org, include your linkedin, github, etc, and tell us a little about yourself.
Hey there, Thomas from Watsi here. We actually used to have a "Donate monthly" checkout during the one-time donation flow, but in the several months that the checkbox was live, I think exactly one person ever checked it. We also have a link to the Universal Fund after you make a one-time donation, and that's seen good conversions.
That said, I definitely agree that there are other ways to solicit a donor to join the Universal Fund during / after a one-time donation. Our next idea for a test is to add a quick option immediately after a one-time donation that let's you sign up right there, something like, "Donate $5 every month! [Yes] / [No]".
i would say that running out of money is the only way for a startup to die. I haven't heard of a company earning loads of money closing down (except when being bought out or something).
There's a lot of room between running out of money and earning loads. Say I was earning $15,000 per year from my startup. Costs were low and I could take most of that home but revenue wasn't growing. The business hasn't run out of money but it's not making enough to support me and I have to shut it down. Unless there is significant growth opportunity that I'm missing it's also unlikely to get bought.
A quick clarification here: joining the Universal Fund doesn't mean that we charge your credit card an amount every month and you have no idea where or who your donation is going towards. Every month, we automatically pick a patient your donation goes towards, and you get an email with the patient's story, and an update email after the patient's medical procedure.
Thomas from Watsi here! When we were initially building the recurring donation feature, we experimented with using Stripe's recurring billing functionality, but we ended up building our own monthly charging (still through Stripe's API). Stripe's feature is more designed for fixed-price "plans" that folks can sign up for - i.e., SaaS products, rather than the Universal Fund's pick-your-own-amount recurring charge.
Where do you draw the line between "creating new software" and a "large scale project"? Every large scale project starts as a small project, so at some point you must decide to start writing tests; and then you have the burden of backfilling 'em.
Watsi – http://watsi.org – San Francisco, CA; FULLTIME, possible VISA
Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform that enables anyone to directly fund healthcare for people around the world.
~~~~~~~~~~
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
~~~~~~~~~~
We’re a team of developers, designers, doctors, and marketers working at Watsi because we believe that everyone, everywhere deserves access to healthcare. We move fast, take risks, and come to work every day excited about building an organization that matters more than we do.
We’re looking for a full-stack developer (engineer #2) to join our five-person team in San Francisco. The ideal candidate is an experienced, product-focused generalist who wants to use their skills to bring healthcare to the world. Our stack is Rails, Backbone.js, SCSS, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Heroku, RSpec, and Jasmine. You don't have to be familiar with our stack, but you do need to learn fast :)
If you’re interested in learning more, please send whatever info you have (linkedin, github, personal site) to jobs@watsi.org.
AFAIK this problem is endemic to any job processing system where jobs can take more than N seconds to process. What Heroku does:
* Heroku sends the TERM signal.
* The process has 10 seconds to exit itself.
* After 10 seconds, the KILL signal is sent to terminate the process without notice.
Sidekiq does this:
* Upon TERM, the job fetcher thread is halted immediately so no more work is started.
* Sidekiq waits 8 seconds for any busy Processors to finish their job.
* After 8 seconds, Sidekiq::Shutdown is raised on each busy Processor. The corresponding jobs are pushed back to Redis so they can be restarted later. This must be done within 2 seconds.
* Sidekiq exits or is KILLed.
+1 on that question, I'd be very interested in that as well. My guess would be that since Sidekiq is thread-based rather than process-based it wouldn't have to deal with the issue of all processes receiving the signal at the same time.
