We have a few positions vacant at the moment – have a look:

In Sao Paulo, Brazil – we need a junior front-end developer. You are highly skilled in front-end development, with specific skills in CSS, HTML and Javascript. You are a competent programmer, but you prefer to work on the front-end. You will be working under the guidance of an experienced and expert engineer. You like working with bright and clever people, and you are passionate about the web. The successful candidate will speak English, and will be a paulistano, or be willing to relocate to Sao Paulo.

In Johannesburg – we are looking for a senior technical architect. You will have the opportunity to establish the blueprint and create the framework for truly cutting edge media delivery platforms that will change the face of media in South Africa. And that is no exaggeration. You should have outstanding technical skills, including the ability to code as and when required. You must be able to interact with a team of highly skilled professionals. You will ideally have experience of VOD, digital TV, IP-TV and related technologies. A background as a developer is essential – you will have in-depth knowledge of the Microsoft .Net platform, but also wider knowledge of open source platforms and languages. You are comfortable dealing with executives and senior managers. You’re not only an ubergeek, but also an inspirational tech leader. This is a challenging position – but it represents a massive opportunity to the right person. Detailed requirements here.

In Cape Town – we are looking for a junior tester, who will devote a great deal of time to ensuring that a large corporate social network meets the right quality standards. You will be part of the SWAT core team – you must be prepared to work with some of the best developers, architects, geeks and web-heads you are ever likely to meet. Can you execute tasks on your own initiative, prepare and execute test plans ? More details on the position can be found here.

Cape Town – we are looking for someone to play the role of Internet Evangelist. This role is available to anyone who is absolutely passionate about the web, who is capable of conveying this passion to diverse audiences, who learns quickly … and who can teach others. Your role will be to evangelise the use of Web technologies (and other Internet related technologies) into the larger group – the challenge is to make people from all non-internet businesses see the Internet as an opportunity not a threat. In addition you will perform tasks as assistant community manager for the corporate social network, and you will assist the Analyst in the team with research tasks. You must be willing to travel in South Africa and abroad, as required. To apply for this job, you will have to demonstrate passion, interest and knowledge of the Web and related technologies. You are a well-spoken, confident geek, web-head and proud to be a Web addict.

Finally, and also in Cape Town – we want to recruit a PHP developer. You will be have outstanding technical skills, wide experience in web based development, and you will be able to hold your own amongst an elite group of developers and architects. Javascript, Zend Framework, AJAX, OO, Web 2.0, REST, SOAP and UML will be old news to you. You are passionate about the web. If you think Twitter is silly, you don’t need to apply. More information here.

If you are interested in any of these positions, please send your CV to Melanie Koch. We look forward to hearing from you.

We have just posted our experimental Social Graph application on Facebook. It offers Facebook users additional insight into their personal social networks, allowing them to identify different social clusters they belong to. In the work and life balancing game, the person with the biggest number of clusters, and not the person with the biggest number of friends, wins.

The most interesting part in developing this application is its use of the so called spring-electrical-graph. It utilises a simple yet powerful algorithm for laying out entity-relationship diagrams (or graphs in a mathematical sense of the word). Any well laid out graph should keep the unrelated entities far from each other while keeping the related ones close. The spring-electrical-graph does exactly this by simulating an environment where all entities are electrical particles of the same charge while the related entities are connected via springs. The rest is left up to physics. The electrical particles repel each other via Coulomb’s law while the related ones pull each other via Hooke’s law due to the springs that link them.

The actual simulation is implemented using the 4^th order Runge-Kutta method for solving ordinary differential equations. Other methods could be used as well but this one was particularly well suited for our use and I had the code available from my Binary Toys project.

While there are other social graphs applications already available on Facebook, Nexus being one of them, ours is a bit more interactive and fun to play with. But we are paying a heavy price for this interactivity in a form of performance degradation for users with a very large number of friends. As the repelling force acts between all entities all the time, for a user that has 1000 friends, we have to apply almost a million forces to our model. And we have to do that four times for the 4^th order Runge-Kutta computation. For everything to run smoothly we would like to do all that at least 25 times per second, which takes our hunger for CPU power up to 100 million computations per second. We soon learned the hard way why Action Script 3 is still just a script, even though we love it.

Click this link to add the SWAT Social Graph to your facebook account: Social Graph

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