Yesterday was book fair day at Zappos, wherein half of our cafeteria was transformed into a small book shop. It really brought some of us developers back to the days of elementary school where such events were not uncommon. Perhaps this feeling was strongest of all for Shane, who discovered a gem of a book entitled High School Musical : All About Dancing.

Part story book and part instructional dance manual, nobody had seen anything quite like it before. It's true that one can get away with a great many things by saying "It's for my daughter", but I happen to know for a fact that Shane is a man who loves to dance! As soon as the recess bell sounded, Shane grabbed Becky and the two started cutting a rug- with director of development Brent calling out dance moves from the book. I was pretty surprised, but the three of them managed to pull off a pretty good show for not having had any rehearsals!

Incidentally, 10% of Shane's book purchase (and all of the other books sold that day) will be donated to the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation. Thanks to Suchi for the great action shot!

Check our group photos here!

The Zappos Development team (or Dev) is currently made up of 37 people distributed somewhat unevenly across our 3 offices in Henderson and Reno in Nevada, and Shepherdsville in Kentucky. The Henderson team is the largest group and handles much of the development of the website and back office tools to manage products and any other things that might need managing. The team in Kentucky is based out of our warehouse and works primarily on software related to the picking, packing, shipping and returns of merchandise. The Reno office consists of Dave. He generally rewrites things in C (Booyah!), generates several different kinds of graphs and authors lots of LaTeX documents with complicated mathematical formulas.

We work with a pretty interesting mix of technology. Much of our code is written in Perl, but we also have a lot of code in Java and even some Ruby. We love open source software and try to use it whenever we can because it saves us some development time and is easy to customize.

One of the things that differentiates us from a lot of companies is that we don't really hire coders (or people who just write code). Our developers are also expected in some degree to be architects, project planners, designers, database programmers and system administrators. It may sound like our standards are pretty high (and they are - we do a lot of interviews!), but the most important qualities we look is self motivation and a willingness to learn. If you have those, then all of the other skills will come in time. Of course, Dev isn't just made up of programmers. We also have database administrators, QA testers, release engineers, dev support personnel and managers all under our departmental umbrella.

We're very serious about our work, but we're also pretty goofy and like to have fun. Don't believe me? Check out our group on Flickr - there you'll find shots of some of our departmental outings and a recent parade we put on that was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes:

Does it sound like you or someone you know would like to work in Development at Zappos? Check out our jobs page and give us a call. We're always hiring!

Okay, duckheads up! This post is not for the squeamish.



So there's this Pacific/Asian food item perhaps most commonly known as "Balut" - let me just warn you - Balut is something if you want to learn more about - you will look up another time (warning).

Well we had a Balut taste testing of sorts the other day. Evidently Ed in our Development group has a source for Duck Balut and he brought in a "brace of Balut" for his fellow developers Pawel and Mike.

This is obviously Pawel...

And this is Mike!

I can't show you anymore pictures but they both ate their eggs! If you want to learn more about Balut, Google will take you there!

Zappos, "PAWELED" by I don't want to know!