Las Vegas, NV-- Tensions are rising as our Development team and Finance team are ignoring requests for talk of a cease fire of the ongoing Nerf war. Both teams have given up on peace talks, and the rumors of war are abound.

There has even been talk of a premptive strike against Finance from Development, and these rumors were proven today as Alex K., stated, "We feel that we need to strike before their arsenal of Nerf weapons grows any larger. I don't think we can wait, it might be too late".

Finance has stock piled some large Nerf machine guns and bows and arrows.

There is even infighting in both camps, our reporter Brett Houchin was caught in a crossfire today and it was caught on film.

The Zappos.com Blog Team will be here to keep you filled in on this developing story.

Zapponians are real people with real appetites and they sometimes venture out of the office to feed on many a delicious dish.

Even though Zappos spoils their employees with a free salad and sandwich bar daily along with soup and snacks beyond belief, some days eating outside of the office is great too!


What ever would we do without the wonderful strip mall across the street from the Zappos.com Headquarters!?!

(Editor's note: Brett H. has been trying to win a rubber bouncy ball with tentacles in the claw machine in the grocery store for 1.5 years now. He's beginning to get discouraged.

There certainly are a number of things one can do with a Zappos Box, below are two examples of what we do with the boxes during a given work day:

1.) Ship Shoes and Clothing to the Best Customers in the World

2.) If you are a developer here at Zappos, apparently you actually use the boxes for shelter, and possibly transportation.

Hina, one of our developers here at Zappos, was caught on Friday actually inside a Zappos box. We're not sure if she was trying to ship herself to our Kentucky Distribution center or not, but she sure seems to have fit into that box very easily. I guess that's one way to save on airfare.

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!