If you check out Jobster Labs, you’ll see that the page now includes an unfiltered feed of recent blog posts from Jobster developers.  (Naturally, the feed is available in HTML, RSS, and Atom flavors.)

Our goal here is to marketing the company to prospective employees .  In some circles “marketing” is a dirty word, but our intent here is to provide an authentic, uncensored picture of what it’s actually like to work at Jobster, both the good and the bad.  The collected blogs provide a better picture of what makes us tick than any resume or essay could do.

Jeff, for instance, talks about Ruby on Rails and how we’re using it as a complementary platform to our Java + Spring + Hibernate + Oracle platform for situations where speed of development and rapid iteration is essential.  Pretty cool.  But Jeff also talks about how Complexity Kills and how some projects at Jobster suffer from excessive complexity. 

We believe that a picture that’s all positive isn’t credible, and that by providing a more balanced picture an employer becomes more, not less, attractive. 

Some of you might be interested in creating an aggregate feed of blogs from your own company.  We’ll probably introduce this functionality as a web service that anyone can use, but until then the Ruby source code that generates the feeds is available here.    (I wrote this quickly and am still a Ruby newbie so please forgive any imperfections in the code.) 

We have an hourly cron job set up to update the static feed files; the HTML version is included in the Jobster labs page via PHP.  I found the Ruby FeedTools library to be an excellent tool for both parsing and creating RSS and atom feeds.