With Alex having much more contact in his role of client liaison and knowing more about the direction the client wanted to take, it was decided that it would make sense for him to take over Stephens role as Project Coordinator. Stephen will hence be given the role of Film Manager - being in charge of the film production side of the project.

- Michael

One of our main ideas for the project has been an interactive version of the bedroom archive being created.

Stephen and I have built a proof of concept for the interactive version.

Link

A user can scroll the scene  and click on special objects to bring up sub-applications relating to the object

Obviously, it is quite basic at the moment and has no actual content, but it gives an idea of what we can do. The design is likely to change depending on the content that may be created and the size of the actual room itself. For example, it’s looking likely that the panning slider may not even be required.

- Michael

 Salary: £50K + benefits 

Term: Full Time

Location: London

This is a really fantastic opportunity to make the step up into a technical lead role or to develop your lead skills further with an highly innovative agency – definately one to watch!

A really experienced, creative Technical Lead who has worked in top Agencies for top clients and knows the commitment that requires.

You will be fluent in at least 2 of the following development languages; PHP, ColdFusion, ASP .NET, Ruby, Python, but ultimately you will be language agnostic as your real skills lie in the concepts and ideas behind the syntax.

You will have a proven record of collaborative working with other developers and be able to lead a team both in the context of a project and the longer-term technical strategy of the Agency.

You will be an innovator with a ‘can-do’ attitude but won’t lose sight of the fundamentals of website production.

As much as you will be an advanced server-side programmer you will also be a front end magician with advanced skills in css, JavaScript and hopefully Flash.

Development for you will be as much about joined-up user experience, design integrity and beauty as it is about bug-free technical solutions.

• At least 8 years experience in a top Agency working with top brands.
• Expertise in multiple programming languages.
• Awareness of Web Standards, Accessibility Standards and cross browser compatibility
• A proven record in collaborative working both with other developers and the wider project team.
• Team leading experience.
• An innovative, ‘can-do’ attitude.
• Good communication skills – you should feel confident when in front of clients.
• Seriously advanced CSS & JavaScript for front end majesty.
• Real design appreciation. You will challenge and collaborate with our Creative Director and Design Team.
• Real attention to detail both front and back end.
• An understanding & ongoing awareness of commercial and marketing goals of projects
• Experience in the demands of deadline-driven work.
• To be able to show examples of technically challenging and beautifully executed work for brands.
• An understanding of the importance of User Experience & User Interface with examples of where you have implemented this understanding.
• A real passion for the Web and to be in touch with current technical innovation and advances.
• A sense of humour.
• To be able to drive technical strategy & direction for the company going forward.

Rachel Murray

0207 420 3540

 rachel@wearefutureheads.co.uk

Yesterday we filmed the Turner trip to the Walpole Bay Hotel in Margate.

Alex and I handled the days filming while Stephen and Tash attended the youth session as normal.

The shoot was quite a challenge as we were unable to use a tripod for most of the shoot, meaning we had to keep the camera as still as possible on our shoulders.

I think it may have been beneficial to have two camera teams rather than one, as we couldn’t film two places at once with only one camera, but for the most part the shoot went well.

Out of the two session, the Elder group went very well and we managed to get many shots of them reminiscing around the hotel along with them sharing their thoughts in small interviews.

The Youth session proved to be more problematic as most of them did not want to take part in any voxpop interviews and some didn’t want to appear on camera at all.

Still, we did the best we could with the situation and hopefully we have some good footage to edit together.

- Michael

With the Turner groups visiting the Walpole Hotel in Margate, we had an early trip to gain an idea of the hotel and decide how best to film in it.

As you can see from the pictures the hotel is an archive of old objects.

From going on the Recce we have come to the conclusion that the smaller the filming team the better, therefore it will just be Alex directing and me handling the camera and sound.

Problems we may encounter are adequate lighting in the evening, as the hotel can get quite dark and the fact that the hallways are very narrow, which will limit our filming options while in them.

- Michael

What to do when you can’t clearly identify a Product Owner

So you have decided to give Agile a shot, but you can’t find a champion from the business side of the house to serve as your Product Owner. Instead of giving up and not trying Agile at all or worse, proceeding without this key role filled, why not look for a customer surrogate? A customer surrogate can exist in several different places within your organization, even within the confines of the Information Technology department.

Before we look at where to unearth a Product Owner let’s look at what role they play on an Agile team. According to the ScrumAlliance the Product Owner is “the one and only person responsible for managing and controlling the Product Backlog.” The Product Backlog is defined as “the master list of all functionality desired in the product.” The Product Owner supports one of the fundamental premises of Agile, that of constantly defining what is the highest priority work that needs to be done. In addition the Product Owner plays additional roles such as; determining and ensuring that the return on investment (ROI) of the project is achieved, representing the needs of the business community, and providing a single point of contact and decision making for the project team.

Typically our first choice of a Product Owner would be a functional department manager who is the champion for the project in question. Why a functional department manager? These types of individuals reside within the domain of the business; they are in the trenches every day. They have hands on experience and know where their department has been and where it is going. They typically have a good understanding of what they need and how badly they need it.

Unfortunately identifying a business champion isn’t always straightforward, especially for product companies or independent software vendors. Don’t give up all hope of implementing Agile just because you can’t find a functional manager to be your Product Owner. There are other individuals within who can serve this role, the trick is finding them. Let’s examine a number of places that we can find a stand-in Product Owner or customer surrogate:

The Product Management department – Does your company have a product management office? You typically see these types of departments within product shops. These individuals serve the needs of the companies many customers. There are two types of product managers; strategic product managers who spend a lot of time dreaming up the road map for the product and the tactical product managers who are in the trenches with the customers every day. Typically a tactical project manager may be better suited to working with a Scrum team because they have a better feel for the customers needs and are generally in the office more.

The Business Analyst group – Business analysts reside in the middle between the business side of the house and the information technology side. They have to learn both languages and how to translate between the two groups. They become experts in the domain of the business and have a good feel for the needs of the customers.

The Technical Team lead – Ok, maybe I am reaching a bit here, but in some organizations technical team leads have been around the block a few times. They generally have worked with the business units for many years and on a number of projects. The better team leads will become subject matter experts themselves and work hand in hand with the business users. Usually they have a good feel for the customer’s needs and priorities. As a measure of last resort, technical team leads can become Product Owners.

Without the critical role of the Product Owner your attempt at implementing Agile can result in decreased effectiveness and ROI and possibly even project failure. While you may have to turn over a few stones, you can find customer surrogates within the walls of your organization. Product managers, business analysts, and even technical team leads can serve as stand-in Product Owners. Utilizing one of these non-traditional Product Owners may be the ticket to your success with implementing Agile in your organization.

For about 5 years I have been working with IBM software. Mostly using Lotus Domino and Notes, designing applications. However I also looked at other technologies, like Websphere and DB2.

I have recently switched (well, I’m still switching) to comparable products from Microsoft. Mainly becasue the company I work for made the decision to stop using IBM for their internal mail and databases.

I do however believe that IBM, known as Big Blue, a big and slow organisation, was ahead of Microsoft concerning intranet software and ease of development back in the day’s they launched Websphere. I have been looking at an article on their website, that states that in 2006, their Intranet was listed in the Nielsen Norman Group Report: Intranet Design Annual 2006: Year’s Ten Best Intranets.

I never heard of that report before, and headed straight over for a look: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/. The report is for sale. 224$ and its yours. For me that is too expensive, and Im sure that my boss (who is likely to leave soon), would have a good laugh if I walk over to ask him for the money!

(reports from previous years still cost about 200$, which I still find very steep!)

However, it gave me a good impression what points to look at for our Intranet:

Some of the key areas for which best practices are presented in the report are:

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies

These points are things (call them features) they look at when evaluating intranet sites. I believe this to be a very complete list, and I’m sure that in a company our size (just looking at our office in Spain, we are about 300 people) can and will have to remove some of the points. Either because of difficulty of implementation (read: cost), Irrelevance or plain Overkill.

It looks like we have a Feature Checklist, with which we can start planning!

Intranet budgets and staffing

As mentioned in the previous post, we are now looking into setting up a whole new knowledge management strategy for our office.

Currently this is dealt with per team. We have approx 250 people working in 15 account teams, giving IT support. Each of these accounts have their knowledge base and their knowledge management processes (if any). As you understand this is not an ideal situation. It is impossible to benefit from each others’ information, and there are a lot, really a lot of double, even triplicate documents. (after all most of us troubleshoot a printer in a similar way).

For a company that is trying to standardise all over the place, this is one of our worst areas.

According to many KM specialists, the first step in this whole plan should be to make sure we have senior management support. This to be honest is more difficult as it seemed. I was convinced that knowing the above, and actively trying to standardise, they would listen to a plan like this, but soon found out the “the idea is good, but it will be too expensive, or take you too long”. Yes, there will be a cost, and a considerable effort, but the return will be a very valuable asset; Knowledge! The work we do at service desks is for a huge part based on the knowledge we have at hand. An analyst can be great in troubleshooting and phone skills, but without documentation…. After all, none of us knows everything.

We are now at the stage that the senior management team is interested in our plans, but we are still not getting a clear go-ahead. This causes us to have to work on the plan outside office hours…

We already have the main outline of the plan. We have the platform (wss) and bit by bit we start to get support. I’m sure that one of these day’s well get the “official” project request. Then we can start gathering people to set up a small project team, and present our plans to the different teams, to get their feedback.

Also, we made a SWOT analysis of the current tools we use, which will help a lot identifying the requirements once we reach the lower level of our plan, which is how the database design would look.

At the moment we are putting everything we’ve got in a high level project plan. Mainly to keep ourselves on track and focused on the parts that are important at the moment and not get in to too much detail (which is a common mistake techies make!). As soon as we have it ready, Ill post an update!

Machine Learning Engineer, Lead / Architect caliber or smart recent grad (MS/PhD) be the company’s first Machine Learning hire!

Exciting early-stage startup with traction and several customers already lined up. 8 talented people in the company with plans to grow over 20 within the next year. Working directly with the Vice President of Engineering, referred by the CEO. CEO and Senior Board member have extensive industry experience in the specific areas that the company is targeting. This has immediately given the company credibility and has already helped in opening numerous client doors.

Company is looking for [ “a top of the pile engineer to lead the effort, as our first hire.“ ] an experienced Software Engineer with strong Machine Learning experience/expertise – algorithms dealing with data mining/collaborative filtering tasks written in Java (or C/C++) are of particular interest. Though, company feels that “a candidate strong in machine learning can overcome a lack of expertise in Java.” 

“ The person we are looking to hire is somebody who not only knows machine learning, and has implemented it at some point, but understands the methodology in depth, and can know about its limitations, and how to overcome them. Somebody who is current and aware of the latest publications, trends, and available tools. Publications are also plus, especially in prestigious journals.

A PhD could work, but a very smart masters can also be a good fit. A less experienced, very ambitious and smart graduate might do the trick. MIT, Carnegie Mellon are target schools. ”

There is no official job description for the Machine Learning role, but to give you a better sense of their technical landscape…here is another current opening of theirs that I am also working on – again, just for some additional insight:

Lead the design and implementation (hands-on) efforts of a large scale data processing and ad serving system (using Java) in a distributed environment. The development tasks involving implementing computer algorithms for Internet search and document analysis using data mining technology, analyze data to improve relevance of search results, and scale up computer algorithms to very large data sets, managing terabytes of data and serving search results using large scale computer clusters with thousands of Linux servers.

Qualified applicants will have the following experiences and skills:

*          Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field; Master’s degree preferred.

*          8+ years of professional software experience.

*          Ad serving systems.

*          Solid understanding of algorithm complexity, parallel/distributed systems, advanced data structures, computer networking and operating systems.

*          Deep understanding of Java (architecture and coding), Databases (Coherence, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres,) Data driven system design and multi-user clusters.

*          Startup experience desired. Must want to be a major part of a fast paced, early-stage startup.

Lots of very interesting and challenging problems to be solved here!

Location: Cambridge, MA.

Compensation: base salary to commensurate, competitive and are prepared to pay for top talent, plus stock options and benefits.

If you are interested in joining a talented team of software engineers that are developing the industries first automated, highly complex systems of its kind then please send your resume to jamie@biviumgroup.com with “ Machine Learning Engineer “ in the subject line.

Not interested yourself, but perhaps you know someone…I am offering a $1,000 cash referral bonus (tax free) for this position. Bonus is paid out 90 days after the referral starts. We also have several other full-time openings for talented software professionals in the Greater Boston area.

If not now, I hope you will consider the use of my considerate and dedicated services when you are looking to make a change or have hiring needs at your current or new employer and require a precise software recruiter to help your company recruit highly talented software engineers. We focus exclusively in the software engineering industry for the Boston area and have been doing so for close to 10 years.  As owners and operators of the firm, software recruiting is not our job, it is our livelihood – no company politics to deal with, no mandatory meetings to attend, just good old fashioned networking and grass roots recruiting around the clock. We love what we do, and frankly speaking, we are quite good at it.

Jamie LeBlanc

Co-Founder & Managing Partner

The Bivium Group

jamie@biviumgroup.com

LinkedIn Endorsements from Clients and Candidates

keywords:

information retrieval, software systems, data mining, Weka, R, Computer Science, Algorithms, software engineer, technical lead, lead architect, senior software engineer, C, C++, Java, threads, distributed, multi-threading, concurrent programming, parallel programming, computer science, AI, artificial intelligence, machine learning, real-time programming, object-oriented, networking, R&D, research development, data structures, machine learning, collaborative filtering, artificial intelligence, data mining, marshalling, open source, hadoop, data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules

This is a continuing story. Because I was not sure how to reply to the question asked, I did the least effective… I asked my boss. Not my direct report, but his boss.

This caused quite a small storm in Barcelona. (completely unrelated to the devastating effects of wind force 10 this weekend – Pictures here -) the Service Support Manager in question reacted weird. I’m not sure, but to me it looked like he did not really know what to do with my question.

I can imagine partly that that is so (which would not be a big problem to me, as nobody knows everything), However it seemed to me he felt attacked somehow.

The issue is that we currently do not have a Solution Architect and his point was (I guessed) that we don’t want one neither. He did not say it, but I interpreted his way of explaining as: “Get that idea out of your head!”.
When I asked him the initial question, it was more to see if he could maybe help me planning my career path towards such a position and nothing more (I believe carreer management is an important task for a manager?!?).
When he was finishing his wave of discontent he ended by telling me that “this issue is something I will have to raise with the Director!”, making this story… To be continued….

Currently as I explained in the past, my role is the one of Technical leader. This, in our company is defined as:

“To identify and exploit opportunities for service improvement within the ISC (our office) environment – both internally and within specific customer accounts. To drive and coordinate initiatives designed to achieve superior levels of service in line with Computacenter’s contractual agreements. To take responsibility for the managing of projects to enable teams to meet & surpass productivity and service standards.”

I received a mail today in which a high positioned manager in my company asked me who in our office acts as a solutions architect.Now the role of Solutions Architect is one I had in the back of my head as a possible next step in my Career. I have never been a person that knows since day one what I want  in the future (being a Gemini in IT), but lately I have been looking into several different career paths ranging from consultancy to Solutions Architect.

When I read that mail this morning, It was the first time the name Solutions Architect role caught my attention. I believe it did not before, due to the enormous amount of job titles available in IT (from which I believe most to be made up by HR staff that was not sure how to classify their staff – Also I sometimes get the feeling that people think that longer job titles are for more important roles, kind of like an extension of their …)

I found that Microsoft offers a Certified Architect (MCA) certification path, which would prepare for this role. On their website they give a good idea what the role consists of(from their point of view):

“Communicate mainly with business owners within a company and with the technical staff that delivers the solution. The projects they work on affect the enterprise and they design the solution to take advantage of the existing assets, integrate them into the existing environment, follow the enterprise architecture, and solve the business problems of the business owner or unit. They are primarily responsible for taking a project through envisioning and design, and are more consultative to the project manager during the development and deployment phases, ensuring the project stays true to the architecture, time-lines, and budgets. If problems occur, they are escalated to the solutions architect.”

This is perfectly in line with my Job Description. Now I am aware of the differences between both definitions, but believe them to be very comparable. (Also the rest of my job description, which I cannot publish because of confidentiality) looks very similar.

The next days Ill be looking into this, and mostly on how I can now direct my role to that of a Solutions Architect.

What follows is a two part series of the top ten reasons why software projects fail. This post’s focus is on how projects are setup for failure, next months focus will be how they fail during the actual implementation.

1. Lack Of Customer Involvement – Not involving your customers on day one of a project is a major mistake. No matter how great the product that your team develops if the customers don’t feel ownership they may not use it. In order to achieve user acceptance involve your customers in all facets of your development lifecycle and continually communicate the state of the project to them.
2. Poor Documentation Of Requirements – Companies will go to great expenses to gather top notch requirements only to ineffectively record them. Developers are left with hearsay and fading memories of customer needs when they get around to coding. Take the time to accurately record your requirements in a template such as the SRS from the IEEE. This will ensure that what your team builds is exactly what your customers asked for.
3. Not Building A Prototype – When your customer’s vision of a product and what you deliver don’t match, you are often forced back to the drawing board for expensive rework. By developing a prototype as part of your requirements gathering or design you can help to align your customer’s vision with your own. As an additional benefit oftentimes seeing the actual interface can help your customer realize that what they wanted isn’t really what they wanted and you have an early chance to get it write.
4. Project Scope Is Too Large – How many short few month projects have you heard of that failed? How many multi-year projects? When we extend the length of a development project so long that it will take longer than a few months to complete we increase our chances for failure. Any large project can be broken into a series of smaller projects, employ the spiral lifecycle model and watch as your team succeeds time and time again.
5. Inexperienced Project Managers/Technical Leads – Putting an inexperienced manager in charge of a software project is like giving your fifteen year old keys to your car, they may be able to get the car running but they may crash it eventually also. Without a knowledge base of experiences to draw from an inexperienced manager may not know how to handle a particular situation and may give up or worse hide the issue from upper management. Setup a mentoring program for new managers and ramp them up slowly on less mission critical projects.

© Copyright 2008 Braintrust Software, LLC All Rights Reserved

Celstream Technologies

Celstream Technologies is an established, global Product Engineering Services company. We partner with technology companies and enable them to meet their product development goals. Our proven expertise and services extend across high-growth domains like Media & Entertainment, Print & Publishing and Consumer Electronics.

At Celstream, we make a positive difference to our client’s business by combining technology and unparalleled domain understanding that yields accelerated time-to-market. High quality is of essence and hence, is the cornerstone of Celstream.

This  Job is posted in http://www.celstream.com/careers/ for more details visit http://www.celstream.com/careers/opportunities.htm#Mac_TL

HCL in India

HCL has evolved from a dream of eight youngsters in 1977 to the country’s top IT group today. Our well-balanced portfolio of turnkey solutions across equipments, software and services make our offerings end-to-end for all IT needs of the Indian customers. Our recognitions speak of our dominant position in India. We have several recognitions for our network management services, security services, IT Infrastructure services and we have been rated as No.1 PC Brand for the last 5 years in India.

HCL is known to be the harbinger of technology in the country. Our partnerships with technology leaders like JDA, Oracle, SAP, KANA, Intel, Microsoft go back to the time when India was being recognized as a growing and strategic market. Along with global capability, HCL has leveraged such relationships to create value for Indian customers – the comprehensive integrated market surveillance solution for SEBI being one such example.

Our services are backed by an extensive direct support infrastructure spread across 170 locations nationwide, which offer 24 x 7 support offering for critical sites. With more than 70 SAP implementations till date, HCL has been rendering service to key Indian players in Banking & Finance, Retail, Consumer and Government.

We are committed to the Indian Market and will continue to invest more to further enrich our end-to end IT offerings for this market. Our flexible engagement models, rich heritage of technology solutions and over 30 years of leadership across service areas give us a strategic advantage to meet the nation’s IT needs.

Designation: Systems analyst / Technical lead Experience: 4 – 7 years Location: Bangalore/ChennaiOracle and Unix – 10 positions Job description: Adequate knowledge on Sybase, Oracle, Unix. (Java exp is optional) Must have prior development / production support experience. This role is for Production Support, hence written / spoken communication has to be good Support for 2 tier / 3 tier apps with SQL / Oracle knowledge is required Ability to work in a heterogeneous environment. Ability to interface with the customer directly is a must Domain knowledge in Treasury desirable but not mandatory

E-mail your resume with the relevant Skill / Position in the subject to refer@hcl.in

This Job is posted in http://www.hcltech.com/ for more details visit http://www.hcltech.com/careers/openings/technical/

An unspecified company in supply chain business process automation is looking for a team lead:

This position requires the candidate to manage a team, ensuring technical project management, design and delivery of our portal development initiatives based on our core product list. This position will ensure proper development methodologies are followed, to maximize reuse, productization and developer effectiveness. A major component of this job is to provide technical analyst support while meeting directly with clients. 

The sounds suspiciously like QLogitek, so it probably is.  If that’s true, the location is kipling and rexdale, out by the airport.

The Good
It’s a relatively senior role, and it sounds like the company’s growing.   The phrase “professionals who are ready to take the next step in their career growth” sometimes implies an opening for someone who’s looking to “move on up” and take on more responsibility than they can demonstrate through their resume.  The corollary could be that they may not be looking to pay what an experienced team lead would normally get.

I’m guessing, although I don’t know, that automating the supply-chain might be something that is moderately robust through a mild recession, should we be entering one. 

The Bad
There’s almost no information here, and although I’ve a guess as to who they are, without even that much information, it’s hard to base any kind of decision on the information they’re offering.  I guess they’re hoping you’ll apply.   Who will you be working for and where?  What will you be leading your team to accomplish?  How big a team, what kind of team, who’s on it?  What’s the process and leadership style they’re hoping to employ?  And so on.

YMMV
Your mileage may vary about working out by the airport, if my assumption about the employer is accurate.  There are some elements in the job description that sound like top-down management.  Some people think that’s an effective way to manage, but not everyone does.  Also, I’m guessing that supply-chain management might strike some of you as dull, although I always find that challenging development always ends up being interesting in the long run, regardless of the industry.

In Summary
If you’re looking to be a team lead, and you’re either willing to work where QLogitek does or at least to find out if my guess is right, could be a good fit.

An unspecified company is looking for a Python/Ruby Developer to help them build some RESTful web services to back a Flash/Flex/AIR application on contract, either full-time or part-time, and potentially parlay that into being a team lead as the project develops:

We’re looking for a talented, experienced backend application developer to create a RESTful service that interfaces with a flash/flex/air frontend.

Currently in startup mode, but expectation is that you would become the team lead for future development within the project. Also – this product is very very cool, and you’re going to be happy to put this on your resume, and show it off to your friends and family.

It sounds like Python is the first choice of technology, although it also sounds like there is some flexibility there.  A brief conversation with the person on the other end of the opportunity (name withheld by request) revealed that he or she seems to be a relatively sane and sensible person, at least so far as one can tell in a short conversation, and the following details, which I can pass on:

-          Consumer oriented: content aggregator + micro participation
-          Self funded, with the right contacts for a funded stage shortly

The Good
There’s precious little Python in town, and not all that much Ruby, so if you’re interested in these technologies, then this job is already well above most of its competition.  It may also be an interesting project, although it’s really hard to tell.  The contract pay being offered seems reasonable, although it’s not exceptional.

The Bad
These secret projects tend to lack information.  Thus, the ’secret’ part.  So you won’t know much about the work until you talk to the people who are offering it, and even then, you may need to pass some thresholds of acceptance just to get more information.   What’s the project?  Who’s behind it?  Is it as interesting as they claim?  What process will you be working in?  How much money are they willing to offer you?  How many hours a week makes sense?  At least you know it’s a work-from-home contract.

YMMV
Not everyone’s into short-term contract work.  This may turn into a full-time position or longer-term contract, but it may not — that’s the risk you take with contract work.  If you’re already doing contract work, this is probably old hat, but if you’ve got a full-time job, there’s a risk to consider.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you’ve got no problem with contract work, but this project takes off, are you willing and interested in taking it further, becoming the full-time lead instead of a contractor?  It sounds like that’s what they’d prefer, so you might need to consider that.

In Summary
If you’d like to be working in Python, there’s very little of that in town, from what I’ve seen.  Alternately, if you’re a big believer in Ruby, there seems to be an opportunity to make that happen if you’ve got the right skillset.  If you’re into either of those and available for some short-term contract work for now, this sounds like it could be an interesting opportunity.