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We’re looking to hire a brilliant Android programmer to help out with YAMU a new and (IMHO) exciting startup. Our immediate goal is to help people get around the city.

Our more geeky goal is to make places into hyperlinks. We want a system so slick that you can click on a place (say, Casa Colombo) and the app will pick up where you are right now (ie, home), pass it to the nearest cab, and then pick and drop you at Casa Colombo. Just click and bounce. No giving directions, just chill and arrive in style. In time maybe be phone can be the meter and let you pay over the phone as well. Really seamless and sexy you know, like clicking a hyperlink and just getting there.

Then we want to help people get around the country, develop other location/time based services, and then maybe expand the model to other countries as well.

The team right now is me, Savan Wijewardene on content and Janith Leanage on tech. We need an Android developer to help us apponize the content we’re producing, apponize our bus app, and develop our nascent cab app.

Skills

Skills required are, number one, the ability to learn and think fast and have an eye for beauty and design. Beyond that, you’d need to be able to manage location based service, work with GPS, billing systems and Foursquare/Twitter/Facebook and other APIs. Oh, and also be quick to learn the Dialog API. We’re not looking for just a brilliant coder, we’re looking for an all-rounder that can take broad instructions and come up with creative solutions and surprise us.

What

As an example of the type of problems we’re trying to crack, see the pseudocode below:

Activation

When the app starts up, there’s a button to activate the app.
When clicked, it first gets the lat/long of the current location, and stores them in lat and long
Then it creates the message string (JSON) with “{\”lat\”:”+lat+”\”long\”:”+long etc.
Signs it with the above algoritm.
Pings “http://yamu.com/server/?action=activate&msg=”+msg+”&sign”=+sign
Gets response code 2000 if successful.
The sign used to sign the above message then becomes the session key.
Code in PHP:

$salt[0] = ‘s`|KYI@,83,Dqa|I52~` =|+Z<-7VAAWkEwbk_b';
[etc]

$id = 10000; // something unique
$secretkey = sha1("password");
$m['ts'] = time();
$salt = $salt[($m['ts'] % 10)];

$m['lat'] = location.lat();
$m['long'] = location.long();

$msg = json_encode($m);
$sign = hash('sha256', $msg . $secretkey . $salt);

$response = file_get_contents("http://localhost/YamuServer/?action=activate&msg=$msg&sign=$sign");

if($response == 2000) {
$sessionkey = $sign;
}

Broadly, we’re trying to make two matching app, one on a client side that enables users to access time and location based services and one on the supplier side that enables them to sell services, in this case cab hires.

Where

Right now we’re working out of Dehiwela, AKA my house. You can work three days in office and two days from home, using the online workspace. The dress code was whatever but it’s been revised to no flashing after some unfortunate towel incidents.

How Much

We’re offering Rs. 70,000 per month. We know that great devs can get more, but we’re offering the chance to be part of something interesting and game changing.

If you’re interested mail me at indi@indi.ca. Resume whatever, but if you can send some examples of prior work, a few references and start a conversation, that’d be great. We have big dreams and we want to push the limits of technology on an international level. If you’d like to do something cool, get in touch.

Posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 in Business, Sri Lanka, Tech, YAMU.