Slideshare had its first team retreat recently; we boarded a bus that took us from New Delhi to Jaipur (which is possibly India’s best tourist destination after Agra, the city of the Taj). It was two days of fun & frolic. Check out the snaps below…

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Want to join the team that is building SlideShare? We are recruiting ROR hackers & geeks to join our New Delhi based team.

Working at SlideShare can be a hugely rewarding experience. Building social software is a whole lot of fun: the technical challenges, the high-involvement nature of the work (how often can you show your friends & family what you did at work last week?), the fast changing internet landscape, and the constant feedback from users, make it a different ball-game than the usual technical work.

Benefits include:

- Experience with cutting edge open-source technology
- Working with a team of bright, enthusiastic people where you can focus on creating great technology that is used by millions of people every day
- Competitive Salary
- Generous Stock options

We are recruiting for the following positions:

Server side hackers

If you’re a open source junkie, and love hacking Linux systems, deep algorithmic work (search, recommendation engines, etc), SQL tuning and optimization, and modifying open-source code to your own twisted purposes, then you might be a good fit for a position with our server side team. Experience in scalability of large webapplications is an advantage.

Front End Developers

We’re looking for web-savvy hackers who know JavaScript and Flash and PHP, and can use them to full effect in creating amazing web applications. Prior experience in application development in a internet firm may be an advantage.

Technologies/Platforms

We work on ruby on rails, linux, freebasd, debian, Amazon S3, MySql etc. Candidates not having experience in ROR can apply- if you have worked earlier on PHP, Python, Perl etc, thats fine as well.

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT net’

PST 9.10 AM: We are facing some problems in our file conversion servers; we noticed this a couple of hours back and our systems guys are working hard through the night (in India) to get this back on track. Expect some delay before your uploaded files will get converted to our flash format for viewing on slideshare.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Update PST 9:50: Approximate wait time conversion seems to be four hours or so. The remaining machines that do the conversion are working non-stop, so your files WILL go through: it’ll just take longer than it should.

Jaehan Ray is a 25 year old student from Daegu, South Korean who we met at the Slideshare office in Delhi recently; so how did he land up there? Well the answer is kinda storylike…read on if you want to hear it firsthand.

Jaehan was on the cusp of finishing his education and move on to a job (much like his other friends) when he decided that this could wait. His big dream in life is to travel around the world, meet diff people and learn about their language & culture. He thought travel is one of the biggest educational experiences one can have. So he created a slide deck (embedded below) to explain his idea and show it to others. He also happened to upload it to slideshare, where we found it and liked it so much, that his slidedeck was featured as the ‘slideshow of the day‘ on our homepage (some four months back). In the presentation, Jaehan had indicated his travel route across Asia & Europe and I noticed that it passed through India. I left behind a comment on the slideshow inviting him to visit the slideshare office. While passing through Delhi last week, Jaehan spent a couple of hours at our office, chatting with the slideshare developers and telling us about South Korean life (including its massive internet orientation). We also shot a small video (below) while he was here.

Thanks Jaehan! We enjoyed meeting you. This world is really a small place over the web and we’re happy slideshare played a small part in enabling our meeting!

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Running a site like SlideShare, you get used to all the PowerPoint jokes. Heck, we enjoy them! When we first came out, the best coverage was comments like: Bore people around the world. We have been told that we are the worst website in the world (I have met the person who made the comment and he’s rather nice (and uses SlideShare now ;-).

Anyway, working at a startup can get pretty intense, and we are always looking for ways to amuse ourselves. One of our users came up with an amusing take on Presentations, which he called PowerPointless (embedded below): Create powerpoints using ONLY existing themes and existing Microsoft clipart!

We are inviting you to take this concept and run with it. Create the PowerPointless. Upload a slideshow and tag it with the word “powerpointless”. We will highlight your PowerPointLess contributions on our home page every two weeks. It can be anything that is an amusing take on PowerPoint. Make our grim content editor laugh and we will put you on the front page.

How to enter: 1) Create something powerpointless (and find someone else’s stuff and share it - with their permission of course). The rules are deliberetly vague - it should be amusing. Make our grim content editor (we won’t tell you who it is) laugh! It should be something about presentations. Or something related which amuses us.

2) Important: Upload and tag it “powerpointless” so that we find it.

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As some of you have been facing issues with file conversions being slow, we’re working on this; we hope to restore normalcy in this matter soon. Thanks for your patience!

As many of you have noticed, slide download is not working on many of the cases. We are aware of this problem and are working on fixing it. Thanks for your patience!

One of our users has created this sweet birthday cartoon for slideshare. Check it out here! Thanks for this.

Seemingly, there are other ones as well…