Perhaps you have heard about Pivotal Tracker but you don't know if it's a good fit for your organization. Perhaps you are a new user with some questions about how best to use the tool. Perhaps you've been using Tracker for a while but are curious about more advanced features. If you're in San Francisco next Tuesday we can give you answers in person.

The San Francisco Tracker Users Group is having a lunchtime meeting next Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. at the Pivotal Labs office on Market St. Please register on the Meetup site, as seating is limited.

Edward Hieatt, Principal at Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Tracker developer, will give an overview of the idea behind Pivotal Tracker and the common features. Based on time and interest, Edward will go into more detail about advanced features, upcoming features, and the philosophy behind Tracker. We hope to see you there!

Beverages will be provided, but please bring your own lunch.

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide is bootstrapping startups, including helping them interview and hire. We currently have clients looking for skilled engineers to build their development teams. This is an excellent opportunity to learn Extreme Programming by working side-by-side with Pivotal's talented and experienced developers while at the same time getting in on the ground floor of a small and dynamic product team.

Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring. General technical requirements include serious web development experience, and a significant subset of Ruby, Rails, CSS, JavaScript, or MySQL.

Here are short descriptions of Togetherville, a current client of Pivotal Labs, and Honk and ekoVenture, former clients currently looking for developers. All three are based in San Francisco. The full job postings follow.

Togetherville is an early-stage, funded startup at the crossroads of learning, technology and society. Starting with our highly-respected and successful Funders and Advisors, we are building a team that is excited about getting a ground-floor startup experience and is capable of consistently meeting and exceeding the high expectations of success we have set for ourselves. We are extremely passionate about what we’re doing and just as passionately looking for focused and fun people to join our team. We are not hung up how many years of experience you have. We’d rather start with your potential and what you can do and then go from there!

Honk.com is a new online automotive website that will make car shopping fun and social. We will enable consumers to experience a new way to explore new cars. We have partnered with a top social website to deliver this new way of car shopping and are funded by one of the largest media companies in the world. Our small team is made up of an experienced group of humble, efficient, and hyper-passionate individuals who are veterans of the automotive industry and social media space. We are proud of our ego-less culture, one that promotes team thinking, not individual accolades. If you're interested in helping prove that social media and car buying go hand in hand, social networks serve a bigger purpose than keeping up with one's day, and a small team can outdo the work of an army - then we may have a seat waiting for you.

ekoVenture has created an OpenTable-like platform for travel experiences and day activities. Our mission is to take the cool travel experiences that are available, and make them accessible to the average traveler. Think sailing, trekking, kayaking, safari, cycling, wine tasting, culinary trips, cultural trips, voluntourism, eco travel, and more. Right now, more than $30 billion is being transacted on trips in our market and we will grow this number by providing greater access to reputable tour suppliers around the world. Already, more than 450 tour suppliers use this platform and have entered 10,000 trips that serve over 160 countries, all which are live to travelers via ekoVenture.com. v2.0 of ekoVenture is taking our already robust trip platform and adding a layer of innovative social features.

If you are interested or for more information please contact the company directly. This is an exclusive service provided to our clients, no external companies or recruiters please.

Full job postings follow.

Three new Tech Talks have been posted to our talks page:

• MDD: How TDD and BDD Miss the Point - Terralien Founder Nathaniel Talbott introduces Metric Driven Development, or MDD. Exclusive focus on TDD and BDD can miss the bigger picture and drive optimizations that negatively impact the business as a whole. Part business talk and part technical talk, Nathaniel discusses what MDD is, why you should be doing it from day one, and what cool Ruby tools you can leverage to make it happen.

• Aristotle and the Art of Programming - Jon Dahl ponders the big questions. What can programmers learn from the thought of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill? More than you might think. He links philosophical ethics and ideas to the processes, tools, and methodologies of software development as we discuss a critical question: is successful development primarily a matter of finding the right rules, creating the right outcomes, or cultivating the right virtues?

• Introduction to MongoDB - MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Mike Dirolf of 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, will discuss the features that make it an interesting choice as a datastore for web applications. He will give examples of how to interact with MongoDB from Ruby and discuss how MongoDB's auto-sharding allows it to provide infinite scalability.