The Bull Og

There was a point today, sometime in-between the deluge of new-hire paperwork, getting to know a new office-space, having to configure a new Microsoft system because my Macbook Pro hasn’t yet arrived, the multitude of new names, and a code overview for (just one) part (of many) of an intricate Rails system, when I thought: “this is exactly what I was looking for.”

Today ranks as one of the best first days I’ve had since starting as a software engineer. I like the people I’ll be working with, I like the company, I like the product, and I like the numerous challenges before me.

Although, I’ll admit that I didn’t sleep very well last night. It was mostly due to the heat in San Francisco but partially due to one nightmare I had about showing up unprepared. I don’t exactly remember what happened in the dream; I either wore shorts or didn’t have any pants on when walking into the office. One is certainly worse than the other, but considering the magnitude of change from my previous position, only one (fairly harmless) nightmare is doing pretty well for the night before a new job.

There was, however, a funny moment at lunch today. The question came up: “so how did someone from Yahoo! get a job at a rails shop?” (alluding to the fact that Yahoo! is primarily a PHP shop.) It reminded me of the time just over three years ago when I caught the Yahoo! shuttle bus back into San Francisco after a day of interviewing in Sunnyvale (which ultimately resulted in my first job at Yahoo!.)

On the shuttle, I started chit-chatting with the guy next to me. He asked if I had snagged the interview through a friend or relative and when I responded that I had landed it after an application through HotJobs, he jolted a bit and responded, rather surprised: “you must have some pretty special skills, then…”

Special enough, I guess…

Yesterday was my final day after just over three years with Yahoo! and while I was sad to say goodbye to the many talented professionals I met there, I’m excited to embark on a new adventure. I’ll be fulfilling the other half of a dream to live *AND* work in San Francisco at a startup whose service you’re sure to hear about if you haven’t already.

I’ve been looking for a good fit at a small(-ish) Rails shop where I would be able to concentrate on the frontend (read: tons of JavaScript/HTML/CSS) for a customer-facing site; a place with growth potential where I could make a substantial impact, a place where they would value my years of experience in the backend in addition to my UI chops, a place where I could utilize my soft skills, a place where I could teach and learn, a place where I could potentially contribute back to the Rails community.

As of next week, I’ll be joining the company making personalized shopping effortless - Shop It To Me - as Senior Web Developer. If I have your contact info, get ready for an invite to join!

From a LinkedIn InMail today:

“Returning Indians can explore Tech Positions at [Well-known Internet Company.] This is an Opportunity for all the Indian Techies to relocate to homeland and get back to the roots. With the Indian Economy revved up, time has changed. Now you can move to India and explore the same Technology and work as in US.”

If I’ve been a software engineer in the south bay, that must mean that I’m Indian.  Of course, with my name, I could easily be mistaken for someone from Bangalore, or Mumbai.

In February 2010, I hit the GDC when I came to SF with the hopes of finding a job. I thought, “surely, with my web skills… I’ll be in-demand” but oh how sobering of an experience it was.

A few months later in July 2010, Zynga was formed.

Fast forward three years and I just caught the other day that Zynga’s been reportedly valued at $5B. A $5B business in three years?!? Amazing.

This last weekend I was finally able to sit down and pound out my first Ruby script. Now I can grab the 790 pics I have in my Gallery installation and thanks to the B-Tree, order them by the upload date.

(There must be a better way to do the regexs in Ruby but I think it’s not too bad for a first stab.)

The next step is to make use of the Flickr API to upload all the pics and set info accordingly.

What to do about tags? In the next iteration, I think I’m going to put a “tags.txt” file in each Gallery album directory in order to ascribe at least a few tags to the photos as they’re being uploaded.

Just for fun, here’s a taste of the Gallery metadata files (photos.dat) that serve as the input for parsing. Good times.

a:17:{i:0;O:9:"AlbumItem":19:{s:5:"image";O:5:"Image":12:{s:4:"name";s:8:"100_0559";s:4:"type";s:3:"jpg";
s:5:"width";i:640;s:6:"height";i:480;s:11:"resizedName";
s:14:"100_0559.sized";s:7:"thumb_x";N;s:7:"thumb_y";N;
s:11:"thumb_width";N;s:12:"thumb_height";N;
s:9:"raw_width";i:1200;s:10:"raw_height";i:900;
s:7:"version";