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";

When I arrived in the bay area about three years ago, I felt like somewhat of a pariah given that I had been most recently working with Microsoft technologies and was trying to get a job amongst LAMP developers in the most competitive place in the world to do so. I fell back on my previous Perl experience and found a sweet gig at Yahoo in what essentially is the dev tools part of the organization.

A few years later, now that I've been able to come up for some air and take a look around, I've noticed that the world has gone the way of RoR and Python. I was telling a friend recently, "it sure is hard to find web dev positions for Perl developers" and he responded (because he's looking to fill some reqs,) "it sure is hard to find Perl developers for our web dev positions."

So, which of RoR and Python to learn first? I'm a big believer in learning by doing, so now I just need to sit down and develop a service in one of the two. Python, bring it on.

Happy to report that the portfolio you now see to the right is completely dynamically generated and driven by XML and XSLT. I still need to work on details for some of the projects (if you click around and notice that some of them are empty or you get an error, that's because I haven't gotten around to fleshing them out yet. Check back soon!)

TODO

• flesh out projects
• fix styling
• create stylesheet for generating resume page as HTML
• portfolio plugin for WordPress plugin?
• add code samples

UPDATE: Sigh, search doesn't work for my resume (which is in XML) because it's not indexed.

I've been meaning for a long time to synchronize my resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn profile. The portfolio to the right that you're currently seeing is static and has been a beast to maintain, as have the corresponding pages (which are all managed by WordPress as a CMS.)

I've finally taken the time and decomposed my resume into XML. Soon I'll be able to use one source file and a few stylesheets to render a web version of the resume, updates for my LinkedIn profile (which I'll probably have to cut-and-paste,) the portfolio on this site, and a simple text version of my resume for online job apps (though, when will I need that last one?)

* : Portal czars, not so much Last week, I was remembering that in Vienna, there was a woman at the IAEA who had started an internal listserv geared towards expats' needs; apartments for rent, activities, used furniture, etc. It was the best source of information in the city if you weren't Viennese, period. She built up a following over the years and spent anywhere from a couple of hours per week to a couple of hours per day administering it. Everybody loved the listserv because it was so helpful. One day, the Director of IT decided that maybe using the organization's infrastructure for that kind of thing wasn't the best use of resources so he decided to shut her down. A bit of an uproar was caused by those on the list so the Director of IT sanctioned the creation of a web portal out of the listserv (which is where I came in as an analyst/developer.) He was willing to throw enough resources at the portal to get it built, but the Achilles' heel of that plan was that as soon as we gleaned all the requirements from the list owner, she was not to spend any more of her working time on it; we were going to automate everything. During one meeting with the list owner late in the requirements gathering, it came to light that she was trying to parlay the situation into a full time job for herself (as portal administrator.) I'm sure she would have done a great job (but I wasn't in charge of budget decisions.) She gave her listserv the sort of personal touch (the added value if you will) that made everyones' lives better. I'm sure she would have done the same as the portal czar. In the end, she didn't get the full-time job doing what she really wanted to be doing (and was really good at doing,) the listserv was officially terminated, and the portal project was shelved.

"...am reaching out to you to see if you would be interested in finding out more about this great opportunity.... this is a fabulous company, very stable and is probably just as exciting, if not more than Yahoo."

More exciting than Yahoo? Have you been reading the news lately? I can guarantee you, there are few other workplaces right now that are as exciting as Yahoo.

"... We need to hire 15-20 people (contractors)... There is a chance this will go full-time down the road."

Wait a minute, I thought you said this was "very stable"? Since when can you use "very stable" and "contractor" in the same paragraph?