Probably the most significant constant in the entire history of this blog has
been where I have spent several hours of my day each work-day. For a great
many years, I have been an employee of Cisco Inc. As of
the 19th of this month, that will end.
I will commence employment at Carbon Five, a
consulting and application development firm in San Francisco, on the 24th of
this month. I am elated about joining Carbon Five’s team of energetic and
innnovative developers. I will be doing Ruby and Rails development and I hope
to learn more about mobile development, async server technologies, and sexy
Javascript front-ends.
Since last Winter Carbon Five has hosted a fortnightly “hack night.” Through
the winter and spring they saw me struggle and batter my way through the
rewrite of my LatinVerb library and my metaprogramming presentation.
Ultimately this co-working session facilitated a relationship which is about
to turn into a working relationship. Here are the things I like about them:
Team
Management: Friendly but clearly with a sense of standards and high
expectations but with great trust in the developers to do what’s right,
well
Staff: Excited, energetic, motivated, funny on Twitter
Size: Forty-ish or souls with whom I can have actual relationships
Culture
Standardized hours (exceptions allowed)
Fancy coffee machine that scares me
Developer-sensitive culture: don’t burn out, do good work on good
equipment in a nice place
Agile Methodologies: Paired programming (flexibly), User Stories
Client Engatement: I’ve never worked whith a money-paying customer, I
think that’s an experience to have!
Technology: The team there is trying out new ideas and tools all the
time.
Proximity: They’re a 3 block walk from my home. Granted, two of those
are SoMa wide north-east/south-west blocks, but it beats the heck out of
driving or taking the train anywhere. They’re also surrounded by several gyms so I can get some fitness work in.
Type of Work
Application development (including “heavy lifting” of the back end)
Startup / Idea bootstrapping
Design
When the door opened, I felt that the time was right for me to make a change.
I will miss my friends and contacts from Cisco terribly. The people at Cisco
and my experiences there defined many of my friends and many years of great
memories. Nevertheless I am so excited about my future with Carbon Five. I
find so much peace in Ovid these days that I’ll repeat the quote I gave in my
“sign off” email:
“As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, it is no longer what it was; does
not keep the same form; but is still one and the same;”
On May 14th, I competed at a Hackfest hosted by Podio.
Podio is a customizable social networking application delivered as a service
(aaS). After 8 hours of coding, I placed first in the competition and won a
beautiful Apple Cinema Display. In this post I will cover my hack, how it was
done, and lessons learned.
A few weeks ago Lauren and I were taking the 30 Muni up to North Beach to hear a lecture. As we crossed a busy North Beach street, a pedestrian darted in front of the driver when he was heard to utter:
“All you people all wear all-black clothes all the time better be careful running around at night. We call this place ‘The Great Black North.’”
Yes, yes, yes friends. According to my awesome realtor, Vanessa Gamp, we are aiming to close on the condo on the 21st. I recorded some footage of us doing the walkthru with the builder with my awesome new Flip UltraHD!
Now this is normally where I put something really cool of the house that I took with the Flip in the blog post.
But honestly, my filming skill was so crappy and jerky i gave myself a seizure halfway through. So, here’s a snippet of Lauren and I getting an early dinner after doing the walkthru.
Anyone from anywhere in the world will find driving in San Francisco for any distance greater than 4 miles a bit daunting.
We have many, many one-way streets, streets to be shared with streetcars, iPhone senses-numbed hipsters wandering across intersections, drunken street-people, horizon-obliterating hills, a non-gridded layout, and few free parking spaces.
Therefore, when a tourist, or any other sane person, goes down a street and sees a herd of lanyard-wearing tourists crossing a square you mean to traverse that seems to have suddenly changed bearing from southwest to dead south with double-parked cabs on the right lane and the left lane is marked exclusively for highway access s/he might let off the gas or tap the brake and …
HONK!
I’ve decided the ability to negate all the legitimate reasons for hesitation and punch through with no doubt at 10 miles over the speed limit is the shibboleth of San Francisco drivers. Just as saying “Man-Chack-Uh” in Austin, or pronouncing “Houston” in NYC like the city in Texas earns you derision and sneers, deciding not to bore across a crosswalk at 50 MPH with pedestrians in view up a blind hill crest marks you as “no from ‘round here.”
Regrettably there’s no retro-honk. You know, when someone honks at you for stopping for a wheelchair-using citizen. You’d love to say “Listen, Jackass, I’m in the moral right.” But that’s just not how it works.
It’s not actually like they were trying to tell you to do the wrong thing, they were just trying hard to aurally re-assert “hey, I’m local, g-money.”
As someone who recently liquidated about 9 boxes of books, the majority of which I read only once but lugged around for 10 years, let me recommend that you RENT your books through a service that’s kinda like Netflix, but for books: the public library!
Since I moved, every time I have the urge to buy a book (physical or Kindle) that I think I will read only once, I instead go to sfpl.org and see if the book can be rented.
It’s a great way to be slightly more careful with your money and conserve living space.
Granted, there are times you want to have an artifact. For this I’m trying to use the Kindle, because I don’t want to move boxes of books again if I can help it.
The only down side with the sfpl.org site was that it didn’t preserve my login data. Regrettably, the site login ID is an un-memorable string of digits and my strong password is equally impossible to remember. You can access your account directly by making a bookmark with the following format.
