Third Day

So, here I am, sitting in a San Francisco apartment, overlooking a trendy restaurant scene. With a macbook on my lap. I feel like I just need to tweet something.  Oh, it all makes sense now!

Living Room Apartment

My last post was a bit terse, so I thought I’d spruce things up a bit.  With real words, anyway.  I’ve started to settle in a bit.  I rode the Muni subway train home all by myself.  I squashed 1.75 software bugs today, too, a new high in my three-day career.

What’s Square like?  A little surreal, for a Midwestern boy, but that may be a bit of San Francisco showing.  A day begins with a silent office, just like anywhere else.  Over the next two to three hours, people filter in slowly.  At some point breakfast shows up.  (I had bagels and lox today.  Or, some kind of fish.  Another day I had something made out of walnuts and lingonberries.)  All the while, folks are working through their tasks.  There is a lot to do for a product with so much focus.

Lunch arrives at around 11:30, 11:45, or so, and often folks will gather in clumps and take a break.  Today we had a guest speaker (Abdur Chowdhury) from Twitter come in and give some perspective on how abusers think and work.  A cool part of the day was when Jack Dorsey gave a quick shout of “Hey, Square!” to announce the presentation.  The room went silent.  He’s trained us well.

It’s a pretty good place to be a developer.  If you set aside the noise, by will or by headphone, you can concentrate on your task and get a lot done.  Meetings are short and direct, more often than not only involving two or three folks for a minute.  Longer tasks may involve two people from different teams pairing up to solve a problem.

I’m also glad to be back in a strong code review regime.  Every piece of code is reviewed and approved.  This may be while pairing, or by working on an issue branch and sending out to the team for a look.  Very nice.  A good way to learn the standards and conventions, and a whole lot of git.

I’m slowly learning the ropes on the mac, finding things, turning things on or off, figuring out the keyboard, etc.  But that’s another post for another day.  I brought along another Dresden Files novel…

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One Response to Third Day

  1. Dan Lewis says:

    Need more info! BTW congrats on landing at what sounds like a great place. BTW try IDEA 10…the indexing is much fasterer.

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