Skip to main content

How To Work At SocialServe.com

Here are my instructions to anyone else who may want to work at SocialServe.com:
  1. Have a strong enough interest and passion for development to start a contracting business without any formal training. Support yourself for about a year and a half working for one client and the next.
  2. Move to an area populated enough to start a user group for your favorite development language, tool, or concept. (Mine was Python)
  3. Be suggested to send in a resume to the company of one of the first members.
  4. Sweat your way through the first real interview for the kind of job you've wanted your whole life.
  5. Cross your fingers not to screw it up.
So, that's my story. I had my interview last Tuesday, called Thursday, and started Friday. I've enjoyed it a lot. Learning my way around the codebase has been going pretty well and I've already got my first couple of commits in, as well as two small projects. I like to think I'm moving along nicely.

One of the things I need to get used to is that all of our development boxes are Macs. I have a company issued Macbook Pro (2.33ghz dual intel, 2GB RAM, 17") and I'm really enjoying the Mac life. The UNIX background is great and the interface is just slick. Installing applications is just fun. I've got the entire KDE suite installed, so I've got a lot of my favorite tools and toys right there.

The time away from the house, while somewhat nice, is probably the biggest downside. Caelan misses me a lot while I'm at work and I miss him and his mother quite a bit. After all this time at home, and all of his life so far with me there every hour, it is tough. It may be harder for me than him.

Finalizing the whole picture is my commute. 30 minutes or less to work and an hour to and hour and a half to get home. What's up with that? I need to see about leaving early or I might just leave an hour late. I'd still get home at the same time, so I might as well spend it in a comfortable chair instead of my ugly car.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...
Post a Comment
Read more