Hello (Again), World

Hello World!

…Again.

It has been a while since I last posted. The last few posts during of the Chaos of Covid where a bit of an escape; then my life got crazy as we sold the startup I was the tech lead at, and I started at Facebook. Since then life, the tech industry, and the world have been a whirlwind of changes, and I have not had much time to stop and refect on my own thoughts about it, let alone write it down and proofread it enough to share it publicily.

A little bit of catch up. Shortly after I stopped posting, we sold Jornaya to Verisk and I got a job at Facebook (as previously mentioned). As tech lead, the selling process was stressful; I want to build for longevity and maintainability, and management was pushing for faster results and short term impact. That caused a lot of conflict and stress, since I was not privy to the sales talks, but ultilmately it made sense once everything came out. I was super happy to get a successful startup exit under my belt, and being there to mature with the startup from a scrappy series B startup, to a sale-ready one was quite the experience.

My interview process at Facebook will likely be the subject of future posts, but it was easily one of the hardest things I have ever done. While I had been building software for close to a decade, I was still self taught with very little pure CS knowledge. Sure, I had some deeper cuts into functional programming, and a relatively strong grip of category theory and general type theory; but the CS-101 things didn’t often come up in my day to day, and that is a lot of what the FAANG-style interviews test for. So it was a lot of back-to-basics type studying, a lot of leet-code, a lot of reading books like The Imposters Handbook, and Cracking the Code Interview, both of which I would highly recommend. Ultimately most of the tricks come down to the human parts of the interview and maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio during the interview to make the interviewer’s job easy. I will save the more fun insights for a future post.

After Comcast, I swore off big corporations, and my time at Facebook/Meta came as an odd mix of startup and big corporate feel. The teams were very results driving, and it was a “Move Fast, Break Things” cuture (as much as they said it wasnt that anymore) which I really enjoyed. But performance reviews and the politics of the job were exhausting, and working a quarter to move the needle by a few percentage points in most positions was not as fulfilling as I wanted it to be. But working on some hard problems at scales otherwise unseen was super cool, and I wouldn’t trade my time and experience there for the world.

Sticking in the startup world during an age of wild economic times has been an interesting ride. Getting hired for high growth teams to be laid off for VC’s looking for profitability or for an RTO to justify corporate real estate purchases has been head-spinning. I’ve been just looking to get as much knowledge and understanding as I can around deliverying product, and building the muscle for shipping impact.

Then comes A.I. My opinions on AI hve gone back and forth so much, about as chaotically as the standards around it have. I am sure as it matures and my experince with it grows, it will continue to chaotically oscillate, but I do hope to capture some snapshots of that process here; future posts incoming.

I am mostly returnning to this medium as a sanity check. The world has been moving at what seems like an ever accelerating pace. Looking back at some of my older posts, I get a good snapshot and sanity check for my view of the state of the world at the time, and that helps ground me and make some sense of it all. As I continue my journey throught the world of software and technology, I’d like to get back to recordkeeping my experience (and occassionally vent). I will do my best to keep it on topic and try not to reduce the signal-to-noise ratios of opinions on the internet, but I will have to measure and iterate to get there.