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A New Start

The last year has been a fun one. I moved to California and began working as an engineer at Mahalo.com. A huge opportunity! During this last year, I’ve had the luxury of working with a series of great engineers as well as some of the most interesting new technologies in the web space. We were lucky enough to solve really interesting problems in scalability and efficiency and were able to constantly push out new products and features, almost on a bi-weekly basis.

It was a very exciting time in my life, and now, an even more exciting time exists.

I was recently given an opportunity to work with another great bunch of developers and right here in Santa Monica, barely a mile away from where I live. It is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. It has been made pretty clear from the various news outlets that my exit from Mahalo wasn’t on the best of terms, but I’d like to come out and say, that although it was a little rough, I wish all the best for Mahalo and it’s staff and I can’t thank them enough for such a great opportunity and learning experience. I will miss all the good times we had there, even if they were being had at 3am when product launch had gone awry. You guys are great.

But, I’m excited to be joining Yahoo! where I’ll be working mainly on Yahoo! Sports as a front end engineer. I’m pretty pumped to take on a role centered around UI engineering at a major internet company that just happens to own the largest sports site in the world. Here, I will hope to help inspire inovation, learn as much as possible from those around me, and build as many beautiful UIs as humanly possible.

I’m feeling pretty darn lucky right about now.

Cheers.

Tags: career, new-beginning, opportunity, personal

New place of employment err, home really

I think I may preface a lot of posts like this (or at least I did with my last blog), but I know, I know I haven’t posted in a while and what it boils down to is that I’m just not that great of a blogger, but hey, from time to time I do feel like writing on ye ‘ol blog.

Since my last update, soooo much has happened in my life. That’s really the topic of this post. To start, I got laid of from my job at Heart of America E-Commerce in Lawrence, Kansas and was thus thrust out into the great world of opportunity, aka, the unemployed. I can’t really complain, the Kansas state government treated me well in the three months I was unemployed, and I managed to take ahold of my free time and start a few side/freelance projects. One of which I hope to launch quite soon and I’m really excited about. More to come later, but to be brief, a couple of us former HOAEC folk teamed up to create a neat little experiment. We’ll see soon how it turns out.

Anyways, I sat and enjoyed my free time for a few months, applying at every job I could think of and really those jobs that I deemed almost unattainable. I had an interview in San Francisco with Weather Underground that went well, but due to the economic situation, so I’m told, they couldn’t pull the trigger, thus leaving me ever so unemployed . Then a miracle happened. The ever so charismatic personality Jason Calacanis retweeted out that Mahalo.com was looking for front-end developers and that there was a $2000 bounty on any referrals. I immediately replied to the craigslist ad and within hours I received an email stating “Our CTO would like to setup an phone interview.”

This is when my jaw hit the floor. I was absolutely exasperated, but in the spirit of not getting my hopes up, I decided I’d just take it in stride and just be myself. The interview rolled around, I felt comfortable, and that it went well. I crossed my fingers and hoped for a call back. Then another miracle happened. I received another email stating that the lead developer at Mahalo would like to setup a phone interview too! Well, “holy shit,” I thought. Could this really happen? Well, I talked Chris Miller later that week, he had me send him a bunch of code samples for the team to review and again, I crossed my fingers. Then… no, not another miracle, the opposite, I shit my pants. I got an email stating that Mahalo would like to have me sit down with none other than Jason Calacanis himself. Yep, shit my pants.

The rest is history really. I got the job, I moved to California and here I am: living a dream. The team I work with is awesome and I learn about a whole brain full of new stuff every day, plus I’m working on a product that matters and can serve to change the world as we know it. HOLY SHIT.

I guess the point of this post is to document this story so that my dumb ass doesn’t forget how lucky I am and to let everyone know that when life gives you an opportunity like this, you simply can’t think twice. It was scary, and at times I asked myself, “are you sure?” But, it feels great and I’m glad I did it. Onward and upward. Sky’s the limit.

Ok, I’m done, and yes, another 2312341234 months will pass before I post again. Ok, ok, I’ll try not to let that happen. I feel more motivated than ever plus, I have so many awesome things to share. I simply have to get around to it! Now, back to coding…

Tags: california, employment, move, personal