The first two weeks at my new job have passed very quickly. I am still very happy and confident that I have made the right choice. The people are smart and pretty easy to get along with, both on my team and in the rest of the company (at least as far as I can tell so far). I attended the first bi-weekly company meeting on Friday and was reminded of the fact that we are still a small startup, where the CEO updates the company every week or two, the entire company discusses new products, shares other news, etc. It’s been about 5 years since I last worked in a similar environment.
In terms of the actual work, I wasn’t disappointed either. Besides getting up to speed on the existing software, in the last two weeks my work consisted of implementing a few new features, fixing a few bugs, and doing some research on potential technologies and architectures for an upcoming project. This is a nice mix of responsibilities. Of course I spent some time setting up my Linux work environment as well. I have some thoughts on that as well, which I will blog about in a separate post. The collaboration is good, we have had several brainstorming sessions, and engineers are very involved in the actual product design. We have many exciting products in the pipeline, and I am glad that I am in the mobile industry at this point in time. I believe that the killer app for the mobile space has yet to be invented, and it sure would be nice if we could play that role.
I am also positively surprised by how well our development processes appear to work, particularly for a company this young. We have a solid build process with nightly builds, a good deployment process, pretty good unit test coverage, various CVS statistics on the intranet, etc.
For now, I think I’ll shut up about my job and continue to blog about technology and other topics.