So, at big companies like this it appears you get to do these “performance review things,” anyway I ended up spending far longer working on it than I wanted to when I should have been rapidly typing things like api.channel_post or request.user but I figured I could make up for some of that by posting a good chunk of it here.

Overall Performance

Just getting moving, between integrating myself with the company and pushing for support for Jaiku I feel these first months were certainly my slowest, but with a solid plan and commitment to it I feel that this is just the beginning.

Accomplishments

• Oh em gee super sekret.
• Biking to work about once a week.

Strengths

• Contributing energy, excitement and enthusiasm / pleasant to work withness / constructive feedback and helpful suggestions is always one of my main strengths.
• Code-wise, I feel I do a good job of contributing well-thought-out, simple, useful designs, generating great new ideas and staying abreast of new developments in the industry, a close connection to open source developers.
• I move quite fast and make a lot of progress when the path is clear, tends to be very helpful for people wanting to experiment with an idea.
• I’d like to think I cultivate relationships between engineering groups, I definitely feel that will be a strong point of mine once I’ve had a chance to interact with more groups.

Areas for Development

• I feel I could always test much better and do better at keeping design docs up to date, I end up running ahead of those far too often, I feel this will improve greatly as I am exposed to more great testers via code reviews, nothing drives me forward as well as working with bright people.
• I would love to teach and mentor others more, I feel I frequently skimp on this due to the feeling of lacking time or for getting frustrated with people who are still learning, I think I can improve this by beginning to write more documentation for projects, documentation for APIs and things like that.
• Complete projects that I started is a big one for me, I’ve noticed myself dropping out of projects here at Google once the meetings become about what I feel is just large company red tape, I’d like to improve this by learning enough of what the issues people are facing are that I can solve them before my interest dies completely. Additionally, simply having the stamina to get through the boring parts long enough to be a useful contributor again.
• Providing leadership, I’m quite used to running my own projects but at a company of this size and nature it requires much more to be a leader that can contribute, I plan to improve this by working with great leaders and taking on larger and larger responsibilities.

Career Development Objectives

My past objectives in career development have always been related to starting projects that bring together small groups of bright individuals in a way that allows them to thrive and produce free products that move towards making the world a better place and in the process learn greatly by being surrounded by these people and working with them.

So moving here felt like quite a departure at first, but I feel I’ve found the right niches to dive into where I can again contribute and progress towards those goals.

My plans are to bring about environments within the company that breed the kind of passion and excitement that I’ve always taken for granted at smaller companies and smaller projects, and through working in those environments implement and launch innovative products that assist other developers both internally and externally in bringing that same passion and excitement to their environments.

Having a platform like Jaiku on which to rapidly develop new tools is one way in which I intend to begin accomplishing, and working with some of the more interesting developer-facing projects internally and externally is another. Along the way I intend to re-acclimatize myself with C++ and Java so that I will be more quick to contribute to those projects that are based on those languages.

It’s not all bad, to be sure, there have been warm days and nights, a few of which where it didn’t rain at all. And the rain’s not terrible, just ever present; blues skies are but a fading memory.

Despite all that, it’s still a the greatest pleasure biking around, the warm air, the wind, even the rain, on your face just can’t be beat.

I think I’ve reached the limits of what writing about the weather can really hold interest for, so I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a nice place to live and, as much as I’d like some sun, after all the travel I’ve done this year the only thing that sounds worth escaping to is my bike in SF.

My role at Flock is changing and to celebrate Mexican independence I will join that vast pool of the self-employed. I’m still quite excited about a lot of the stuff we are doing, especially the things being worked on right now (and I have the coolest bio) but I’m not willing to trade the freedom I have found here in Amsterdam for the level of communication and dedication that is required to be such an active part of a fast moving team.

So, starting at about the 16th of September, I will be somewhat more available to work with your badass company as my time commitment to Flock will be significantly decreased.

Also, if anybody wants to pay me to travel around the globe wearing stupid glasses I’m all ears.

This weekend, thanks to my being back in town for a bit, I will be attending the coolest hacker event in the galaxy, SuperHappyDevHouse 8. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to attend and I’ve got a couple projects stored up.

If you’ve got an awesome side project you’ve been postponing for months because you just don’t know how to code up the database side, or a neat little hack you’d like to bang out that you just haven’t found the time for, THIS IS YOUR VENUE. This is not a conference. This is not web 2.0. This is you, your laptop, a net drop and lots of caffeine doing a 12 hour sprint to get that awesome thing done.

While the South-By folks are away, the coders will play. superhappydevhouse8

** Update ** Wrote a HOWTO about Organizing a DevHouse

Technorati Tags: code, community, opensource, party, shdh

Hey world, I am looking for housing from the 1st of March around the center in Amsterdam, up to about €700, rooms are okay. If you feel like forwarding me to any of your cool friends, here is a nice bit of email you can send them:

Programmer dude from California currently residing — well… trying to reside — in Amsterdam, seeking housing from the 1st of March for up to about €700. Friendly, open source, enjoys music, big breakfasts and Belgian beer.

Around the center would be nice, fun housemates would be nice too. Free tech support for housemates

Contact me, Andy Smith at 06.5599.4930.

Technorati Tags: amsterdam

So far using an OS X install disc gets me the same message, but inverted.

Picked up a 40-year-old bike at the big outdoor market today, works like a champ except for the brakes — I pretty much have to stand up on one of the pedals to make the thing stop — and I feel like a new man. Also bought a slightly lighter sweater/coat to wear so that I don’t get too warm while biking, and it was a nice day out so it seemed a good idea.

So it started hailing.

But I’m eating garlic mushrooms (/knoflook champignons/) and drinking a Leffe blond letting my hat and coat dry off and warm up draped over a heater. I swear, the only Dutch words I am learning are the names of food.

• blogosphere: We’ve got to be over it by now. How many more conferences about blogging can we realistically have? We’ve saturated everybody we needed to, we can sit back and let gigantic evil corporations force our parents and grandparents into it from now on. It is just the net now guys, just an extension of humans behind computers, and it isn’t about what “the blogosphere” says, it is about what the people behind computers say, so give us names that are applicable to our groupings like “cheaply-bought evangelists,” “desperate political attention-grabbers,” “bandwagoneers” and “socially inept twenty-somethings.”

• web 2.0: See “bandwagoneers” and “cheaply bought evangelists” above. Somehow hearing this phrase has become synonymous with listening to a company spokesperson attempting to “build a community” with me while raping all the software and projects I love in an attempt to convince people that they are open. I understand the urges to have buzzwords in every possible sentence you utter to me, but have some dignity because we see right through you. If you want to impress me, here are some buzzwords you can try out: “context-free grammar,” “naked women,” “python,” and “can I get you a beer?”

• attention owner: Okay, so I don’t ever actually hear this one, likely because I immediately attempt to find something else to do if somebody mentions anything that sounds like it could lead into a conversation about how important it is that their attention be justified, but it is so self-aggrandizing and empty that I hope it never has to reach my ears.

Just so that this post isn’t all negative…

Technorati Tags: blogging

Summary:

• We have made significant progress along our Roadmap.
• We are currently working heavily on expanding our specification documents.
• Dates on our Roadmap will be pushed back a couple weeks to a month to allow those specs to be done well and give some of us a little time off around the holidays.
• Our new specs should additionally serve as documentation for the community.

Explanations:

A little while back, a few weeks ago at this point, Flock put out a Roadmap detailing where we are hoping to be when regarding the browser. It was a fairly loose estimate, meant mostly to give us a place to direct those interested in seeing their peeves fixed to a place where they can see a rough timeframe during which they can start expecting the nightly builds to start having those fixes integrated.

The first milestone has already passed and most of the issues we were trying to solve with it were handled. We missed a few things, some RSS stuff, debugging some performance issues — that’s my fault, sorry guys, and we never handed off a build with everything working at the same time… and believe me, Lloyd was not pleased with us for it. We were pretty set to have had one out last week, but we’ve decided we needed to expand our specs to prevent this kind of thing from continuing to happen.

The spec work we are doing has been going wonderfully. We have a HUGE amount of stuff to cover but we’ve got a good system in place for working on them (text files and distributed version control in place of a wiki that nobody ever uses, basically) and they are proceeding along quite rapidly. We decided to take the time to work on these right now for a couple reasons, firstly because good specs help prevent the kinds of problems we’ve had with hitting milestones, secondly because specs help keep everybody on the same page and, especially with our new recruits overseas, a project this big makes that very difficult without a solid reference document.

With all this work being done on the specs and the prospect of some time off around the holidays (hello France), we are pushing back the Roadmap’s timeline by a couple weeks to a month, we’ll have the best estimates once we finish the spec. Our apologies for shifting the timeline on you.

We will have a lot of specs (60+ pages so far), but they will serve in great part as documentation as well since they are being formatted for use in our wiki and are intended to be public.

All in all, we think this is a Good Thing and, like properly setting up your environment, will greatly increase our efficiency in the long run.

Technorati Tags: flock

“Well, how about Andrew Smith?”

“That doesn’t match either.”

“Umm, I’m holding my card right now, this is the right number, can you check again?”

“Sir, the name doesn’t even belong to male.”

“Uh, okay… I guess I’ll have to sort this out, thanks.”

Well, I didn’t sort it out, because I am lazy. Today I decided to open up some of the “time sensitive” mail I had received in the past few weeks that I have been at work. One was a letter about a court appearance (I forgot to buy a Caltrain ticket one time, stupid), the other was from the Employment Department about a fee for having overpaid me. The name was A M Smith, the address matched mine, but the social security number was definitely not mine.

All in all, pretty shitty, I expect some identity theft stuff going on, but that’s not all. So far all of those things are sort of distanced from me, yeah somebody is pretending to be me or something, but they aren’t physically anywhere near me.

Today, however, I was bugging Chris about the rent (basically, I get the money then transfer it to the landlady’s account) because we were pretty late this month and usually I get the check from his bank before now. A couple hours later I got this email:

Subject: Oct rent

If you didn’t cash this, we have a problem.

Check #57307339 from our account was mailed to Andy Smith on 09/29/2005. Funds were withdrawn from your *10264 account on 10/04/2005. Contact your financial institution if you have a question about when your funds were withdrawn.

The check gets sent to my house. I tend to have a stack of email sitting on my desk or in my hallway until I get to it. Various people have been through the house on various occasions (although relatively few between 09.29 and 10.04), but realistically somebody has to have taken the check and cashed it under my name.

I’m not very happy with what any of this implies, nor with the steps that will have to be taken to resolve it. Rent is going to be a bit more expensive this month, too.

Technorati Tags: identity theft