So, for those of you wondering where I’ve disappeared to, whether I’ve been neglecting you on Facebook, on this blog, in person, or via some other means of interpersonal neglect — at which I naturally excel in any case — here’s the answer: I’ve been interviewing for, getting ready for, starting, and running around frantically trying to understand, a new job.
The company is called Hipmunk, and we (I have to get used to calling Hipmunk ‘we’ now!) run a travel meta-search site: a site for searching for plane tickets and hotel rooms across many providers and web sites.. If you haven’t heard of us, perhaps you’ve heard of our largest competitor, which is named something very similar to ‘canoe.com’. (Hey, I’m not going to send any business their way!) If you’re planning on traveling anytime soon, go and check us out… you can often find quite inexpensive plane tickets and hotel rooms that way. And they have an adorable mascot, which anyone who knows me would know is a major draw for someone like me.
The new job brings new challenges: Hipmunk runs almost entirely on python on the back end, a language I’ve never played with before. Their data storage is in PostgreSQL, which I haven’t played with in five years, and which I never got terribly expert on. And they interface with a whole bunch of different companies, in a whole bunch of ways, each one completely different from every other, and we somehow have to extract the same information from each one . It’s a lot to learn, and trying to hit the ground running is turning out to take a whole lot of work. I’m kind of exhausted when I get home in the evenings, and not inclined to do anything terribly strenuous. Like type a sentence. Or pick up the phone. Sorry about that.
Fortunately, what the new job doesn’t bring is a longer commute. In fact, Hipmunk is around two and a half blocks away from Cloudmark. So I expect to be having frequent lunches with ex-coworkers.
I promise to be more attentive to the rest of my life as things settle down. And things will settle down at least somewhat in the next few weeks, as I get to know enough of the language and infrastructure that figuring out the rest doesn’t seem like quite such a daunting task.
They’d better settle down. Or I will explode.
Finally, the image above is a picture of the Bay Bridge, western span, taken from the Embarcadero one morning on my way to work. The clouds sure do act funny here in San Francisco.
