new job!

This Monday, I started work at Akamai. New jobs are always awesome and so is this one, but I really like my group and my boss, and the work seems interesting. It's a very thinky kind of place; the algorithms are mostly done but there are always more optimizations to do and there's more creativity and less plumbing here than at some other places. The people here are thinky too, which makes them fun to interact with.

I like to see how quickly I can check in code, as a measure of how agile the company is. This time the answer was Wednesday morning, mostly because access to Perforce is through SSH keys and Akamai is super careful about establishing trust for those. Two days or so isn't bad for a company of this size and I see the need for caution since we're a great big target. My boss was super sweet in saving aside a project for me with a gentle learning curve and not very much schedule pressure. We'll see how the learning curve ramps up in a couple of weeks when I'm done with that and move on to something more complicated.

I asked my boss if I should attend a particular design review next week and she asked if I was going to cause trouble. I responded "I don't know, it depends on whether there's any trouble that needs to be caused. But you guys seem to be pretty good at that". This put a big smile on her face and she said I had chosen the right group.

I keep running into people I know there. It's a pretty big company and even a percent of the employees is a pretty big number. But based on what I have seen so far I think I'm going to have to revise my estimate to two or three percent.