My First 100 Days @ Square
Day 0: Prep, prep, more prep.. and a team lunch! :)
I learned that my new team will be using Rails and Ember, neither of which I have even heard of. Here are some helpful links with tutorials that I went through.
End of Day 5:
Checking in! Woo, I finished Square One (which is the set of internal onboarding meetings for new hires) and read through a lot of their new engineer onboarding procedures. Besides setup, I also learned a significant amount about the product and Square’s ecosystem.
During my brief hours home, I did some more minor Rails on my own. My goodness, I have barely an idea of what’s going on. Oh and POODR should be arriving in the mail in a week or so because one of my coworkers recommended that book to learn Ruby.
Side note: Learning Ruby has been extremely weird… maybe it will grow on me.
4 weeks through and in the midst of week 5:
I have been onboarded and have made a handful of pull requests! Not only that, I have successfully emerged from my deep dive with Ruby and Rails. Some of my explorations are documented here. Feel free to contribute! From what I can tell, Square has an engineering first culture. From talks covering a plethora of engineering and product topics to the skillful managers that push you beyond your limits, it’s hard to imagine not excelling.
One of the peculiar feelings I have is a huge sense of gratitude and luck. I feel tremendously lucky to have had the opportunity to work hard and get here. Beyond that, I feel like the culture here and Silicon Valley in general is of excess. Everyday, I pass by countless homeless people on the streets and in BART stations. Yet, everyday I also pass by countless Squares, Uber employees, etc., each of whom eats and drinks to his/her content and enjoys a daily life of comfort and security.
Lastly, I want to tie this with the giant economical machine that is capitalism and technology. I’m reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and in one of the chapters, the author discusses how the capitalist machine invests in individuals and technology so that it can harvest the rewards. In turn, it will invest more, all the while leaving those “incapable” homeless. Am I just a cog in this magnificent and horrifying machine?
9 weeks through, Monday of week 10:
Now that I have had time to adjust and onboard, I can say that my productivity has overall increased since coming here. I cannot put my finger on an exact reason but the environment here is very conducive for productivity. From my manager to the equipment to the easy access to food and drinks. With all my bodily needs met, I can focus on just pure work. I have to say thank you to my team, the Marketing team. It’s been an absolute pleasure so far.
On a separate note, I’m about to release my first official feature! Not some DB optimization and not some bug fix but an actual feature! Woo, things are about to get wild :)
…
So… I lost track of time. 100 days have surely gone by. I came here to tell myself that time flies faster than it did back in college. Take time to reflect and that slows things down a bit. Onwards to 2018!
