Tag: gdg

Past week activities

What do we talk about.

It’s been an interesting week here and probably everywhere. There are a lot of things going on in the world. Like most people, we have been hanging out in our house and only going out unless we need to. Life is going to change around here and who knows if we or anyone is ready.

Let me just touch on a few things from last week.

Monday

We planned on attending the funeral for my neighbor that passed away. He was a super nice guy, but his health has been deteriorating the last few years. I haven’t seen him much, but when I did, it was usually him coming to tell me to keep my son from messing with things in his yard, or me going over to his house to apologize for my son taking something from his house. We talked a few times about VW’s and his yard. He has some cool trees in his yard that provide a TON of shade for us in the summer. They are awesome, until the winter when I have to rake up the mess. I don’t mind it though, the shade is well worth it!

Unfortunately, that day the school had an early day, so one of us had to go pick up the boy from school and miss the end of the funeral. We went to lunch. I went to work after lunch. Nothing too exciting.

Tuesday

The cold I picked up the Saturday before was getting worse, so I decided to work from home. I have a pretty flexible job, and I’m able to work from home if I need to. The social interaction with my coworkers is one of the highlights of my day and it is definitely different while working at home. I tend to get more stuff done, because there are fewer distractions.

Wednesday

I went to work and tried to stay in my room more. It’s much easier to work on my 3 monitors vs 1- 17″ laptop screen. I also had GDG to attend that night. They were discussing the Firestore, which was very interesting. The presentation had some problems, but it was good. Here is the Stream if you are interested. Check out the guy talking about ServerApp at this timestamp. It is a super cool idea about ordering food from your phone in a restaurant. Having access to the server via your phone. It is a great idea, unfortunately during this time it may not progress like he wants if the restaurants close for dining.

Anyhow, I was pretty fired up about NoSQL databases after leaving and very curious how I could use them more. I usually work in the relational world. I can see the benefits of a Document Database, but i’m not sure how reports and data duplication work.

Thursday

I went to work again, I have been feeling much better. Who knows what I have, maybe just a cold? I had to do a training today for my coworkers. I did a little presentation on creating a simple API using NodeJS. Public speaking is not my strong point, so i’m sure this wasn’t very good. There were only 6 of us in the room and I was still petrified. I’m going to work on it a little bit more improve my skills. Got any tips?

Friday

Nothing special happened today, but we found out the schools will be closed to students for 2 weeks and we’ll be homeschooling the boy at home. This could be entertaining, to say the least. I’m thankful that my wife can stay home and help him with school. We needed some tortillas, so the Mexican market is on the way home. It was super packed with people, so it took about 40 minutes to get through the line.

Saturday

Another day of sticking around at home. After giving the boy his medication he pretty much stayed upstairs playing with Lego’s. I went to Costco to pick up a few essentials and to see the craziness. Unfortunately, it wasn’t bad at all and I made it through the lines without much trouble. I’m going to go crazy if I have to stay inside too much. A nerds life is behind the keyboard, but you need to get out every once in awhile.

I saw the best thing in my neighborhood. There was a family with a table and a pyramid of toilet paper with a sign that read “Stranded on the bowl without a roll?? Here is one on me! Pay it forward! #metootp“. I thought it was awesome!

Sunday

Today has been pretty lazy and great! Our church is canceled, so we did stuff here as a family and it went good. A 7 year old that has a hard time sitting still normally at church has the same problem x3 at home.

Be Safe

I hope everyone can stay safe during these crazy times. Facebook had a pretty epic link floating around to this site: “HERE’S THE ENTIRE LIST OF EDUCATION COMPANIES OFFERING FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS DUE TO SCHOOL CLOSINGS” – Hopefully we can keep our kids happy and not halt the learning that the teachers have worked so hard to do every day. They are working hard to provide learning online and we have to help our kids continue to learn. It’s going to be tough.

Out of my shell

I just want to preface this post with: I am not looking for a new job and I really love who I work with and what I do.   If it weren’t for the people, I’d be jumping ship, but the group of guys I work with are awesome.   

When I grew up, I was always pretty shy.  Talking to strangers has always been hard for me, so making new friends was also hard.  It was especially hard if the target of my conversation was a female.  At some point in my life I started changing.  A blind date, and 2.5 years later, my wife and I were married.  If I were telling this story it would be 2 minutes long, but if you hear my wife’s side of story, you better bring chips.  I’m not as shy now as I was when I was younger and I find people more interesting and curious now a days (as I’ve mentioned in the past).   

Meet Ups 

For the last several years, I have been attending several meetups.  I have been attending the Google Developers Group (GDG) for about 7 years now (A little break here and there due to guitar lessons).  I also try and attend the UtahJS or .NET Group.  They are all pretty interesting and have unique attendees. The GDG is by far my favorite, because of the people and their interests.   Personally, I like going to learn new technology and to get out of my comfort zone by meeting new people.   You have to not take it personally when the introvert sitting next to you doesn’t want to talk. 

HackerX 

I think I received an invite in my email or found a link to an invite and signed up.  I thought it was something completely different, because I didn’t go research it.  It sounds like a bunch of people hacking away on computer stuff.  Fun right?  I didn’t find out what I was in for until a few days before the event.  Like it says it is a “Networking and recruiting event”.  It’s the perfect place for someone looking for a job!   The two events I’ve been to have had about 15 companies there looking for candidates. 

How it works

The companies are setup in 4 rows with about 4 to 5 companies in each row.   The candidates line up on one side and work their way down through each company.  “Speed” Interviews take place at each table with each company for 5 minutes.   It takes 20-25 minutes to go through each line and it is a 2-hour event, so you do a lot of waiting and you have to scramble at the end to talk to companies you missed out on.  The companies are just as tired as you are and they sometimes get a little grouchy if you are just trying to find out about the company and not looking for a job. haha 

Networking

If you are shy or came by yourself, you are going to be pretty bored waiting in line, especially if you didn’t rush to the front of the line.  You can do the math, and figure out how long you have to wait to see the first company if you are slow.  The best part of this event is networking with the introverts (“nerds”) in line with you.  

I’ve met some pretty awesome people in line.  There are all sorts of people in these lines.  Programmers find their jobs pretty interesting, and when we try and tell others about what we are doing, most audiences are bored.  For instance, if I tell my wife how I coded up a bunch of unit tests to test my code, she tries to act interested, but I can see her eyes glossing over.  When you talk to other nerds, they usually get it, or are truly interested.  It’s awesome and that is what makes it fun to talk to some of these people.   I also find it interesting to find out about them personally.   

Companies

This time around, I got inline and only had to wait 25 minutes before my first interview.  The company hosting the event had a guy going through the line talking to the candidates and taking resumes.  Of course, I didn’t bring any but we chatted for a bit. 

I went through the line and talked some pretty cool companies.  They have swag and various things to hand out.   It’s fun to learn about the companies and what they do.    I made it through another line of companies and talked to a few others at the end. 

I survived

It was a great experience.  The fear wasn’t as great this time, but I also had nothing to lose.  It would be a lot different if I was looking for a job.    I could write more about the people I met. I will post the most interesting individual I met here. Is name is Admiral Potato. I’m glad I talked to him. He has a lot of interesting interests. He can be found here on tumblr.com and on twitter.

A few companies that I think would be great to work for are: 

https://degreed.com/ – They allow you to work remote and work in C# and Javascript 

HireVue –  They use some interesting technology. They help companies make better hiring decisions. Video Conferencing Interviews? They use AI to predict information about the candidates going through the interview process.

Parakeet – Vacation Rental Home Automation. I’m interested in home automation. They work in Python, which is interesting. I’ve used it in a few projects and on some pet projects. It’s fun.