Today is the longest day of my life, and yet...I'm writing.
Not that today is a bad day - far from it. It's just that I'm running on pure adrenaline at this point. Today consisted of a painful 3:00 AM wakeup call and farewell to the love of my life, followed by a 90-minute drive to the airport and a 4 hour flight to the West Coast which I spent crunched between two passengers larger and heavier than myself. I should be really, really angry right now, but I'm not. I'm currently sipping an iced chai latte in a coffee shop in San Francisco, California, just a few blocks away from the place that will become my home for the next few weeks.
So what's a semi-small-town coder like myself doing in the largest tech hub in the world? Well, the answer is complicated. To make the story short and sweet, I'm going to be performing web development duties on a contract with one of the largest video gaming sites in the world. Truth be told I've surprised myself a lot over the last few years, ending up working with people and companies that I never could have imagined. A lot of these relationships I've built relate to what I've always wanted to do when growing up. I suppose that's a good thing, then, because I'm a big kid at heart. I'm here in San Francisco to kick ass, take names, code like hell, and (if time allows, of course), play a ton of video games.
The title of this blog is read "Senmon Baka Saisei", and it refers symbolically to expanding one's horizons and shedding corporate mandates. It refers to the outdated methodologies that many large companies use to keep their software engineers in check. Many times, large companies have explicit clauses in their contracts preventing engineers from exploring technologies on their own, contributing to open source software, or taking credit for any sort of work accomplished outside of the workplace. For those engineers working in very specific areas of technology, these policies are often equivalent to career suicide. Because of one of these policies - along with my own attitude, which I admit can be stubborn at times - I ended up learning far more after leaving a large corporate job than I did while actually working one. I'm not saying I'll never return to a large corporate workplace, as it had its own set of advantages that smaller companies do not enjoy - but right now I'm still hungry for knowledge, and this opportunity in San Francisco is primed to deliver just that.
San Francisco is a really interesting place. The city is vibrant and full of life. Economic differences between residents are more pronounced than any place I've ever seen, but they aren't hostile to one another - at least not explicitly, as far as I can tell. Given the fact I was hauling around a bunch of luggage I was expecting to get harassed as I tried to find my way around, but it didn't happen. I feel really small here - just like a musician who just moved to the big city to fulfill a life-long dream to score a record contract.
San Francisco is my New York, and my laptop is my guitar. This is my story.
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