Category: General Convo

Back where it started.

Last year some time, I wrote a post about being giddily excited about working at a “dream” job in Portland.

A little over a year later, I find myself back in the Bay, back where my Silicon Valley career started.  I know for some people, working at a place in different disciplines can be a rewarding experience.  Finance, marketing, management, etc., probably thrive in corporate environments.  But when you are a creative engineer, who wants to create impact, get things done, solve challenging problems, and dream big, an overbearing corporate bureaucracy can crush you to a pulp.

I used to always take company culture for granted until I actually experienced one phenomenally bad (for me).  I have never spent so much time in meetings, had more meetings to quantify the previous meetings, spent more time wondering why JIRA tickets aren’t in the right column/state than solving issues for consumers, had code “reviews” more focused on the fact that a line is commented out instead of the performance of an algorithm or memory, getting more grief for being 10 seconds late to a standup instead of celebrating progress in the standup, being completely unaligned with product/design because “you are an engineer, not a designer”, ….

ARGH.

I must say, my manager at my previous company warned me.  He was worried about me going to a place that wasn’t focused solely on engineering given my talents.  I believe I owe him a bottle of wine or 4.

Needless to say, I am so happy to be back in an engineering focused environment.  One where I can actually focus on creating delightful user experiences, work with stunning colleagues aligned with the same goals, and getting things done.  Or as you would say, just doing it.

by mbu Categories: General Convo

New Job, New Focus

Well, it’s a little over the midway mark of 2014, and so much has changed in the first half of the year that it’s a complete blur.

I left my old job at Comcast for a great new role at Nike.  Much more consumer focus and I’ve been overwhelmed by awesomeness since my initial “running start.”

This also means I moved out of the Valley to Portland.  It’s funny, the experience and awe I’m getting in Portland is what I expected to receive in the fabled SV.  However, I don’t think I fit into the meritocracy equation just yet.  I’ll save that for another post when ready.

I also happen to find this area friggin gorgeous:

Photo Jul 26, 2 46 03 PM

 

Photo Jun 15, 12 29 51 PMI’ve also become a father, which has been the absolute most awesome experience ever.  I now get that whole “changed focus” thing people talk about.  This little girl is what it’s all about.

Ciao for now!

by mbu Categories: General Convo

Busy busy busy…

I definitely need to use this blog more, but I’ve been so busy the past few weeks I sometimes forget.  I should probably use Omnifocus to create a weekly “write a blog” task to corral some of my thoughts.  On any note, expect some updates:

[unordered_list style=”tick”]

  • getting a Leap Motion in the mail, finally, can’t wait to play with it
  • some upcoming changes, in multiple places
  • that update blog entry on organizing my daily tasks (thank you OmniGroup for making Omnifocus sync in the background)
  • updating mbu Creations to show off newer tech skills, long overdue
  • my ever evolving love of AngularJS, I also need to throw more books I’m reading up here, I wonder if GoodReads has a “social” embed…
  • attending Fluent Conf 2013, how did I not blog about this awesome conference?

[/unordered_list]

I think that’s it for now, hopefully I force myself to actually do it.

[UPDATE] there is a GoodReads social widget, and many other things I didn’t know it could do

 

by mbu Categories: General Convo

“Field Trip” fun…

I hate getting tripped up on silly interview questions, and I usually always rework them afterwards to see what brief moment of dumbness I was suffering during the interview.

On a “field trip” I took recently just for fun b/c of who it was, I had a problem presented like this, with a jsFiddle link to my current solution below.

GRRRR at how easy this was in thought after the interview… unamused

An interview question, to create a generic function that will give a path for cursor animation on a “search menu” that is displayed like:

A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Z

With a path given like “R!L!DDDRRRR!” when searching for “BAT”.

The problem assumptions were that you are always dealing with uppercase letters, no special characters, no spaces, etc. The beginning always starts at ‘A’. You are also given a dynamic width (to worry about), so your function can traverse any size menu. I got tripped up on this after getting barraged with a bunch of core JS language questions, so here’s a stab at the solution, minus some additional work to not traverse boundaries (outside the matrix or in places where there are no selectable letters).

http://jsfiddle.net/marshallbu/x9LwD/

by mbu Categories: Development, General ConvoTags: , ,

My new blog!

Since my old blog on mbu Creations is pretty much dead (and I’m working on revamping/upgrading that anyway), I think I’ll start a new one here.  I’ll keep it Tumblr-ish to keep it simple, but I won’t use Tumblr b/c well, I like having more control over my stuff and playing around.

I’ll do posts about general thoughts, things I’m tinkering with, and cool stuff I see around the internet (and in the real world).

This blog may not stay in this overly simplistic state.  Since I love messing around with anything web, I’ll more than likely use this as a test ground for something, be it cool CSS3, some HTML5 wizardry, or some funky JS, expect to see stuff change.

But in the spirit of rapid development, for now you just get quick and simple 🙂

by mbu Categories: General ConvoLeave a comment