Today I ended a stint with a startup. I ended my time at Aardvark as part of The Mechanical Zoo, and on Tuesday I start my time at Aardvark as part of Google.

And to think I could have been five months into my Master’s thesis, wrapping up the first month of my last semester at MIT.

I laughed out loud to myself today as I was waiting for the bus to take me home from the landlord’s office – I like this life.

Last week at around this time, I had just been told that my four roommates were moving out, and that I either had three weeks to fill four rooms or find a new place for myself. I got the rent down, two roommates stayed (plus the dog and the cat), a friend moved in, and we did the Craigslist dance to fill the last room. So now we’re good, with a little terror, stress, and hopefulness thrown in.

Two months ago at work (plus change), all of us piled into a room like we normally do for our end-of-the-week meeting. We were told that a term sheet had just been signed for us to be acquired by Google. Due diligence was done, HR negotiations occurred, and secrets were held for far too long from far too many people. We start at a different office in three days – and I’ll be bringing my personal little knot of excitement, apprehension, and curiosity.

In looking at life post-college, I was worried it’d be too routine – I thought that without “landmarks” to look forward to (winter break, summer vacation, finals, formals, trips), I might be bored and let time slip by without noticing. Well – now school looks methodical and predictable and the extraordinarily safe option.

What have I learned? That question will, hopefully, be answered thoroughly in the future in frequent intervals, but for now, a brief summary of my favorite learnings of the last several months:

• How to fix a flat on a bicycle (and a little about how the bicycle works to begin with)
• How to pick a health insurance plan to fit my needs
• What an acquisition looks like from the inside, and how many things could go wrong without a strong negotiator on your side
• French men are the most amusing members of a tech startup
• Socializing and quality alone time are most beneficial in a carefully maintained balance
• I still don’t take enough advantage of the opportunities around me! (Talks, meetups, people)
• Everything usually works out in the end

But I know I continue to be extraordinarily lucky. So I’m extraordinarily thankful – and am excited to see what else is in store!

Background
There are typically two ways to provide conditions for a database search via ActiveRecord. The first is find, which looks like this most of the time: User.find(:all, :conditions => {:first_name => 'Bob', :last_name => 'Smith'}, :limit => 5). find takes two arguments: {:all, :first, :last}, and an options hash (more here).

Or taking advantage of existing relationships, which basically ORM-magic away a one-to-many foreign-key relationship between tables, e.g. some_user.files would return an array of some_user’s File objects. So on and so forth.

And a third way, which I like and think cleans things up really nicely but is apparently not relevant to this bit of learning, is using named scopes (more references) – essentially, a way to wrap up any part of that options hash into what looks like a method on the model itself. An example involving a female named scope on our beloved Usermodel.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  named_scope :female, :conditions => {:gender => 'female'}
end

This allows you to not only get all female Users by calling User.female, but also allows combining of named scopes and the find method to minimize repetition and narrow the scope of a query. For example:
User.female.find(:all, :conditions => {:first_name => 'Christine'})

But wait!
In a script I was working on recently, I needed to loop through an array, and look something up at each step:

args = { :select => 'some_attr_id', :limit => 5 }
user_array.each do |user|
  if condition
    files = user.files.published.find(:all, args)
  else
    files = user.files.unpublished.find(:all, args)
  end
  ... < do stuff with the files >
end


Interestingly enough, as args passed through the loop each time, it picked up the parameters added by the user-files relationship! Meaning, the first time through the loop with User 1, the args hash looked like this:
{:include=>nil, :readonly=>nil,
:conditions=>"`files`.user_id = 1",
:joins=>nil, :select=>"some_attr_id", :group=>nil,
:offset=>nil, :limit=>5, :having=>nil, :order=>"files.created_at DESC"}

… which makes all sorts of sense, considering a query like user.files.published would just be a search across some files table with user_id and a published conditions, but how irritating that the args hash was 1) mutable at all, and 2) modified by being passed into the ActiveRecord query!,

There, I went and said it. Come and get me, I’m ready.

First, my definition of merit: the quality of a person’s contribution to a given environment for the role they have been commissioned to fill. This means hiring someone or rewarding someone based on what they can do, rather than what they represent. This means pressing every member of the team to step up and distinguish themselves in some way, rather than hiding in the back trying to blend into the background.

What about rewarding “hard workers”? People should be held accountable for the work they took on, and measured on the quality of the work they produce. In my environment – in a software development environment – if I’m lacking in a ‘knack for things,’ then I should go make up for it in any way I can find: reading books and blogs about my craft and industry, keeping on top of new and relevant changes, finding some way to fill some niche in my environment that has not yet been filled. A meritocracy is no place for complacency (and is apparently not very friendly for work-life balance, either) – everyone should be pushed to be better.

And what about encouraging destructive competition within a team? I think people are big enough to recognize that working together allows everyone to achieve more (I sound like an inspirational poster in a second-grade classroom). Helping others does not detract from the quality of your own contribution, and can often improve skills in other aspects of your life – ones that may become valuable in surprising ways.

More to come next week. Possibly not on the same subject. Can you stand the anticipation?

Note: I’ve formed a blogging support group (pair?) of sorts with a friend. So we’ll now find a way to meet up and/or blog together once a week, as we both recognize the value in: 1) writing down our thoughts in some structured way, 2) exposing our thoughts in a public forum, and 3) company while miserable. Or, at least, company while doing things that all too easily get pushed to next week’s to-do list. Hopefully practice will make perfect – and the quality of these posts will improve.

My ‘persona,’ via some crazy Media Lab grad student’s project – mostly (it seems) built from some snippet of text a friend wrote about me once, that seems to have since dropped off the internet.

Everyone likes pretty pictures. And most of the nerdy part of “everyone” likes graphs. And everyone definitely likes to learn about themselves – which is why I have so much fun exploring sites like

mint and me-trics – though it seems like other random takes on personal analytics (e.g. your.flowingdata – more details here) are popping up left and right as well.

All the pain in these applications, though, is the actual collection of the data – I think it’d be incredibly interesting (if extraordinarily creepy) if the information was captured for me, and all I had to do was consume it. Mint does a decent job, though it’s focused on the area of “personal data” that leaves the largest paper trail – so it still can’t tell me how many snack breaks I take while at my computer, or the average number of times I hit ’snooze’ before I get up on work days.

One of these days. Someone needs to build an accelerometer-equipped-image-recognition-machine-learningy widget to capture this data, and the software to process it :)

When should you sacrifice your own happiness / career development / intellectual stimulation for a product you’re excited about? Can you love the product and love the work? Or does loving the product just blind you to what you’re doing (and vice versa)?

I suppose it all boils down to how idealistic you are. Is this going to be the game-changer? Is there really nowhere else as, or almost as, exciting – but where you get to do interesting and challenging work? I usually think so – he may not. How does loyalty play into this – when are you obligated to stay with a company when you’re only being satisfied ideologically and not intellectually? (I say almost never – or that it’s only up to you to effect a change so that you are intellectually satisfied. But I’m only selectively idealistic, and incredibly selfish when it comes to my development.)

(p.s. – failed a bit with blogging once a week – but hopefully I can put something up soon about last weekend, which I spent at http://w2sf.startupweekend.org/ , and get back on track.)

There was a lot of satisfaction gotten in the ability to arbitrarily vary the size of my writing (and the number of times I wrote over the text) depending on how important things were, and having everything literally at my fingertips – I pulled the planner out, flipped it open, and everything I needed to know about the day was there. (I carried my computer around with me all the time, too, but it was typically a bit more of a hassle to open it and open the right application while talking to a friend in the middle of a crowded hallway.)

So I told myself that I’d never turn away from paper, that I’d be true to my roots (pretend that makes sense) and stick with the low-fi solution. Google Calendar never really appealed to me anyway (BIG SECRET: I really hate web apps sometimes), and I couldn’t handle having my calendar isolated inside a desktop application.

Then CalDAV support came to Google Calendar. And I got an iPhone (finally). And I graduated from school (double finally).

Can I just say – I used iCal to schedule seventy bazillion things in a six-week period during September and October last fall, and it was the easiest thing ever? And now that I can sync my calendar back to Google, and have it synced to my personal laptop, work laptop, and phone, and no longer spend lots of time with pen+paper… I think iCal has changed my life. [side note, if it wasn't already obvious: I'm a little OCD when it comes to evening / weekend plans / etc. But you all love me anyway.]

And the iCal interface is just so damn slick. None of this am-I-clicking-on-the-event-title-or-the-event-blob-to-move-the-time, no latency, no sorry-we-can’t-reach-the-server. I kind of wish double-clicking on an event would always allow me to edit right away, but in the same way I am lame enough to designate a taxi application my Favorite iPhone App Ever, I think iCal is coming very close to being one of my Favorite Mac Apps Ever. (But never the top – that honor will always be to Quicksilver.)

So in the end, that’s all this post is – an rhapsody over a Cocoa application. Yum.

But of course, the other side had its say as well – why, after all, shouldn’t these founders (who were looking for their third) hold any new teammates to standards as high as those that they themselves adhere? At least they list their expectations out for everyone to see, and hopefully avoid problems further down the road.

I’m torn – what is the right way to handle your pet project? I came into this summer wanting a ‘real startup experience,’ one with late nights and young techies bonding over their mutual misery labor. I complained about most people in my office heading home by 7, despite the smaller and otherwise generally ’startup-y’ feel. But then, faced with an opportunity to interview with a company that would expect more of me – expect me to make it the primary (only) focus in my life. And I don’t know, after all, if that’s what I want anymore.

I do want to care a lot about my work, be heavily emotionally and professionally invested in my product, and I wouldn’t mind it if everyone stuck around until 9 or 10 most nights… but I also appreciate having good friends outside of the company, and coming home to a roommate who cares more about my personal and emotional health than necessarily the health of my professional career.

In any case, I think this is going to be something I’ll be revisiting over and over again in the coming years, and something that will be heavily dependent on my professional focus. We’ll see what happens… and I’ll leave with a quote from a serial entrepreneur’s thoughts* on “Rules for Web Startups”:

#10: Be Balanced

What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work. Yes, high levels of commitment are crucial. And yes, crunch times come and sometimes require an inordinate, painful, apologies-to-the-SO amount of work. But it can’t be all the time. Nature requires balance for health—as do the bodies and minds who work for you and, without which, your company will be worthless. There is no better way to maintain balance and lower your stress that I’ve found than David Allen’s GTD process. Learn it. Live it. Make it a part of your company, and you’ll have a secret weapon.

* I actually hate the term ’serial entrepreneur.’ But I suppose Evan Williams has done pretty damn well for himself, and while I want to resent him for trashing this style of working, some part of me supposes he can’t be entirely wrong about everything.

I’d had the goal of going out and “doing the SF tech thing,” which to me at the time meant going to tech meetups and talks and meeting all sorts of cool people, and learning all sorts of cool things. Clearly, it didn’t happen.

So this year I’m trying something different. I’ve been much more proactive about getting out and talking to people – an interesting union of MIT friends in and out of the startup world, acquaintances with interesting backgrounds and experiences, and now and then the occasional stranger whose blog I find fascinating. (I hate the term networking. I prefer “being-enriched-by-the-wisdom-of”.)

While the first category of dinner partners definitely keeps me from feeling like I’m becoming a hermit, it’s the second two categories that are really pushing this summer and myself forward. I walk out of each of these dinners excited about everything I can and want to do, and even more convinced of the importance of constant self-improvement.

So. In the interest of committing myself to a number of things to achieve this goal, here goes the list:

• Blog at least once a week. I’m going to set an alarm on my iCal and commit to posting something interesting I learned, or thought, or accomplished.
• Read 1 ‘improvement’ book for every fun book. I’m in the middle of reading the LOTR series (for the first time!), and once I finish The Two Towers, until I finish a programming- or startup- or productivity-related book, I won’t let myself read Return of the King. Sniff.
• Keep working a few nights a week on my side project (more later) – I feel like I need at least one or two non-school- or work-related projects under my belt before I can respect myself as a hacker. Or, as a lower standard, any sort of programmer.
• Along that line of thought – be more disciplined about said project! Don’t just sit down and start coding. Plan out the project a little more (what do I want it to do? How should it behave?) and use version control / repo management tools as well.

(Side note: am still probably far too awkward to be going around meeting people and making these first impressions. Need to work on that, too – for now, just sadface)

(Last note: tonight’s conversation was described as “covering a lot of ground, both philosophically and academically.” Last week’s was described as “spontaneously deep conversation with strangers.” Good nights, both. :))

It’s a urinal. It’s a run-of-the-mill, yes-he-really-did, urinal. Made into art (and thus deserving of a spot inside the MoMA) simply by declaring it as such.

Of course, some amount of reputation was required to pull that off, and some other, more traditionally respectable work had to be done to acquire said reputation, but in the end – he’s able to pull something someone else technically “made,” and enhance it for his own purposes.

In the software world, there are those who seem to find it unthinkable to use off-the-shelf products to help with the engineering process in-house. While this attitude has certainly led to plenty of innovation (thank you for Cassandra, BigTable, etc), these special cases seem to really only be the extreme of the “there’s nothing out there just for us” attitude. And, I suppose, to play devil’s advocate, in their situation, off-the-shelf tools probably aren’t quite right for their incredibly unique case. (Or maybe they just had too many engineers and not enough game-changing projects?)

In any case. One of the things I’m getting used to at Aardvark – and starting to really appreciate the wisdom of – is utilizing existing and established solutions when necessary. We need bug/ticket tracking? There’re tons of solutions out there – done! Better log analysis? Found, installed, done. System and cluster monitoring? Perhaps not entirely ideal, but good enough – done. It lets the team know what we need to know, and gets us free to focus on what we really need to get done – the core product and infrastructure.

I joined a conversation this past weekend with a couple of people just starting to get their startup off the ground, and they were embroiled in a CouchDB vs MySQL debate – are relational databases really outdated, or are document-based databases just overhyped? Which is the better to start with for their startup? My answer – whichever makes your actual job easier. There are lots of cool toys out there, but there’s a careful risk vs. reward tradeoff you have to make – and when you’re focused on startups, can you really afford an awkward risk down the line with your data or architecture?

I suppose this is a long, elaborate rephrasing of “Worse is Better.” Take shortcuts and the quick, easy, established route to change the world, first – then figure out how to make it happen better.

This summer, I’ve been exposed to more down time than I’ve ever been used to – part of it has been due to the necessary delays that come along with the joys of public transportation, some of it is from the copious amounts of walking I’ve been doing (to the grocery store, to and from work, to BART), and some of it is late at night after I get home. (Digression: that down time I’m not OK with – email me to hang out if you’re free!) And in this down time (actually, often when I should be focusing on other things), little thought bubbles pop up around my head:

I wonder what the weather is like in Boston, and (when it’s cold and windy here in SF) how much I actually appreciate seasons on the East Coast,

I wonder why there are so many people scattering so many elementary grammar and spelling mistakes in their emails (“Lot’s”? Come on.),

I wonder about companies and focus and HR people and women (more blog posts along the way),

I wonder about relationships and priorities and what other people are doing this summer.

So somehow, in my mind and for this blog, I’ve been queuing up quite the list of things to think about and blog about. I haven’t, however, found the impetus or time (because I’m thinking up too many other thoughts? :)) to actually do so. So here’s a promise – there are interesting things to come.