Hello, all!
I’m in beautiful, cloudy, foggy (and thus perfect) San Francisco, CA now, having just finished my second week at Six Apart. Life is, therefore, awesome. :-)
I stopped home for two weeks for various reasons first, and got to have a good time with Nick and Ryan, both friends from high school in Billings. Always good to see friends– and if the local brewery has a “kill the keg” night, so much the better!
My parents also had dinner at our house for the priests in our diocese, which, with thirteen or so priests, was a fun time. (You wouldn’t necessarily know, thinking of a bunch of Catholic priests with the Bishop, that they would be a good time– but it was.)
Anyway, after all that, it was at long last time to start my internship with 6A, which has, thus far, been a bloody blast. I’m working on David’s team, and working primarily with Simon on a project to do neat stuff. I’d probably best not go into the neat stuff at the moment, though I’ll talk with David and see what’s currently public. Certainly, when it’s released I’ll talk about it here. And I have an awesome workspace too!
Anyway, one of the interesting things about this new internship is that I’m working almost exclusively in Perl. Now, those who pay attention to nasty little things like my resume might notice that I don’t, strictly speaking, list Perl on there. Those of you who know me might also know that I don’t, strictly speaking, know Perl, and have traditionally avoided it in favor of Ruby. Well, all of these things are essentially true (I spent a year on Perl in high school, but that was until this spring the last time I’d used it; Information Retrieval was in Perl, but required very little of it to get by), but I’ve been working quite readily in it for the last two weeks, and I have to say, I really enjoy it. Even if Perl is somewhat incantation-prone (I had to explain to my mother what that was, which was amusing), CPAN makes actually using it in practice completely fantastic.
Besides merely CPAN being fantastic, there’s also the advantage that 6A’s people wrote a really large part of it. The guy who wrote XML::Atom::Stream sits immediately to my right, Simon’s written a fantastic number of modules (although I note he wrote a magic 8-ball for no reason that I can fathom), and in general, I’m told that over 2% of CPAN as a whole is donated by Six Apart. Which is staggering. So whenever I need help with something, I can ask nearly anyone, and they’re incredibly nice, as well as knowledgeable. And Simon, in particular (as he gets the brunt of them) is especially patient with my stupid looks.
So 6A is wonderful, I’m doing fun work, I’m living staggeringly close to work (and in the heart of the city; I live in SoMa, so I’m half a mile from work, and close enough to nearly anything to get there if I really want), and I’m just generally having a blast. And now, dear readers, I’m off to Pinole, CA for the evening, to have dinner with a friend of my parents.