A new adventure

(This is a long overdue post).

I remember when I used to have homework, then for a few years in college I had no work. Last month, after a 4 month vacation, I began ‘grown-up life’. Unlike other giant leaps, mine didn’t start with a small step. It started with a 13000km trip to Silicon Valley.

I am very happy to have started a new (and first!) job at Mozilla. After last year’s incredible internship, it feels just like home. I have joined the Platform team and begun working on some upcoming APIs which I’ll blog about as they shape up. Being able to work with extremely talented people and to work on a class of problems that very few engineers in the world get to toy with is very satisfying. It does come with its share of problems, like having to get to grips with a decade old, sparsely documented code-base, but damn, when that code executes correctly after hundreds of iterations, there are so many snacks to celebrate with :) But seriously, joining Mozilla at a time when Web architecture and APIs are undergoing massive upgrades, and we get ready to launch a mobile operating system, is very exciting. Oh and employees get to be guinea pigs test it.

Couple this with managing your whole life for the first time. No longer do parents or the dorm automatically pay electricity bills or ensure your Internet connection is working. House hunting, paying rents, moving, buying furniture, managing finances, cooking, everything has been a first. Smooth for the most part, but far too salty sometimes.

Couple this with the constant technical, cultural and recreational melange that is the Bay Area and the regret about not having enough hours in the day and it’s overwhelming. In a month I’ve discovered rock climbing, seen a trapeze act, won second prize in a hackathon and gone to various meetups. Every day when I snuggle into my comforter-sleeping bag combo (you see, I still haven’t bought a mattress) get into bed, I’m exhausted, but every day is also a very satisfying adventure. I can’t wait to have more of them.

P. S. The libuv book has suffered due to this, but I’ll get back to it soon.