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Amyra is not a baby anymore

My daughter Amyra has grown so much since she was born. As my wife says “she is not our baby anymore” as of now she is 15 months old.

Opportunistic photo that makes her look like our little mode.

She has been fun and intrepid but most of all she has been hard headed. If she wants something she will definitely wants it. She has been good on trowing herself back and giving us scares of falling over but luckily there has been nothing that scary. Although a couple of time she hit herself when she throws herself back and we can’t act faster than she does

In terms of health Amyra has been sick couple of days back with the hand and mouth disease and lately an ear infection where we had issues treating it but I’ll talk about this later.

She still hates the car seat every now and then and has become harder and harder trying to get her in it as she has become stronger and stronger. I forgot to mention she is a strong baby specially for her size it is hard to control when she wants to scape from our arms.

Here she is after playing in her pool on our deck

It is still amazing show she has grown but as we go through our journey with her we do see some challenges. Currently we have discovered that she has three allergies egg, peanut & penicillin. At some point it was showing milk positive allergy to milk but that thankfully has gone away.

We discovered first of these allergies when we have her try peanut butter and after that we had a scare because it was reacting fast according the on-call nurse. So yes we call the clinic right away and gave her Benadryl to alleviate her red rash on the neck no scarier than that.

The allergy to penicillin was a different story. When she got sick with an ear infection the doctor prescribed her Amoxicillin which is a common antibiotic derived from penicillin and that cause a big reaction on her face giving her a rash all over her cheeks although the doctor though it was a combination of that and some eczema. But no matter what it was it was not pretty. Yes she was cute at the beginning with pink cheeks but then those became more reddish that even the made the daycare staff worry about her. Thankfully we got a doctor’s letter for this situation thanks to my wife for been extra careful on handling the situation.

We are loving the time with out daughter and enjoy her laughs and walking towards us. I could not ask for anything better in our lives and cherish each moment good or not so good that Amyra has to offer with a lot of love.

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One year @ SAP

It’s been a great year working with awesome people, awesome managers and I can easily say that this is the best place I’ve ever worked.

When I was looking for a new position I was mostly looking mostly for the right culture fit then good location & similar pay.

There were tons of companies interested in hiring me. I even started filling my whiteboard with the list of companies that were in the pipe and in which interview stage I was. At some point I had almost 20 in flight.

Although there was a lot of interest it was very challenging because most positions were either a long commute to downtown Seattle, others were really awful places to work and there were some that just could not wrap their minds around my previous/expected salary against their non-competitive budget.

I even laugh at one of the recruiters when she told me that my salary was a red flag when I had like 8+ other companies which had no problem with it.

Most of the people I talked were just really bad interviewers.

I was about to give up so I started considering the bad culture of Uber, long commute to Facebook or other smaller companies in downtown Seattle which had a startup culture. I even started considering giving up on the culture and try the forbidden Microsoft which is a no-no in culture.

Most interviews were a bust except Facebook which I decided not move forward once I got the offer from SAP is in downtown Bellevue.

Then I was contacted by an SAP recruiter and I was very hesitant about another political Microsoft like culture so I put them on the back burner. But I did agreed to a phone call with hiring manager just to respectfully let him know that I would not move forward because of the culture fit but when I asked questions he gave me a 180 degree view of what I though the culture would be and so far it has been true.

I was convinced once I talked to the team and told me that it’s a brand new team mostly people convinced from startups to start a project with great innovation inside the company and operate like a startup.

It’s the best of everything worlds team awesome culture, great commute to downtown Bellevue and I even got a decent bump on compensation so I could not be happier.

We’ve grown fast so I’m trying to keep a watchful eye for the politics rolling in.

So far has been a really awesome with the best people I’ve ever worked.

Fun note

As mentioned before looking for new position some people were just really bad interviewers.

On one instance after the full loop I did not get hired just because I have not done enough Node.JS.

Been a senior software engineer I just though that “these guys were just amateurs because a language is a tool but the concepts remain the same”. 

For instance I  started working @ SAP using Node.JS and on my first project my manager told me that he is a good developer but my code was on another level and my response was: “Dude this is the first time I code in TypeScript for Node!”

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Started working for DS-IQ as Sr Software Engineer

I have not posted anything in a while but I think this is a good time to do it. As I have not mentioned before I got a job at this company call DS-IQ. They are an awesome company that have the intelligent marketing engine that Walt-Mart uses.
I love because it has tons of different technologies that I’m really interested in working like WebServices, MVC website, Linux, Hadoop and Data Science so it pure technical heaven for opportunities which I want to grow my career.

Besides that:
– It was in a nice location in EastGate.
– Better tittle than in Microsoft now I’m a Sr Software Engineer
– Better pay as I get 25K more than before!!! althogh it is laking on benefits and there is no bonus.
– I was particularly surprised that people are really really nice!!!! Which is an awesome plus!

So it was a no brainer to join and it is very pleasant that it is an awesome environment.

The things I miss is better benefits like ergonomic accomodations, having my own office and other benefits that a big company like Microsoft can provide.

But trust me I won’t change this company for Microsoft anytime soon as the teams I’ve worked in Microsoft just threw me done and make my life miserable.

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Thinking about helping others with their financial goals

I’ve been managing my personal finance for a while and I’ve been really good at it. So I’ve been thinking on helping others with their financial goals, by giving basic advise like making sure to pay their debt on the higher interest first. Making sure that they can see what actually they are spending on a monthly and yearly basis.

I personally like helping others but never found the right channel to do it for the masses I think opening a new blog or page in facebook would do the trick.

Maybe I’ll write a book! Anyway just thinking her in my personal blog to just find ways to help others and have a higher purpose in life.

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Playing with ASP.NET MVC with AngularJS

I used to do Web Development in ASP.NET WebForms and WebControls. I was pretty good at it and I avoided MVC for a while as I saw that it was pointless.

But after seen the job requirements for web development I have surrender to the idea that I’m just a backend developer as no one wants to hire smart people to learn the skill set.

So now I’m starting my own School Powers project integrating these “new” MVC technologies. I started playing with it and making it work but I still see it pointless it is removing the ideal case of rapid prototyping. Seems that it is just a practice to make managers happy that the website logic can be tested easier and workloads can be separate as well. I still disagree with the idea as I’ve been always creating a model to bind to the UI but now I don’t get the ability to use an user interface to design the site, I just get plain HTML to do it and the workload becomes a pain.

Maybe is just my resistance to it that is making it harder or it is a very steep learning curve.

AngularJS it is starting to grow on me. I’m not an avid JavaScript developer but seems that I will be getting closer with AngularJS. The bad part is that it seems that it is a steep learning curve.

I hope to have at least a couple of things ready using MVC and AngularJS before I find a new place of work.

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Finally started my School Powers project!

These couple of days I’ve been working seriously on my School Powers project as well playing around with ASP.NET MVC with AngularJS.

School Powers has been an idea that I had for years and I wanted to develop, I actually bought the domain 7+ years ago that is how far I’ve been with the idea.

 

I would say I really don’t like MVC seems pointless over-complication seems that just makes the site more “testable” so it is not ideal for rapid prototyping, but the MVC skill is on demand so to I need to get familiar in order to work in Web Development.

Agular JS I actually worked a little bit and seems complicated but it is starting to grow on me.

Well back to School Powers.

I initially started in my home office whiteboard, was a while ago when I was preparing for my interviews and wanted to play with the idea of starting to write this project that I had in the back burner for years.

  • I started in the white board by writing scenarios that I wanted to cover but I let those aside for a while.
  • Once I decided to go for it I though that it is a good exercise to practice my design skills.
  • I started doing the database schema on the whiteboard.
  • The the database design was pushed to a local Microsoft SQL instance. Now thinking about it maybe I should look into MySQL instead.
  • I think I’ve a bit ahead of myself trying to design the entire thing, but I should just do it by pieces.
    • For example:
      • I should start by doing the Username & Password validation and then move to the rest of the features.
      • Maybe I should have the feature first then based on the scenarios.
      • Well it is a design exercise so I’ll give it my best shot of figuring out what is the best approach

Anyway here I’m happy that I’m working on my own thing and at the same time learning new skills.

I’m thinking on putting my project in GitHub but then it will be public. I’ll give it some though.

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New Opportunities

After leaving Microsoft as planed I started preparing for my interviews this last Month.

Today I interviewed with Facebook and I notice that everything went well as I figured out how to solve the problem, BUT I just did not had enough time to complete testing and fixing the bugs on my code even though  I did had the right approach. Just the writing the actual code did go overtime so we had to sort of hash the end of it to solve the bugs.

So I discovered that the worst thing I do on interviews is that I talk to much.

Seriously I say that because I talked to much at the beginning of the interviews then I don’t get enough time to solve the problems.

This happened to me while interviewing with LinkedIn as at the end I did not had enough time to figure out the second problem plus I discovered that need more training doing recursive algorithms.

Well long story short today I got an email from the LinkedIn recruiter stating: “The engineering hiring panel decided not to move forward with your candidacy”.  So basically I did not get to a second interview because talking to much.

This is really bad news, it means that the same could happen with Facebook!

At least in Facebook I had enough time to figure the idea of how to solve it just did not get enough time to test it and figure out the bugs.

Hopefully I will get a chance to do the full loop, but there is a definite worry.

 

At least LinkedIn was not my first choice as I did not had the culture that I wanted, I just wanted the opportunity to move to California and that is no longer an option.

The worst thing is that I did knew that I was talking to much as I’m an extrovert guy, but I was so engage in conversation that just did not watch myself on time.

Facebook is my culture fit as lets me innovate.

I really hope that I get hire in Facebook, so I can apply myself towards short talking and more Recursion preparation in the full loop.

Otherwise I will have to lineup some contract work which bring good money but does not provide the culture that I’m driven to have.