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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.