August 2006 – Seemant Kulleen

Complex Processing, Contests, Jobs

Actually, looking back at the last 3 blog posts that I’ve made, I’ve pretty much given away who exactly I’ll be working for 🙂 In fact, one person out there guessed correctly.

Anyway, when I found the posting on the search engine, I sent in my resume with a cover letter, I stalked HR over on LinkedIn, and then finally I went into the place physically with another letter telling them why I was Seemant Kulleen. 7 interviews and a few weeks later, they asked me to work with them on a contract to come up with rules and judging guidelines for their contest. It’s actually a pretty sweet contest, with a ten thousand dollar cash prize at the end of it, with weekly one thousand dollar prizes before it.

I advised them on the rules and guidelines and indeed made two specific requests:

deflashify the front page
don’t launch browser windows on clicks, let everything live in the same window

For those of you who did go to that site before and after, you’ll notice the difference. I think it’s a lot more user friendly now, don’t you?

And now, it’s a few weeks later, and I’m joining their full time staff. I can not tell you how excited I am about this. I think the technology is fantastic, and I think the scope for growth and emergence of a standard for StreamSQL is tremendous. Let’s face it, people, the amounts of information that need to get processed are just growing. Fast. There are needs all over the place to process as much of it as fast as possible. And StreamBase, to me, seems to have the best position to do just that.

In the next episode, I’ll talk a little more about their technology and why I got all excited about it.

Conti-NEW-ation

Over the past 6 months or more, I’ve been thinking about where I’m headed, what I’m doing, and what I’d like to be doing. This is mainly career related, I guess. Comes from being in your thirties, maybe? Anyway, I looked back over the 5 odd years I’ve been with Gentoo, and I realised that what I enjoyed most about being with Gentoo was the developer relations stuff. Not the firing and all that crap, no. The stuff about building relationships. The stuff that involved scoping out new people and engaging them on different development issues. The stuff that essentially defines who I am, really. That is to say, the stuff that is my personality anyway.

And so I decided that that is where I must go. So I started reading through the more interesting and pertinent entries on reddit and of course, Guy Kawasaki’s blog amongst other things. Guy had a great post about evangelism in which he mentioned simplyhired, the vertical search engine. I tried it out and sure enough, there were/are more tech links than religious links.

Anyway, all that led me to find this one opportunity that is located right in town. It was perfect. They wanted an evangelist, and a Developer Relations Manager. How perfect is that? They may as well have advertised, “We’re looking for a Seemant Kulleen to do what he does.” Lemme tell you, I hopped to that opportunity.

Tomorrow: the conclusion. maybe.

Newness

I’ve been really really quiet lately. I’ve ignored Rach, I’ve ignored James, I’ve ignored my new old friend Gordana in the emails. And I’ve ignored the blog. I haven’t been bullskipping or anything like that, though. I’ve been fairly occupied and busy.

First off, Aimee and I are moving out of our current digs and into a new apartment. Our current landlords are great, but the apartment is a little small for us. So we’re looking for a bigger place. We were going to move into another complex, but the company there has questionable business practises (they employ the bait-and-switch technique very very effectively). I won’t link to them, as I don’t need to be sending traffic their way. So we looked instead at a privately owned place and we really liked it, so hopefully we’ll be able to move in there. With two days to go on this lease, the pressure’s high!

As you know, Daniel is now here for a year. He’ll be working at Brontes. Yes, that’s right, I did not say “with me” even though that has been the plan throughout. Actually, I resigned my position at Brontes on Thursday.

I highly enjoyed working with the team at Brontes. Ed is easily the best VP of Engineering I’ve ever worked under. Phil was a fantastic team leader, and Dave is a great guy to work with.
I made some good friends at Brontes: Joe, Barbara, Janos, Tong, Justin, Dave, Tom, Brandon, Adam (I’m missing a url for Joe, but I’ll fill it in later).

Suffice it to say, I’ll miss them all terribly. It’s bittersweet, this parting of ways. I’m going to a new exciting opportunity that I’ve wanted for a long long time, and I’d kind of reached the end of where I wanted to be in Software Engineering.

The new opportunity? Ha, I’ll keep you guessing until I post the next installment.