After a record-short 333 days, my tenure at Buildium is over.

Last winter’s ludicrous snowfall finally put the nail in the coffin of continuing to live in Boston. But it also became clear that moving out of Boston wasn’t compatible with my employer’s plan to centralize their personnel locally and stop supporting people working remotely. I had hoped to stay on while relocating, because it would obviate the need for any Pittsburgh job hunt, but given our opposing directions it was inevitable that Buildium and I would have to part ways when I left town.

Buildium logo

In the past, when I left a company (as opposed to being laid off or having the company move out from underneath me), I’ve always been fortunate to move on to something better. In 1995 I jumped from a failing medical software company to a rapidly-growing nascent internet consultancy, which was without question the best career move I’ve ever made. And in 2006 I left a tiny professional services contractor to return to large-scale internet consulting just as open-source and “Web 2.0” were taking off. It would be awesome if this departure leads to similar improvement, especially given the way front-end coding has transformed over the past couple years.

The unfortunate aspect of my departure is that I’ve been really happy at Buildium and would prefer to stay. While property management software isn’t the noblest purpose in the world, it was a huge improvement over my previous job spamming students and funneling leads to student loan companies. I greatly improved my technical skills, the hours and stress level were uncommonly humane, and the pay was good.

And the people were awesome. Buildium’s leadership team has its share of challenges, but it’s been very satisfying to once again work with and for people with a healthy dose of both intelligence and common sense—as might be expected from a company founded by and stocked with fellow Sapient alumni.

But more than that, what makes Buildium unique—both among my former employers as well as across the industry—is that its staff are enthusiastic and uncommonly personable and caring, without being contrived or dogmatic about it. From top to bottom, the positive attitude of their team members sets Buildium apart from other places I’ve worked.

That’s a big reason why I would have preferred to stay on as one of several remote workers on their engineering team. Sadly, the commitment to centralizing operations in Boston made that impossible. And after 25 years here, my life is taking me in a different direction.

Although that didn’t stop me from feeling a certain righteous amusement when HR asked the employees to vote on what Buildium could do become a better place to work. Someone added “Work remotely” to the list of ideas, and sixteen people put their checkmark-votes next to that item: more than twice as many as any other suggestion!

And if that input had been put into practice, I would still be working there, rather than going my own way and diving back into the job market in an unfamiliar town.

Slow Mover

Aug. 21st, 2015 10:01 pm

Two weeks ago, work’s new office opened. Worth blogging about? As much as anything, I guess!

Buildium had clearly outgrown our old office on Chauncy Street in Downtown Crotching, and on August 10th we opened a new, more spacious office on Franklin Street in Post Orifice Square. Actually, it’s the old State Street Bank building, which used to be one of the most prominent features of the Boston skyline until they removed the logotype sign from the top.

The most noteworthy thing to mention was our move timeline. As originally planned, my department packed up on Tuesday July 28th, expecting to work from our homes for four days before taking up residence in the new place on Tuesday August 4th. But as the week wore on, we learned things weren’t quite ready for us; so we were told to hold off a day, until Wednesday. Then no, it would be Thursday. No, let’s try for next Monday… In the end, we worked from home for eight days (12 calendar days) before opening the office two weeks ago.

Working from home for a week and a half was okay, and was a good trial run for potentially working remotely full-time, if that winds up being a possibility. I was actually more productive than I had anticipated, to the extent that I didn’t get very much personal stuff done at home. But collaborative work still required more planning and effort.

The biggest thing I’ll miss about the old office is that the windows opened: a treat that I’ve enjoyed only a couple times during my professional career, despite working at scores of client sites. It also helped that my desk was in a corner with windows on two sides, but that wasn’t anywhere near as significant as access to fresh air.

At the new office, I’m at one end of a double-row of ten desks, which is tolerable, but pretty dehumanizing: far worse than being in a cube farm. The nearest set of windows is about 50 feet away, and the fluorescents are on all the time. On the plus side, I’m close to the hidden back exit and bathrooms; but I’m far away from the foosball tables.

Our building—and Post Office Square in general—is much more businessy. For neighbors, we’ve exchanged Chauncy Street’s skungey ESL students and affordable housing tenants for self-important real estate dealmakers and financiers in suits. In a stunning display of righteousness, the other tenant on our floor—a local branch of real estate brokers Cushman & Wakefield—came over and requested that our HR department prohibit our employees from wearing tee shirts at work! Arrogant much?

In more pleasant topics, although I haven’t really scoped out the food choices, one benefit is that the new building is only a block away from Lanta, the Thai restaurant I used to walk a mile to visit once a week. Hopefully there’ll be a burrito place that can replace Herrera’s, because that’s rather a long walk just for a burrito.

My commute has gone from about a mile to a mile and a half, which is still walkable, but I may start biking in more. There is a bike room down in the sub-basement, which isn’t great, but it’s functional. However, getting between our office and the sub-basement is a veritable ratmaze of public and freight elevators, hidden stairwells, and Orwellian linoleum-and-fluorescents corridors, and navigating it chews up all the time I’d save by biking home rather than walking.

Conveniently, last Wednesday was both my weekly Green Line Velo group ride as well as a “bike breakfast” day (a rather tepid affair put on by some local cycling organization), so I rode in for the first time. My commuting route—which I extend to a completely-unnecessary 10 miles—is identical to my commute to our old building except right at the end I jump one street over, taking Seaport instead of Summer.

So that’s my take on Buildium’s new digs.

Backson

Jul. 4th, 2015 03:56 pm

Because they only last 45 minutes, summers in New England can get pretty busy. Take the past couple weeks, for example. Here’s a day-by-day account of the past 14 days…

17 Wed
After a regular day at work, I received a call from someone interested in buying my condo unrenovated. That was about an hour before my contractor arrived to sign the contract for my bathroom renovation, which I then put off until I had a chance to speak to my real estate agent. And an hour after that, my best friend Inna arrived from Pittsburgh to begin a two-day visit.
18 Thu
Spent the day with Inna, but also met with the real estate agent to determine whether to proceed with my renovations or not.
19 Fri
Spent the morning with Inna before seeing her off on a flight to Germany. Spent the remains of the day packing for the next day’s bike ride.
20 Sat
Spent about nine hours in the saddle, biking 130 miles from Boston to Provincetown in my annual Outriders ride (writeup). Kicked around Provincetown until my late-night ferry back to Boston.
21 Sun
One precious day of rest, which was badly needed, since I seemed to be developing a sore throat.
22 Mon
After a regular work day, ran home to change into fancy clothes for an evening cruise of Boston Harbor to celebrate my employer’s 10,000th client. Very tired from too much socializing, biking, and lack of sleep!
23 Tue
You might call this a day of rest, except that it included work, laundry, a grocery run, and packing for another bike ride. And my sore throat was getting worse…
24 Wed
I biked in to work, and after work biked out to Waltham to pick up my registration packet for the weekend’s MS Ride.
25 Thu
Led a contingent of co-workers on a 70-mile bike ride up to Ipswitch and back for Buildium’s beach day summer event (writeup). More energy-sapping socializing! Kinda scraped myself up playing beach soccer.
26 Fri
A regular work day, but it included a free, private ice cream truck as a reward for being nominated in Boston’s best places to work survey!
27 Sat
Woke up at 4am to ride down to UMass Boston, and then another 100 miles to Bourne with friends from Buildium for the Cape Cod Getaway MS Ride (writeup). Stayed overnight in a Mass Maritime Academy dorm. (Note that I said “stayed overnight”, not “slept”.)
28 Sun
Sunday’s 75-mile MS Ride to Provincetown was cancelled due to weather: 55 mph winds, record cold, and record rainfall. We got soaked to the bone just getting from the cafeteria to the bus outside that would bring us back to Boston, and I got completely and utterly drenched after riding 4 wind-blown miles from UMass back to my condo. Yes, I still had my cold, too.
29 Mon
After working half a day despite illness, Inna flew back into town for another quick visit on her return trip from Europe.
30 Tue
Took half a day to see Inna back to the airport and on a flight home, and then enjoyed a surprise four and a half hour planning meeting due to shifting priorities at work that promise to make the next few months extremely challenging.

Knowing how insane June was going to be, I intentionally left this Fourth of July holiday weekend COMPLETELY open. So now I’m enjoying napping throughout the day, recovering from my cold, being completely anti-social, and writing up some blog entries to share what’s been going on.

It was nice to have interesting things to do in June, but I’m very happy to have this brief, quiet respite at the moment.

Who is the best foosball player in the company? This question has followed me through three of my last four employers, ever since I spun my first rod back in 2005.

I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to provide my coworkers with an answer to that eternal question, through FRank, the foosball ranking site I first developed nearly ten years ago. If you’re interested in ancient history and FRank’s inception, you can read more about it in this blogpost from 2007.

A year after I wrote that post I left Optaros, and my foosball ranking site languished, nearly forgotten. After wasting a couple years at a sad little company that didn’t even have a foosball table, last December I found myself interviewing at Buildium, whose kitchen included not one but *two* tables! During the interview process, I made sure they knew that hiring me meant access to my foosball ranking site, too!

Naturally, after years of neglect, I wanted to clean things up a bit (and size up the foosball culture) before I opened the app up for public use. So over the past few weeks I put a few hours into a bit of a refresh. And I’m pretty happy with the result.

Here are some of my favorite new features:

Foosball table

First, I rewrote everything using Google’s Angular javascript framework. For non-techies that probably doesn’t mean much, but it’s cool new technology that I really need to learn anyways. And it allows me to easily do some cool things like providing predictions of the score of any given combination of players.

I also made it a single-page app, which means everything happens on one page, kinda like Google Docs, without any page refreshes because all that data comes from behind-the-scenes API calls. It feels more like a native application and less like a website.

Next, I redesigned it to have a mobile-friendly user interface, so that it would be simple and easy to use, whether you were on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. It even has its own little icon so that its bookmark looks just like any other app on your phone.

I even added the Web Speech API, which allows anyone using Google Chrome to enter a set of players by saying aloud something like “Jordan and Matt versus Dave Owens and Ben”, rather than having to manually navigate four cumbersome drop-down lists.

In the first two weeks of public availability, the adoption rate among players here has been great. This week I added a user-suggested feature: when someone logs a game, a message is automatically broadcast in our company’s foosball chat room (from “FRank Foosbot”), summarizing the result for all to see.

Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with how I was able to bring it up to date with how the web has evolved. It’s been a fun coding exercise, while contributing something unique to the company culture.

The biggest irony, however, was when Buildium hired my old friend Dave. I worked with him at both Sapient as well as Business Innovation, where he wrote (and then lost the source code for) his original Microsoft .Net foosball application that inspired me to create FRank. And years later, we’re working together again, and I get to show him what his old foosball ranking system has evolved into.

Enough stuff has happened in the past two months that it’s time for another aggregated life update.

Health issues remain inconclusive. After surgery in December, I had another attack of abdominal pain around New Years, which prompted another visit to the GP and a followup CT scan. That detected nothing, so I’m back to eating a regular diet and taking a wait-and-see attitude. Meanwhile, I’ve taken the lull in proceedings to catch up on dental and eye stuff, get a new pair of glasses, and a haircut.

Watched the Super Bowl, since the Patriots were in it, and it proved to be a remarkably exciting finish. Whatever. I would rather the Revs have won.

Last month I observed the one-year anniversary of my kyūdō First Shot training. I also started learning hitote, which is a more involved form involving two shots and repeated kneeling down and getting up. It’s nice to have something new to think about and work on.

In January I made a long-overdue four-day visit to Pittsburgh, which was extended by two days due to Boston’s first huge blizzard disabling air travel. Pittsburgh wasn’t very eventful, but it was a nice visit.

Since then, Boston has been pounded by huge snowstorms one after another, causing daily gridlock, forcing the transit system to shut down for days at a time, and setting numerous all-time records for snowfall, wind, and cold temperatures. A sampler:

  • For the entire winter up to January 23rd, Boston only had 5.5 inches of snow. In the next three weeks, it would receive an additional 90.2 inches (over 7.5 feet)!
  • February broke the record for Boston’s snowiest month ever, and did it by the 15th of the month!
  • By the end of the month, Boston had received five and a half feet of snow, beating the old record by 50 percent.
  • Boston set the 4th snowiest 30-day period anywhere in American National Weather Service records.
  • It snowed on 20 out of 28 days in February.
  • Boston set its all-time record for greatest snow depth.
  • This has been Boston’s 2nd snowiest winter on record. We’re less than two inches away from setting a new record (9 feet of snowfall), and we typically get about 8 inches of snow in March.
  • An avalanche off the roof of a skating rink hit four people, burying one. Two of them had to be hospitalized.
  • Boston cyclists built a 40-foot-long “underground” snow tunnel for commuting.
  • In many cases, cars were so deeply buried that owners had to put cardboard signs on them warn snow removers not to plow there.
  • An MBTA ferry and a Coast Guard icebreaker both got stuck in the sea ice in Massachusetts Bay.
  • Blocks of sea ice more than 7 feet thick came ashore on Cape Cod.
  • During one of our blizzards, Mt. Washington recorded the highest wind gust it has experienced in seven years.
  • February was 12.7 degrees below normal temperature.
  • It was the 2nd coldest February on record
  • For the whole month of February, we only had one day where we reached the day’s average high temperature.
  • At 15 days, we fell one day short of setting the record for consecutive days below freezing.
  • At 43 days, this was the longest consecutive time that Boston has ever stayed below 40 degrees, beating the old record by 8 days.

I could go on at length, but it’s an experience that honestly is best forgotten. I will say that it has unambiguously strengthened my commitment to moving to a warmer climate.

Out of utter frustration with the weather, I set up and started using the indoor cycling trainer, which I didn’t use at all last winter. As a result, I’ve already earned $66 as a paid cyclist, thanks to my company’s health benefit…

And I’ve now been working at Buildium for 100 days. The money is happy, the atmosphere is friendly, and we’ve added yet another old Sapient (and Business Innovation) coworker. I’ve been doing a lot of Javascript, Knockout, and Angular work, which is enjoyable (mostly).

Thanks to the snow, I worked from home several days, and enjoyed an empty office when I made the trek in. I’ve made three satisfying lunch expeditions for Thai from Lanta (formerly Rock Sugar). Our company recently announced our first acquisition, and it looks like the two businesses complement each other well. And I hope to hear news about improvements to our office space.

While there, I’ve enjoyed rebuilding my foosball skills, and have been alpha testing a new version of my foosball ranking site. I’ve optimized the UI for mobile devices, made it more interactive by porting it to the Angular Javascript framework, and made it behave more like a single-page application by burying all the data requests in behind-the-scenes JSON AJAX requests. After talking it up to my coworkers, I’m excited to open it up to general use! I’ve even played with the Web Speech API and hope to incorporate speech recognition into it soon.

Otherwise I think things are quiet. Like that thrice-damned groundhog, I’ve been holed-up, waiting for the mountains of snow to recede before venturing back out into the world.

Before I talk about my new gig, a brief word about the old one. I spent nearly three years working for a student loan marketing company called Edvisors. In 2013, a company from Las Vegas bought them out and phased out our Boston headquarters.

The title of this article is a bit of an inside joke. Edvisors had a lot of turnover, and people came to appreciate the euphemism “Transitions”, which was the usual subject line on the emails announcing another coworker’s departure.

Edvisors was pretty political and had (insert superlative adverb) outdated technology. On the other hand, I’m very proud of what my team accomplished. We built a good frontend team from scratch, set up vastly improved processes and standards, and dragged the company kicking and screaming toward 21th century technology and design practices.

Even after a six-month soft landing at Edvisors, I still took some additional time off. In the past year or two, the frontend technology field has advanced radically, most particularly in client-side Javascript frameworks like Angular and Ember. At the same time, I started hemorrhaging money thanks to repairs and medical bills from two big bike crashes, diagnosing and removing a faulty gall bladder, big vet bills after the sudden death of my pet cat, and renovations to my condo. Between rapidly changing technologies and a shrinking nest egg, it was time to get back to work in earnest.

Once I got serious about the job hunt, it took just a month. I only sent out four resumes, and got responses from three of them. I’m immensely thankful to have so many helpful local connections and a nicely loaded resume. It was also nice to get through the always-stressful tech interview; you never know what questions (or coding exercises) you’ll be asked, and despite having lots of experience, one always wonders how one’s tech chops will measure up against other candidates.

So two weeks ago I joined a company called Buildium, which was founded by a couple old coworkers from my Sapient days. Once upon a time, they bought and started renting a couple apartments, but discovered there was no good software to help them manage their properties and renters and contractors and taxes… So they built it themselves and started selling it, and they’ve built a thriving business around it.

Buildium logo

I’m a senior member of their growing frontend team, and I’m really excited that they are transitioning to the Angular framework, which is a tremendous opportunity for me. They also have a strong UX design practice, which is a real differentiator for a small product company.

In addition to the two founders, Buildium employs four other old friends from my Sapient days: one’s still a working designer, and the others each manage Buildium’s technology, design, and product management practices. And there’s at least one more old friend starting in January.

Even though it’s been about twelve years since we worked together, I was surprised by the things my old friends remembered about me. One of them recalled that I was the kind of person who absolutely didn’t want to climb to senior/leadership positions, and another fondly remembered the “Snackland” website I built (in ASP & ADO!) to help teams vote for what snacks they wanted to spend their collective money on.

Having kept in touch with some of those guys, I recognized the company name when a developer position at Buildium appeared in my RSS feed of job listings one day. I reached out to one of those buddies, and the rest was pretty straightforward.

This constituted the unlocking of one new achievement: the first time I’ve ever received a job offer without ever meeting anyone at the company face-to-face! Most of the vetting was done by phone, with one video chat for the tech test with a developer in California. In fact, I was the one who insisted on coming in to check out the office and meet a few people before accepting their offer! Very different experience.

As a company that prioritizes employee satisfaction, the benefits are refreshingly good: completely flexible PTO, the potential to work remotely, and of course I’m pretty happy to have decent health insurance again, after footing the bills for my recent medical issues. And they have not just one, but TWO foosball tables, which means I need to work on restoring the meisterly skills I had six years ago. Initial indications are positive, but considerable practice will be required! There’s also the opportunity to rewrite FRank, the foosball league ranking site I made so long ago, perhaps adding a mobile interface and speech recognition!

They’re located at the opposite end of Downtown Crossing from where I used to work at Optaros, so I know the area pretty well, and plan to revisit Lanta, the Thai place that formerly was Rock Sugar, my go-to lunch spot.

I’ll also enjoy a reprise of the walking commute I had down the statue-lined Comm Ave mall and through the Public Gardens and Boston Common. Or ride a whopping two stops on the Green Line… Definitely beats the hell out of the 40-minute commute down to Quincy that I had last year! Although I’ll miss having that nice, long bike commute, too. It’s not worth riding one mile to Buildium; it’d be as pointless as going out for a two-block jog!

On that note, there is a Buildium Strava cycling club, and their big company outing is to ride the 175-mile Cape Cod Getaway charity ride for MS each year. It goes from Boston to Provincetown, like the Outriders ride I do each year; while the MS ride takes a leisurely two days, Outriders does a shorter 130-mile route in just one day! Amusingly, it usually takes place one week before the MS Ride.

I also garnered an enviable second new achievement: coming in to work wearing jeans on my first day! Very cool! But my first day ended with something a lot less cool: when I went home and checked my postal mail, I received a note that my gall bladder surgery was scheduled for Thursday, only two days later! So at the end of my first workday, I had to ask on short notice for two days of PTO!

After taking Thursday and Friday for the operation, I returned to start my second week of work a week ago. I set up my development environment and finished my first code fix. Then Friday was the company holiday party…

I already posted to Facebook about the awkwardness of starting a new job right before the holiday party, which is an experience I’m always desperate to avoid (as related in this anecdote from my Sapient days). Fortunately, two weeks was sufficient to break the ice with some officemates—thank goodness for the non-threatening mixer value of foosball!—and so I survived our seasonal Mandatory Fun.

My third week began with the deeply exciting experience of PAYDAY!!! I also have transitioned into a new (semi-permanent) team, so that I can cover for another frontend dev who is moving away at the end of the week. That’ll provide some immediate challenges, but it’ll also be exciting to be able to really dig into the work.

So overall the new job is Really Good.

Here’s one final observation. Having always set money aside when I was working, I’ve had the flexibility to take some time between jobs to unwind and just enjoy life before jumping back into it. But this fall I looked back at my resume and was a little surprised when I added up the numbers; since 2002, when I left Sapient, I’ve taken almost seven of the past 13 years off!

And being honest, I have to say that it was a really good thing. I’ve enjoyed entire summers kayaking or cycling, and been free to travel or devote time to my meditation practice. Given how insanely stressful and frustrating and exhausting software development can be, I think those periods of relaxation have been a real lifesaver for me. I definitely think it’s nice to pull a year or two of one’s retirement forward, so that one can enjoy time off while one’s still (comparatively) young, strong, and healthy. And the break gives one time to decompress and reconnect to one’s enthusiasm for work (and money!) before going back to the daily grind.

Now my most recent little sabbatical is over, and it’s time to dive back into the melee. But at Buildium, I’m really excited by the company, the people, and the technology, so I’m planning on enjoying it quite a bit.

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