Ornoth

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Edvisors was pretty political and had (insert superlative adverb) outdated technology.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.

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.

Haven’t been inspired to write much lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. So I guess it’s time for another potpourri posting. I’ll try to be brief, although there are a lot of little things to go over, and a few lengthy ones.

Everyone always asks me about employment first, so… I haven’t found anything yet. I haven’t been too worried about that, since you learn as a consultant to save during good times to get through the bad, and there’s nothing like taking a year or two of your retirement when you’re young enough to get out and enjoy it. At the same time, it’s really time to make this a top priority, now that summer’s over.

However, it amused me to no end to find a TED talk by a designer who totally espoused my beliefs about taking time off during one’s working years, and demonstrated some fabulous design work that came as a result. Check out the nice, eloquent, short talk here.

Ironically, my net worth right now—nearly a year after being laid off—is the highest it’s been in seven years. More surprising still is that if I go back to the last time my net worth was this high, it was December 2002, about a year after I was laid off from Sapient. What is it about being laid off that causes me to get richer, when one would normally expect one’s savings to be depleted in no time?

Well, actually it makes sense. Tech and consulting layoffs correllate pretty closely with stock market bottoms, and the market usually recovers nicely in the following twelve months. So although my savings has eroded somewhat, my mutual funds have appreciated much more. So remember: buy stocks whenever I lose my job!

The next most common inquiry concerns biking, and I have such a tale of woe about the incompetence of my bike shop. Sparing you the details, my bike has been in and out of the shop since the Fourth of July, and has been completely out of commission since early August, while two major components were shipped back their manufacturers (one of them twice).

Meanwhile, I’d been putting a lot of miles on my Bike Friday folding bike, including my first century ride on it. The folder isn’t bad, although I will complain that it’s heavy, which means I can’t climb hills as well on it.

Thankfully, I just got the reassembled bike back from the shop, and after all that travail, it’s running fine. Just in time for cold weather, of course. There’s a lengthy writeup about the whole long ordeal here.

Since I measure my cycling year from mid-October to mid-October, I just concluded my 2008-2009 season. I wound up with 4,000 miles on the road and about 500 more on the indoor trainer. With five centuries under my belt, it was a really good year.

In other news, Boston’s bike coordinator has targeted my street, Commonwealth Ave, for some very non-standard bike lanes. I’ll be curious to see how they pan out.

The deadline for PMC fundraising has passed, and this year I raised a total of $8,266, which is pretty good for a recession year. My lifetime total is now $52,657. The check presentation isn’t until December 5th this year.

This also seems to be the year I started sea kayaking. After expeditions with my brother and my CIMC friends, I also spent three hours recently on a very choppy Charles River basin, having rented from Charles River Canoe & Kayak’s new Kendall Square location. My obliques got a real heavy workout. Once I’ve got an income, I really do have to start thinking about picking up a boat. Meanwhile, I’m looking into my storage options, which are limited in my condo.

Indoors, I recently re-read Alan Watts’ "Wisdom of Insecurity", an awesome little tome that was my first serious exposure to Buddhist philosophy, back in January 2003 (original review). I’ve also just re-read Robert Anton Wilson’s 1975 "Illuminatus!" trilogy, which was interesting, especially when some of the details of his dystopian future turn out to be accurate predictions of policies enacted by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. Here’s an excerpt:

"Their grip on Washington is still pretty precarious. […] If they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-roaders would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and [they] aren’t powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution."

"What sort of tools?"

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. […] The people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can’t be trusted."

Online, I’ve put some time into finally revamping OrnothLand. The new version can be seen at http://www.ornoth.com/. I was pleased to be able to easily include my most recent Twitter tweet, Livejournal blog and cycling blog posts, and Flickr photograph by parsing their RSS feeds. And I’ve implemented (although not perfected) long-desired features like the ability to search through past entries as well as see only what’s new since your last visit.

A couple notes on Facebook, while I’m here. A while ago I stopped getting notifications when a friend added another friend to their list. I miss that feature, which was sacrificed to one of Facebook’s rewrites; however, now it seems to be about to come back. On the other hand, I also recently stopped getting notifications every time a friend took a quiz or took an action in one of their applications, and I have to say that’s been a godsend, and saved several inane people from being un-friended. I’d already manually ignored 787 applications, but I haven’t added to that list in several weeks.

I’ve also spent some of my free time expanding my cooking repertoire, which has paid nice dividends. I started with basic stuff that I’ve cooked before but hadn’t in years, like roasted beets, roasted potatoes, sour cream cookies, tollhouse cookies, brownies, and my family’s traditional spaghetti sauce, which I modified to include a bit more heat. I added steamed broccoli to the list of things I’d make, and I continue to experiment to figure out how to make stir-fry that doesn’t produce allergic headaches. Sadly, I think garlic and onions are the culprits. I also just made Hi-Rise Bakery’s vanilla loaf, which came out nicely, but boy is that one expensive piece of bread!

People often ask about Grady… He’s doing okay. Nothing really to mention there. He’s mellowed out a bit, even to the point of tolerating being held, but he’s still quite the little athletic hunter, especially when it comes to wadded up balls of paper. I should probably take and post some more pictures of him.

Speaking of photos, this photo of mine will be displayed in two five foot long resin displays at the Red Rock Canyon Visitor’s Center outside Las Vegas. Very cool thing to add to the resume/portfolio, and it’s another paying client. And made another photo expedition to the top of Boston’s Custom House tower; results (here).

On a side note, my friend Inna is DJing a show on Duquesne student radio. Visit wdsr.org Fridays from 5-7pm.

Closer to home, this is a big year for Boston politics. There’s a big mayoral vote this year, plus the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

The autumnal equinox has passed, which means the end of summer, which I hate to see go. The fourth quarter is always the worst time of year for me, starting with my birthday, which as usual I’ll thank you not to observe. I’ve been kicking around ideas of what to do, but I suspect it’ll look a lot like last year’s observance… hopefully with the same result!

October and November look to be very busy at the sangha, as there are two big events coming up. In October I’m participating in a metta (lovingkindness) practice group. I’ve sometimes scoffed at metta practice for being simplistic and pointless, but at the same time, all the challenges I encounter in my practice are pointing me in that direction. So this’ll be an interesting experiment. And there’s also the annual Sandwich Retreat in early November, which is always revelatory. You can of course expect writeups. And there are several interesting topics and speakers at CIMC’s Wednesday evening dharma talks. So it’s going to be an intense couple months of sitting motionlessly with one’s eyes closed.

That’ll be quite a change, tho. The center was closed for their usual summer hiatus, and until recently I’d seen very few of the people in my dharma circle since July. I miss that. Unfortunately, the previously copacetic dynamic has deteriorated after some of the usual adolescent antics. It saddens me, even though I know that change is, of course, inevitable.

I should take a second to record a couple interesting tidbits from the most recent talk, given by John Peacock. There were three key points he made that resonated with me, each from a context outside Buddhism, in addition to coming from completely separate contexts from each other.

One of his main points was to approach life with a sense of wonder, to see things deeply and anew as they are encountered. By looking at a tree and seeing "a tree", our minds see little more than our pre-existing conceptual model of "a tree", rather than the specific instance before us, which might differ radically from that mental construct, and is certainly much more vibrant and alive. This obscures reality and inhibits one’s ability to see special and meaningful details that make this tree unique. It’s these kinds of penetrative insights that also give a fiction writer the experience and the vocabulary to build a compelling mental image of a scene, which is a belief I’ve held strongly since writing an article about Tolkien’s use of vocabulary for a fanzine thirty-five years ago. You can see one incarnation of that particular rant on the DargonZine site, at http://www.dargonzine.org/dpww/docs/wonder.txt. So you can imagine how John’s words about wonder and careful observation resonated with me.

Another interesting bit was John’s response to a question I asked that went something like this:

Having a background in Tibetan Buddhism as well as Theravada and IMS, you seem singularly qualified to speak on the topic of viewing Buddhism along a continuum from extremely rational and scientific to extremely superstitious and ritualized. I don’t know how it is at IMS or Oxford, where you teach, but here at CIMC we hear almost nothing about jhana (concentration) practice, despite the fact that it is very heavily emphasized in the Pali canon. Where on that spectrum do you see jhana practice falling?

The response was that jhana practice is useful in developing concentration, but he seemed skeptical about the existence of the specific sublime mind states described in the suttas. He also said that the suttas actually equivocate, pointing specifically to Majjhima Nikaya Sutta 26, the Ariyapariyesana Sutta (The Noble Search). That sutta includes the Buddha’s unsatisfying search for enlightenment by studying under other Indian teachers, many of whom taught concentration practice. So the canon seems to imply that concentration practice is helpful, but not sufficient.

Finally, John was presented with the standard Buddhist question that sets Buddhist virtues of patience and acceptance of life as it is against the human desire to correct injustice and make progress (positive change) in the world. The answer is, of course, that wise action is virtous, but the important factors are that one perform such actions with a wholesome intent rather than coming from a place of aversion, and that one must perform all actions without becoming so attached to a specific result that it causes suffering if it does not come about. This relates very closely to managing one’s expectations. I first learned the importance of expectation management in my professional consulting career at Sapient, where common knowledge held that one should always under-promise and over-deliver, so as to always exceed clients’ expectations. A yogi should bring that same attitude to the actions they take in the world, letting go of the attachment to a particular outcome, and being delighted if things transpire in a positive way.

Finally, I’ve taken a bit of time to do some formal goal-setting for 2010. Here’s what I’ve got:

• Get a new job
• Travel to the Bay Area and:
  • Participate in the annual Buddhist Bicycle Pilgrimage
  • Meet and thank Gil Fronsdal
  • Hang out with some of my friends in the area
• Complete my 10th Pan-Mass Challenge
  • Possibly crossing the entire state by starting in New York State
  • Exceed $60,000 lifetime fundraising
  • 5th consecutive heavy hitter
• Participate in at least one week-long residential meditation retreat

So those are some of the things that have transpired over the past couple months. Although my cycling blog will be a bit less active in coming months, hopefully this one will get a little more attention, even if it may not be the most exciting reading in the world.