Erudition and Inanity

Update: I’m not sure if I made this clear below, so just for the record: ThoughtWorks is a cool company with a great reputation and I’m thrilled to be joining them. All of my comments below should be taken in the spirit of that statement.

I’m tickled pink to announce that I’ve accepted a job with ThoughtWorks as some kind of Ruby guy and so I’m moving from Boston to Chicago to live the dream of 80-100% travel to places that are not Chicago. I thought it might be worth explaining briefly why I chose them.

In short: I get to work in Ruby (apparently), on a diverse range of projects, in diverse settings, at considerably greater job security than I might find at a startup; I expect to learn a tremendous amount about developing good software; it’s a change of scenery and a chance to travel; everyone at the interview impressed me, and were kind enough to let me geek out over Handshake, yea, even unto the whiteboard; and significantly, I couldn’t find anything credibly negative about the company, either from former employees or outside observers. If they suffer from a little hubris, well, there are far worse sins to have.

I’d also like to note that everyone I met at the interview event, in particular their founder Roy, was remarkably and even alarmingly candid. It was a breath of fresh air.

The job starts on June 18th, and shortly thereafter I’ll be attending ThoughtWorks University for six weeks. I’ve always wanted to see India. I also have to relocate to Chicago between now and then; I don’t know anything about the city, and if anyone has any advice about living and working there I’d love to hear it.

So I’m out in California tonight and tomorrow for An Interview. I’ve never been any farther west than Florida before, and so far… well, it looks a lot like Boston’s Rte. 128 belt, to be honest. I used to read way too much Wired Magazine in high school and I remember, if you can believe this, dreaming about Silicon Valley and the brave new pioneers out there forging crazy new Internet services. So even if nothing comes of The Interview, I’m tickled just to be able to visit.

Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to get out much. I’ve always wanted to see San Francisco but there’s not really enough time to make it from Mountain View (cough) to there and thence to San Jose in time to catch the red-eye back to Boston. I’ll be flying in just in time for Friday classes, where by ‘just in time’ I mean ‘six hours early’.

I had hoped to get some studying done tonight but I’m pretty beat. Apparently there was a screwup with the reservation. I arrived at the checkin desk for JetBlue only to find that, although they had me down for a ticket for San Jose to Boston, there was no such reservation for the other direction. After twenty increasingly frantic minutes on the phone with the travel agent they managed to scrounge up a seat for me, with only minutes to spare before the flight had to leave. Naturally the flight was subsequently delayed for an hour. Har har.

Study, you say? Yes, I brought textbooks in my suitcase. I’m That Guy.

I was working with the TA for our Software Development class the other day and I noticed that he’d remapped his browser to display fixed-width fonts as Monaco instead of Courier New. It’s a good idea and I thought I’d repost it here in the service of others who were, like me, too dumb to come up with it on their own but still unsatisfied with their fixed-width font experience. The setting is in Firefox under Preferences -> Content -> Fonts & Colors -> Advanced.

Running Windows? This is similarly old news, but the new ClearType-enabled fonts that Microsoft released for Windows Vista work just fine in XP. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I installed Windows on my shiny new Mac via BootCamp and was suddenly acutely aware, in a way I never had been before, how ugly everything looked. Their new fixed-width font is called Consolas, and it’s lovely. You can grab them all here.

It’s not that Courier New is such a terrible font. Well actually, I guess it is.

I should have done this years ago. Very cathartic. Although I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do when the number of links I’d like to include exceeds the size of my wacky checkerboard box. Details, details. brianguthrie.com