Tag: work

Ten years of Atlassian

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Today marks ten years to the day that I started at Atlassian! I blogged LiveJournaled at the end of the first week back in 2010 but looking back on it, it didn’t quite capture the brain-dribbling-out-my-ears aspect of when I started. Jira was — and still is, really — a complicated beast, and attempting to wrap my head around how all the different schemes interrelate was something else, especially when everything was called a <something> scheme!

I started doing support for Jira Studio at the beginning of 2011 — where we would host the products ourselves versus what I was doing when I first started, supporting Jira Server which is running on the customer’s own hardware—, was promoted to senior support engineer in 2014, and then left the customer support wing of the company entirely nearly three years ago and started doing support for our internal PaaS (platform as as service)!

I’m still in that same “Shield” role, still doing a good amount of coding on the side, and have been rewriting vast swathes of our internal documentation which has been received extremely positively. (We have very clever developers at work, but writing clear and end-user-focused documentation is not their strong suit. 😛) The coding has been primarily on the internal tool I mentioned in this post — except we’re now using Slack instead of Stride — and there’s been an increasing number of teams adopting it internally, and I’m actually getting feature requests!

Granted I’ve worked at exactly three companies in my entire career, but I honestly can’t imagine being anywhere else. Here’s to another ten years!

Another year of Node.js (now also featuring React)

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I posted last year about my progress with Node.js, and the last sentence included “I’m very interested to revisit this in another year and see what’s changed”.

So here we are!

There’s been a fair bit less work on it this year compared to last:

$ git diff --stat 6b7c737 47c364b
[...]
77 files changed, 2862 insertions(+), 3315 deletions(-)

The biggest change was migrating to Node 8’s shiny new async/await, which means that the code reads exactly as if it was synchronous (see the difference in my sendUpdate() code compared to the version above it). It’s really very nice. I also significantly simplified my code for receiving temperature updates thanks to finally moving over to the Raspberry Pi over the Christmas break. Otherwise it’s just been minor bits and pieces, and moving from Bamboo to Bitbucket Pipelines for the testing and deployment pipeline.

I also did a brief bit of dabbling with React, which is a frontend framework for building single-page applications. I’d tried to fiddle with it a couple of years ago but there was something fundamental I wasn’t grasping, and ended up giving up. This time it took, though, and the result is virtualwolf.cloud! All it’s doing is pulling in data from my regular website, but it was still a good start.

There was a good chunk of time from about the middle of the year through to Christmas where I didn’t do any personal coding at all, because I was doing it at work instead! For my new job, the primary point of contact for users seeking help is via a room on Stride, and we needed a way to be able to categorise those contacts to see what users were contacting us about and why. A co-worker wrote an application in Ruby a few years ago to scrape the history of a HipChat room and apply tags to it in order to accomplish this, but it didn’t scale very well (it was essentially single-tenented and required a separate deployment of the application to be able to have it installed in another room; understandable when you realise he wrote it entirely for himself and was the only one doing this for a good couple of years). I decided to rewrite it entirely from scratch to support Stride and multiple rooms, with the backend written in Node.js and the frontend in React. It really is a fully-fledged application, and it’s been installed into nearly 30 different rooms at work now, so different teams can keep track of their contact rate!

The backend periodically hits Stride’s API for each room it’s installed in, and saves the messages in that room into the database. There’s some logic around whether a message is marked as a contact or not (as in, it was someone asking for help), and there’s also a whitelist that the team who owns the room can add their team members to in order to never have their own messages marked as contacts. Once a message is marked as a contact, they can then add one or more user-defined tags to it, and there’s also a monthly report so you can see the number of contacts for each tag and the change from the previous month.

The backend is really just a bunch of REST endpoints that are called by the frontend, but that feels like I’m short-changing myself. 😛 I wrote up a diagram of the hierarchy of the frontend components a month or so ago, so you can see from this how complex it is:

And I’m in the middle of adding the ability to have a “group” of rooms, and have tags defined at the group level instead of the room level.

I find it funny how if I’m doing a bunch of coding at work, I have basically zero interest in doing it at home, but if I haven’t had a chance to do any there I’m happy to come home and code. I don’t think I have the brain capacity to do both at once though. 😛

New job!

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No, I haven’t left Atlassian, but come Monday I’m starting in a new role!

We have the concept of a role called a “Shield” that’s essentially support but for helping our own internal developers and users (as opposed to external customers), and the idea is that it’s the first point of contact for developers who need help or have questions about the particular service/platform/whatever that the Shield is supporting, as well as being able to step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of pain points that those developers run into and what sort of things could be done to minimise that. The name “shield” comes from the fact that you’re essentially shielding the rest of the developers on the team from the distractions that come from other people constantly contacting them throughout the day, and letting them get on with what they do best (actual coding and improvements to the product). I’ll also have the opportunity to actually do some coding and make improvements too, though. \o/

The team I’m joining runs our internal microservices platform that an increasing number of our applications are being run on, and though the microservices themselves can be pretty much any language you’d like (it’s all Docker-based), the code that the platform itself runs on is Node.js which ties in rather nicely with all my learning over it over the past almost eighteen months.

I’ve been doing external customer-facing support for over thirteen and a half years so this is going to be a lovely change! It’s going to be really weird starting anew where I know next to nothing about the inner workings of the thing I’m supporting though. 😛 I expect my brain is going to be dribbling out my ears come the end of next week.

5 years!

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It’s been five years since I started at Atlassian! That is completely ridiculous. I realise my LJ at this point is mostly me going, “It’s been x years since y, that’s crazy!” but it’s true. 😛 When you’ve been at Atlassian for three years you get an extra three days of bonus leave each year (it expires at the end of the year so you can’t just hoard it), and at five years they’ll pay $3200 for you to take a holiday somewhere! kungfupolarbear and I had already been looking at going to New Zealand, probably in spring, and so this is a nice extra. I definitely can’t imagine working anywhere else, that’s for sure. My Senior Support Engineer-ing is going very well, I play Magic: The Gathering with a bunch of people every day at work, and they put in what’s essentially an actual salad bar for grabbing stuff to put on sandwiches. So instead of the quick and lazy and very unhealthy peanut butter and honey sandwiches I was having, I have sandwiches with tomato, lettuce, capsicum, and salad dressing on them, and it barely takes more time than the previous unhealthy ones!

Also I’m 32 today! We went over to mum and dad’s yesterday for a birthday lunch, and my sister and her husband and two kids were there. We took Beanie over as well, which he always loves, and as always I took some photos.

\o/

Promotion!

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I’ve been acting-senior support engineer at work since the guy who used to do it moved to another team, but I’m now OFFICIALLY the senior support engineer. 😀 \o/

DIY, and some not so DIY

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No posts for the last month, mostly because there’s not been anything of note happening. Yesterday, though… phew!

So, the path to the back room was pretty bloody awful.

kungfupolarbear had found a photo of a nice path design, so we decided to go to Bunnings and get the supplies for it. Long story short, about five hours and many sore muscles later, we have a new path!

As per pretty much everything so far, it took more work than expected.

And today we had an electrician come to replace the god-awful ceiling lights that were in the lounge room and kitchen, and to wire up some ethernet for us too. It’s so nice being able to put our own little touches on things now!

In other news, our annual bonus ended up being 12.5%! \o/ Of course, 45.6 cents in the dollar of that went to tax, but that was still a nice chunk of change. So I’ve ordered a NinjaBlock. Should be fun to play around with.

Work

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I had one of those days at work today that was just totally productive. The guy who is our senior support engineer is away pretty much this whole month and he’s the one who generally looks after the internal escalations (cases that the support engineer who is dealing with it has gotten stuck on and needs some help).

As the next-longest-serving hosted support engineer I’ve been looking after the escalations while he’s away. It was really satisfying today, some of the issues were pretty hairy but I sorted them out in the end.

Quite a good feeling!

And now, a work-related update

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Hey, why not update three times in a night!

Come the 19th of April, I’ll have been at Atlassian for THREE YEARS. Insanity!

It’s been crazy busy the last month or two, as one of our hosted services is winding down and being phased out, and we need to get everyone migrated over to either OnDemand or their own self-hosted instances. Despite us announcing that we were phasing it out back in October of 2011, far too many people have left it to the LAST DAMN WEEK to get everything sorted out, meaning that in addition to our normal load of support issues coming in, we have a heap of these extra hosted ones to get done too.

It’s flat-out and I’m pretty drained by the end of the day, but thankfully it’s not actively stressful, and once I’ve finished for the day, that’s it… I don’t need to be continuing to work from home afterwards.

Having said that, christ I’ll be glad when we’ve finished with all this. ::faceplant::

Also, I should probably go to bed now.

Ow

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So at work we have a thing called the Atlassian Foundation. Basically we get five days a year to take off work and do charitable things. We (by which I mean myself, kungfupolarbear, and a couple of co-workers) helped out at Monika’s Doggie Rescue last Friday.

Wow. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.

The dogs they take in were all a day shy of being put down, so they tended to be smaller dogs and with much more problems than your average dog. We took a few of them out for walks, and helped with the laundry that needed doing. The first dog I was walking had a problem where if he’d see another dog that wasn’t from his “group”, he’d start borderline screaming and would turn around and try to bite whoever was walking him. The person from the rescue place obviously warned me about this and what to do, it wasn’t like it was unexpected, but christ. Not a good start. And sure enough, we ran into some random dog while we were out for walks and the dog did exactly as described. It happened again on the way back to the place, fortunately I managed to avoid getting bitten, but bloody hell.

We did hung out some laundry, then took a second batch of dogs out, which were thankfully much better behaved and the walk was quite uneventful. The third batch, the dog I was walking kept stopping to look back and bark at the other dogs and I kept having to literally drag him to get him walking again. I ended up talking a different route to the others so he’d actually focus and start walking.

The reason this post is titled “Ow” is because I was wearing my regular boots and made the mistake of running, borderline sprinting on one occasion, to give the dogs a bit of a workout. I was thumping along flat-footed and the boots have no padding in them. The end result is that I think I bruised my hips or something because I was sore as absolute buggery on Friday night. We had Lily over the weekend, and I was sore but not too bad, but when I woke up on Monday morning I must have slept funny or something because I basically couldn’t bend at ALL. It’s currently just past 10pm on Tuesday night and my lower back is still sore as hell. I’ve been working from home both days, and will be again tomorrow, because owww. It’s getting better, but unfortunately Dencorub seems to be the only thing that actually does anything, and even then it’s not totally improved.

kungfupolarbear didn’t escape unscathed either, the first dog she was walking was solid muscle and kept pulling on the lead very strongly throughout the whole walk. She was leaning back to keep the dog in check, and as a result has sprained her leg and hip muscles. 🙁

My semi-regular two-month update.

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An update! Mostly brought to you by velvetrhapsody updating, then me realising it’s been ages since I updated mine. 😛

Work is mostly the same, but far busier. We updated about 8000 customers to JIRA 5 last week, and it’s not so much that there were massive bugs but the sheer number of people raising support cases about either minor bugs or just questions about functionality… argh. I’ve been absolutely non-stop flat out the entirety of last week, and this week doesn’t seem to be slowing down any.

I’ve had to get an ergonomic keyboard at work, because my left wrist has starting feeling… weird. It’s that feeling in the muscles on the underside of the arm towards the wrist that you get after an evening of ten-pin bowling, where you feel like you’ve been using muscles you don’t normally use. I don’t know why it’s suddenly come on, but the new keyboard seems to be helping. (It’s a Microsoft Natural 4000 if anyone is interested).

On Saturday I went for a flight in a 1950s de Havilland Chipmunk! I took some photos prior to the flight. It was actually rather nerve-wracking because I was flying it for most of the flight! I’m not sure I want to do it again, to be honest… I spent it mostly concentrating on keeping the plane level and so didn’t get a chance to do much sight-seeing.

Lily has started school this year, which is crazy. I have no idea where that time went! Apparently her teacher is nice.

New Year’s Eve was excellent, kungfupolarbear and I went to a co-worker’s place in Kirribilli, and the view was insane. Witness:

The full set is here.

Speaking of photos, I’ve been on quite the black and white kick lately.

Cottage

Glass

Light from above

Broken

We’re going back to Boston in August for kungfupolarbear‘s 30th birthday, which is very exciting! I loved Boston, and it’ll be great to go again now that we actually have a decent camera. \o/ OH THE PHOTOS WE WILL TAKE

…and I think that’s mostly about it!

Oops

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Nearly two months without an update! D’oh. I’ve completely forgotten to even look at my friends page for the past few weeks. 🙁

Work has been going very well. At the end of October we launched a whole new platform for our hosted offerings, called OnDemand, and it’s been very well received by everyone. There’s been a massive uptake of it, but our support load hasn’t exploded.
The three of us in Hosted Support are currently sitting next to the other two hosted platform teams, which is really nice. We can just turn around and ask questions, or we know immediately if something’s going funny.

Speaking of work, we had an awesome Melbourne Cup Day lunch last month. Everyone dressed up and we left work at 11am and went to this really nice venue on the harbour. We had absolutely delicious food, plenty of beer and wine, and it was all paid for by work! I brought the camera and gave it a good workout, and got a bunch of great photos. In fact, this particular one was used as a presentation slide by one of the CEOs in the last all-hands meeting we had! 😀 (It was the “Questions?” screen, so nothing major, but I was pretty chuffed).

We’re currently twelve days away from moving house. We were wanting to stay in our current place until we saved up enough money to buy a unit, but it turns out the owners want to move back in. They had a baby and had just moved closer to the city while she was pregnant, but the douchebag real estate agent neglected to mention any of this when we signed the lease originally, and assured us that it’d be fine to renew the lease when the time came.
The new place is in Turramurra, about ten minutes closer to the city than where we are now. It’s a bit bigger than our current place, and it’s actually an investment property. The owners wanted to make sure we were going to be staying a goodly while before they agreed to get flyscreens installed (there aren’t any right now), so that’s a good sign.
We’ve done a reasonable amount of packing already, and not having to de-mould every goddamn thing in the place is making it so much faster.

I completely forgot to mention that we went down to Melbourne for the weekend on the 9th/10th/11th of September, and it was great! We stayed in a really nice hotel on St Kilda Rd so were able to just wander up to Flinders St and get to wherever. And oh, the food! Man, both kungfupolarbear and I would be SO FAT if we lived in Melbourne.
I’d been there once before to visit Xenex but that was many years ago now, and I don’t even recall what we did. 😛 It was so different to Sydney and I can’t wait to go back. Naturally, I took heap of photos. 😉

A friend of Kristina’s came over from the US and stayed with us for a week. The ENTIRE TIME, the weather was absolute rubbish. 🙁 We went up to the Blue Mountains and literally couldn’t see anything. I’ve never seen fog anything like it.
The shitty weather has pretty much continued since then, and it’s feeling more like we’re going from autumn into winter, rather than already being in summer. Supposedly it’s meant to be a cool wet summer, so I’m not holding out any hope of the weather improving. 🙁

Lily starts school in about two months! 😮 And she’s turning five in May. Holy shit. I have no idea where that time went, it’s crazy. She’s doing really well with her letters, she knows the whole alphabet, and I set her up with WriteRoom and my old iBook G4, so she can spell words from her books and see them right on the screen. She actually asks me if she can “do letters”, which is good! I just looked, and my Lily set on Flickr has 226 photos in it. 😀 It’s fun looking through all the old photos and seeing her getting steadily older.

I love my work

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So due to the large amount of (free) drinks we get in at work, and the increasing time that it takes for the office organiser people to stock the fridges, we’ve gotten in vending machines and will have people come in and stock them for us. The drinks in the vending machines won’t cost us any money, it’s just saving time.

😀

Monies!

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At work, we get a company-wide bonus each year, and the better we do the more we get. It starts at 7.5%, and goes up to 9.5%. We got the full 9.5% this year! 😀 …so naturally I’m spending part of it on shiny new camera gear. 😉 I’ve ordered the Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L, and it ought to arrive early next week. \o/

Work is going quite well, we hired a new guy for Studio support and he started about three weeks ago, and he gets along really well with everyone. The queue hasn’t been horrible this week, so I’ve had a bit of time to relax.

kungfupolarbear‘s new job is going fantastically well, everyone there is nice, and people are sane!

All in all, things are excellent. 😀

Busybusybusy

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Holy crap today was non-stop busyness from the moment I sat down at my desk. I met up with the lovely velvetrhapsody for lunch, since we discovered that we work right across the road from each other! Apart from that, though, I had no downtime until I finished for the day. It was a reasonably productive day at least, but man am I fried.

A year on

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Wow. It’s been exactly a year to the day since I started at Atlassian! I was looking back at my LJ posts when we found out we were getting made redundant at Apple, and they were understandably bummed out, but holy crap did everything turn out nicely. 😀

In the year I’ve been at Atlassian, I’ve gotten a total of 11.5% in payrises plus a bunch of share options, I’ve been able to get my geek on massively, and am working in an even more laid-back and more awesome environment than Apple had!

I love my job. 😀

Busy busy busy

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Man, since I’ve been doing Studio support I’ve been pretty much flat-out every single day. Some days it’s good and I get lots done and I’m very productive. Other days, like today, I have about five things going on at once for the entire day and can’t concentrate on any of them. My brain was leaking out my ears by about 2pm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the hell out of work, but some days are definitely more draining than others.

When we first moved up to Hornsby, it really felt like Katoomba but I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly that was. I’ve realised now that it’s because the air is so much cleaner here than the city or even Lane Cove (Lane Cove is only ~10km from the city). It’s so nice stepping off the train in Hornsby after work and just having wonderfully clean fresh air. Even more so now that the weather is cooling down and the air has that autumnal coolness to it.

Amusement

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Every quarter at Atlassian, we have “Fedex”, where all the developers take two days off to furiously code and make shiny new things (see here). One of the things being created this year involves Sharepoint, and the writeup for it was absolutely brilliant:

The Problem
Some people really love SharePoint. Especially business manager type people. They just can’t get enough of it. It’s like KPI crack. With no knowledge of programming, web design or HTML, they can go in and create customisable dashboards, reports and lists and lists of information, pulled in from every other data-store imaginable. They can set it up to email them regularly with new information, export into pretty word documents and use a myriad of other useful Microsoft-centric features. Once it’s setup, they sit back and bask in the luminescent glow of their sweet, sweet datas. From their fortress of KPI solitude, they have ample time to reflect on how brilliantly awesome they are – breaking occasionally from their meditative state to hit the refresh button.

Oh yes, they f*$&@cking love their reports.

With this image underneath it:

😀

Time for my quarterly update!

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Biggest news is WE’VE MOVED OUT OF OUR SHITTY FUCKING MOULD-INFESTED APARTMENT! \o/ We found a gorgeous two-bedroom townhouse that’s right near to the train station in Hornsby, and has AIR CONDITIONING and GAS COOKING! And a backyard! It’s about forty to fifty minutes train ride, which is a fair bit more than the twenty to thirty minute bus ride we had in Lane Cove, but it’s still less than when we were living in Dee Why. It’ll just take a little while before we’re used to the longer commute again. Pictures will be forthcoming once we’ve finished putting everything away. 😛 …I should point out that we’re still renting, not buying, heh.

Work is going well as always. I’m going to be doing support for JIRA Studio for this quarter, to see how I like it, and move into it permanently if it’s good. It sounds it, it’s a much more sysadmin-type role, which sounds fun.

And lastly, we’re going to see Rammstein and Tool this Thursday night! \o/ I saw Tool last time they were out here, and they were fucking AMAZING. Rammstein has been here before, but I’ve never seen them. Woohoo!

Today can go fuck itself in the ear

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Blargh. I had an extremely dumb day today at work. You know those days where nothing sinks in and you just don’t get anything? That was today.

Work has paid for a couple of us to take the official Sun Java training courses (at not-insignificant expense!) and I’ve been working my way through it (this is the very basic don’t-know-any-Java-or-any-object-oriented-programming-at-all one that I’m doing). At the end of each section there’s exercises where you write code to do various things. As I get further into it, they give you less and less hand-holding with the coding, which is understandable. But I was just not understanding it at all. I had to get a co-worker’s help about four times and it still didn’t actually click.

Later on, there was a support case that I took, the customer had provided a backup of his data so we could try to reproduce the problem. I was still struggling to get the backup imported when a co-worker replied to the customer having looked through it all and worked out what the problem was, and what the solution was.

Then at the end of the day I took another support case, and I’d gotten so bogged down from the two things I mentioned above that I was totally doubting myself, and had to double check my answer to the customer with a co-worker because I wasn’t sure.

Plus poor my kungfupolarbear might possibly be losing her job, or possibly not, we don’t know, because the CEO at the company she’s working at is a dick with no actual understanding of what she does.

Ugh. The title of this post says it all.

Updates!

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Work’s been going great, we ordered a shiny new Core i7 MacBook Pro which shipped today, and Lily turned 3 on Tuesday! I can’t get over how quickly that’s gone by.

This weekend has been atrocious though, because Lily has this horrendous chesty cough. It sounds loose and she seems to be coughing stuff up at least. She’s not all grumpy during the day thankfully, but at night she just can’t get a proper sleep as she keeps waking herself up with her coughing. She sometimes coughs so hard she almost gags. 🙁 I got probably four hours sleep at the most on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m dropping her off at her mother’s place at about 4pm today for Mother’s Day, so I’ll at least get a single good night before going back to work tomorrow.

kungfupolarbear will have been married for an entire year in exactly one month! Craziness. No idea where that time went either. The weekend after our anniversary is a long weekend, and one where we don’t have Lily, so we’ve used the Wotif.com voucher I got when I started at Atlassian and have booked two nights at the River Oak Lodge in Kangaroo Valley. The voucher was for $500, and even after the two nights we’re left with just under $200 on it. Woo!

And of course, I’ve been continuing to take lots of photos of everything, heheh.

Workiness

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Phew! Man, this week has gone by in an absolute flash. It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you’re actively busy the entire day.

The other guy from Apple, Chris, and I are going to be supporting JIRA, Atlassian’s bug tracking software. We’ve been spending the whole week working through a bunch of documentation and learning how it all works and how to use it. We’ve been left to our own devices to work through it all, they’re not constantly looking over our shoulders seeing what we’re doing.

The general atmosphere is very similar to Apple, all laid-back. There’s no formal breaks or schedule either, which is fantastic. And we get an hour for lunch, instead of half an hour. They’ve got a kitchen area downstairs that’s totally stocked with food and drinks and snacks, all free to eat as you please! And there’s an entire large fridge dedicated to storing beer and general booze! No Bundy, but my manager said I could speak to someone about getting some in. 😀

So yeah. It’s going extremely well!

And of course, considering we now have a shiny new camera, it just wouldn’t be proper to not include some photos!

Come to Me

Clockwork

Command Me

Technology

Everyone loves cardboard tubes!

Shiny!

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We are now the proud owners of a Canon EOS 7D!

…we just don’t have a lens yet, hah. Mum and dad have gotten me our first lens, a Canon EF 35mm f/2, for my birthday, and we’ll be getting that tomorrow when we go up to theirs for birthday lunch.

This is the last weekend of my unemployment too! I start work at Atlassian on Monday. Very exciting! kungfupolarbear‘s new job is going extremely well as well, everyone there is nice and and she’s actively getting to exercise her brain a bunch.

Boom!

YAY!

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I GOT THE JOB!

At Atlassian, that is! And holy crap, the pay is significantly better than at Apple. AND they’re giving me a voucher for kungfupolarbear and I to stay in a snazzy hotel for a few nights before I start! And I don’t start until April 12!

I also got a call last night from the Catholic school asking me to come in for a second interview, and an email this morning from the place in Artarmon asking me to come in for a face-to-face interview! Man.

But YAY! I haz a job! One of my co-workers from Apple also got a job there too, which is awesome, so there’ll be a familiar face there to begin with. WHEE!!

When it rains, it POURS

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So, I had the interview at the Catholic school yesterday, which went pretty well. They said they have pretty much no proper Mac experienced people there and they’re rolling out MacBooks to the whole of Year 11, followed soon thereafter by the entire 1100 students at the school, so it’d be pretty hectic. I’d also need to be training up the staff as well, in weekly sessions.

The Atlassian interview went really well, they mostly asked me technical questions, which I knew all of the answers to. The only they asked about that I didn’t have any experience with was Java, and one of the interviewers laughed and said “Willing to learn?” to which I replied “Absolutely!”.

I sent the interviewer a follow-up email basically saying thanks for interviewing me, and kungfupolarbear suggested adding a line about MyMac probably going to make me an offer soon, which I did. I got a call yesterday evening from one of the HR ladies there asking if I could come in today for a second interview!

I had the phone interview with the place in Artarmon this morning at 10, they’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades sort of person with both hardware and software troubleshooting. Then I had the second interview at Atlassian at 11:30, which was via video conference to one of the support managers who was in San Francisco at the time, which also went very well, followed up by a quick session with one of the other HR people. They said they’d get back to me by the end of the week.

I got a missed call on my phone from some random number while I was on the bus on the way home, checked my voicemail and it was a friend who used to work at Apple who had left, and it turned out one of the jobs I’d applied for was with the company he’s at! He was just calling me to let me know it was a relatively junior role and to check what sort of money I’d be after, and to make sure I was interested before he put my résumé forward. I asked about promotion prospects, and he said that he’s actually going to be moving over to the UK at the end of this year, which nobody else knows about, and that whoever was in the role that I applied for would end up taking over his position. And the money he’s getting at the moment is quite a lot better than the initial position. I told him I was definitely interested.

And THEN at about 5:30 I got a call from a guy at the University of New South Wales about a job I’d applied for back at the start of this month, saying he was very keen to get me in for an interview and that I’m their number one candidate for the job at the moment!

And I’m still waiting to hear back from MyMac as well.

Holy crap.

Job annoyance

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Well, that’s annoying. I had an informal interview today with a recruiter, but it was only $25/hour and a contract that was only until the end of the year, so I said I wasn’t interested in that particular role. It was a pain to get to as well… it shouldn’t have been, but there’s been a bunch of construction on the way to the area, which meant Google Maps was totally wrong. Urgh.

And I was meant to get a call for that job that’s ten minutes away from home, but didn’t. Emailed the lady that originally contacted me, no reply. Called her, and her voice message was “I’m not available, please send me an email”. Useful!

On the bright side, I’ve got two interviews tomorrow, the one at Atlassian that I mentioned previously, and one at Monte Sant Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney. Which is a Catholic girls high school. If I got that job, I could say, “At work I’m surrounded by Catholic schoolgirls!” and it’d be true. Hah.

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Well, it looks like our luck may be turning around! kungfupolarbear had an interview this morning for a QA position at a place only about ten minutes drive from our house, and she did so well they want to get her in for a second interview next week!

I’ve gotten two more responses to jobs, both for interviews, one is also about ten minutes from here, and another is in the city. The first is a Mac service-type job, the second is for a company called Atlassian that makes software development tools and are apparently pretty huge, from looking at their customer list! And next week should be when I hear back from MyMac as well.

Myself and a few ex-Apple people went for a photo outing today, we just went wandering around the city and Darling Harbour, I managed to get a few good ones! And from my lowly point-and-shoot PowerShot S5, no less.

Maritime Heritage Centre

Tiled

Yes, it’s more job stuff!

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I had the interview at MyMac today. It went very well. They’re definitely interested in hiring me, but they’re just not quite sure in exactly what capacity yet! They were saying they’re looking at expanding and hiring some more staff, and they realise that someone with my skills doesn’t just walk in off the street every day. The store manager is going to a conference in Chicago for a week starting next week, so they won’t have a chance to put their heads together (there were two guys interviewing me, the store manager and the chief operations manager) and work out exactly what they’ll do. It might even be a new role that they create.

I already know three other people there, all from the call centre, so I’d fit right in. They’ve also got three people from the Apple Retail Store on Regent St in London, so there’s quite the pool of talent there!

I won’t hear anything until probably week after next, but that’s okay. I’ll just enjoy the unemployment! Hah.

Monies!

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Woo! My redundancy pay came in today. We now have ZERO debt of any sort! It’s a good feeling.

Although the lack of job is less good, heh. I’ve been applying for a bunch of jobs, got a follow-up questionnaire email from one this morning, I’ve replied to that so we’ll see how things go.

On a totally different note, anyone who has an Xbox 360 and likes tower defense games should check out Toy Soldiers on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s a WWI-themed game and is fantastically fun. I’ve been playing it rather obsessively since it came out last week!

[EDIT]
And having mentioned the jobless thing, I just noticed there’s two positions for Mac Service Technicians at local service centres, one just five minutes drive up the road in Chatswood and the other at Bondi Junction, where several of the people from the call centre have actually ended up! I’ve applied for both. 😀

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Well. I’m now officially unemployed. It was a weird feeling handing my badge in and leaving the building for the last time.

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We’re all erasing our work computers and re-installing the OS afresh. It’s all kind of sad. Everyone is sitting around all melancholy.

My machine’s home folder has come from the original 15″ G4 iMac I used when I first started in October 2003, and I kept migrating it from machine to machine to machine. I’ve got so much stuff on here, over six years worth. I’ve copied everything to home that I’m wanting to keep at least.

This will be the last post ever from my Apple work machine. Sigh.