RSS FeedFor the last decade I've been toiling away in Australia on my own software; P2P, a music app, and insane operating system development, unbeknowing that I actually had any employable skill. I just developed this software because, well, "I thought it would be useful" was how I justified it, but really I develop software because I love doing so. That one better explains all those late-night-dev-sessions.
At the end of my Honours year and just before I enrolled in my PhD, I found out my Honours year project had been accepted into a software development conference held in the U.S.A. My university was kind enough to fly me pretty much literally halfway around the world to let me give my talk there. It was a great thrill to me, to finally visit the place where TV comes from and to discover that everyone really does talk with those cool 'TV accents'.
During the conference I met a fellow named David, who tells me that my software was in some ways similar to the software at this slighty-odd named company "Red Swoosh", and that they're looking for someone like me. After more discussion and a trial project that I work on back in Australia (me now also enrolled in my PhD at this point), and suddenly I find I have a dream job waiting for me in San Francisco. After a little while I make the decision to drop my PhD and fly on over. This of course is via a month stopover in Thailand, where instead of writing P2P software in my room and Uni as I had been doing, I'm was now writing it from the beaches of Thailand. And now, in Silicon Valley. I had gone from my home Separation Creek Valley ( set in a town of 7 people ), to Silicon Valley.
So looking back, I had come from my life of developing software for the fun of it from my room, to Red Swoosh. I think the ninja most aptly described my whole experience when he said those famous words:
| "I was just training in a pit of Siamese lions, and a severed arm flew in and hit me in the head. 'You have been called up for operation Red Swoosh'." |
||
Tom, code dude.
UPDATE: This post has been translated into pirate.
This entry was posted on September 3, 2006 at 4:02 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Comments
Interesting story about your interaction with an interesting product. I spent 4 years working on a product that uses the traditional client-server model and http/s instead of s/ftp for content delivery. To optimally save your customers money on bandwidth, you depend on your downloaded clients being online and the downloaded file being available to your client to seed. Very much the same limitation that binds bittorrent if I understand your methodology. If not, please correct my understanding. you certainly have gotten my attention.