What lies beneath New York’s rivers
My submission
made it to the number 1 slot at news.yc.
In other news, I played against type today and accepted David‘s offer to bring me to The Boston chapter of the Gotham business network.
It wasn’t nearly as painful as I might have expected…which is interesting. I’ve been working a lot on my introversion and shyness recently (trying to have 3 and 4 sentence conversations with secretaries, waitresses, sales people, etc.), and my practice (although baby steps) made it easier than usual for me to make small talk with a bunch of business folks.
I’m not 100% sure that I really “get” business networking groups. Sure, in Silicon Valley, I can see that every third person is either an engineer you’d like to hire, a VC you’d like to woo, or a purchasing manager you want to sell to…but the more chamber-of-commerce style business groups that I’m familiar with seem to be very lawyer-and-real-estate-agent-and-graphic-designer heavy. If I’ve already got an office, a lawyer, and a graphic designer, what am I there for? Cross pollination, technical learning, brainstorming marketing ideas … these don’t seem to be the fodder of chamber-of-commerce style business groups.
As I was (re-) contemplating this on the drive there, David himself offered that he enjoyed it mostly for the social aspect.
Anyway, it was a mostly new experience, and it was practice stepping out of my comfort zone, so it was time well spent.
In the other ~6.5 hours of my day (yes, the commute and the meeting took 3.5 hours total!), I re-cleared the decks (thought I’d finished this on Monday, but sometimes Monday doesn’t really end until Tuesday…), and got 15 minutes back into the task I was working on back on Thursday and Friday: unified charging for SmartFlix (late fees, deferred fees, university fees, all against the front-end database, not the back-end database). It’s a pretty big project, and not only will it simplify and unify the code base, but it will result in lower merchant account fees (perhaps as much as $10-15k / year).
The tentacles-in-many-pies aspect of the edit (three code bases, two databases, etc., etc., etc.) means that I’m heartily sick of the mess, and also means that even cleaning it up resembles being the female lead in an off color Japanese movie / soft drink, and I can’t wait till I’m done.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Think of it as more practice… I entered college as a tremendously socially inept aspiring engineer, and ended up joining a fraternity. I left college as a slight less socially inept engineer, but still fumbled quite a bit. My professional career took me increasingly into customer-facing roles (I’m now a Field Applications Engineer), and my level of confidence in those situations has shot through the roof.
I’m still a bit off in truly “social” situations — I find it hard to interact in a party atmosphere where I know few people and I’m not sure who to talk to or why… But in a little bit more structured environment (i.e. where I have a meeting with a customer, or a training to several distributor salespeople) and a back story for why I’m there, I do much better than I ever thought I could have managed 10 years ago.
May 14th, 2009 at 7:48 am
Reading the “what’s at the bottom of the Hudson” article reminded me of a peculiarly relevant song by Portastatic, from the Summer of the Shark album, called “Swimming Through Tires.” You should check it out.