deploy jokes

Late at night, we needed to perform a small site maintenance.  US users are sleeping, but it's the middle of the day in Australia.

X: "People from Australia are on the site, and we need to do things to it!"

To our Australian engineer: "Can you tell them to stop using the site for a few minutes?"

Australian engineer: "Okay!"

X: "Email all@australia."

---

On skype chatroom at midnight:

On-call engineer: "Okay is everyone ready to deploy?  9+5=13"  [Our deploy script requires the engineer to do a simple math problem.]

On-call engineer: "I mean, 8+5=13.  It's scary I got that wrong at first."

Me: "Have you stopped drinking at all between beer o'clock [Minted Friday happy-hour tradition] and now?"

On-call engineer: "Don't ask me questions you don't want to know the answer to."

---

On skype chatroom:

On-call engineeer: "Oh web4, where art thou web4,
Deny thy code and refuse thy branch,
Or if thou wild not, be but sworn my Thursday
release XXXX branch"

Me: "You can't rhyme branch with branch!"

Minted shirts!

Our shelves of Minted shirts!

When I worked at Microsoft, because there were so few women, the shirts came only in men's sizes. It sent such a loud signal that women were not valued. Is that history now, or are there any companies nowadays that still do this?

If there are still any that do this, and you are a woman who works there:
1. that's awful
2. http://minted.com/jobs

:)

moderation

James volunteered to moderate my blog comments for me.  This is exciting, to say the least.

James: "I set up push notifications on my phone for your blog comments.  So that I can moderate them right away."

Me: "Wow!  That's so great!  My fear is that the novelty will wear off, and you'll have a longer and longer lag to moderate them."

James: "If it isn't working out in a week or so, I can write an app."

Me: [getting really upset] "What, to do sentiment analysis and auto-moderate?  If I was going to go that way, I would've just written that myself!"

James: "An app that shows the blog comment on the lock screen, so that I can approve it from there."

Thanksgiving

My mom cooked a token turkey breast this year. She was all stressed over it, even though it was pre-marinated and just needed to be roasted.

Meanwhile she stir-fried six Chinese dishes with ease.



Tom brought his girlfriend to meet my parents. Afterwards we all squeezed in one car and went to the Cosmopolitan hotel. I love the style of the interior decor! Three-story-tall chandelier strings, leather walls, egg chairs.

I am glad I flew to spend Thanksgiving with my family, even though it was only 30 hours so that I could go into work on Friday morning. It was a great 30 hours!

Team being adorable

At work, around 7pm when most people have gone home.

Me: "Does M know that he's supposed to deploy code tonight?"

D: "Yes."

Me: "Oh, how do you know that he knows?"

D: "He made it clear.  Multiple times."

Me: [laughing] "By complaining?"

H: "Yes."

My team is so endearing.

Temp box

At work, we ordered several pizzas. H (brilliant young engineer) shared a pizza with me, and we decided to store the leftovers in the work fridge.

H: [coming back from the fridge] "The large pizza box doesn't fit. I need to transfer it to the smaller box.". [opens small pizza box, discovers there is still pizza in it] "I need to swap these."

D (intern): [getting up with his own empty pizza box in hand]: "You're going to need a temp box. Unless you can XOR pizza."



Later the interns sent me a reddit thread about top revenge stories, and I spent one hour reading it, riveted.

Ice cream

I got an ice cream maker. At first, I was super obsessed and made sorbets continually.

I made a pumpkin pie ice cream. It was too sweet but otherwise good.



I want to experiment with weird flavors like bacon ice cream, basil ice cream.

Knights of Round Table

E and I walked along Crissy Field today.  It is one of my favorite areas of San Francisco.

\

She mentioned that one engineer at her work is nitpicking on irrelevant details. My theory is this behavior happens when the vision and milestones are not clear.

It is like how after the Knights of the Round Table rid the land of barbarians, they got bored and began picking duels with each other. When the quest for the Holy Grail began, the knights had a common purpose again and stopped squabbling.

Afterwards we had french toast and scrambled eggs in the Marina.  

It is pretty amazing that I get to live in this beautiful city and eat delicious french toast.  Thank you past-self from a previous life for building up enough karma!

Pear tree!

Parents planted a $14.95 pear tree years ago, and now it is full of pears every year!

Q4 expansion

We expanded into our annex office last weekend We have the whole floor for the rest of the year, to house our seasonal graphic designers and customer service reps.

The annex looked barren at first but a lot better once we put in carpet and 30 lamps!

batman

DS: We're doing XX checkins per minute.  [screenshot labeled Holy_checkins_batman.png]

SM: I loved that episode of Batman and Robin, where they both wrote code and checked it in.

JH: Looks like batman is committing code, and robin is just merging it into branch.

Mom

Talked to my mom on phone last night.

Me: "One of my coworkers has been stressed for the past few weeks."

Mom: "That's easy. Just tell them to lower their standards. Then it is much simpler to be happy!"

:)

My mom is so cheery. She is the opposite of Tiger Mom.

Lobby lights

Lobby of the Hyatt in San Francisco is gorgeous.

Me: [taking photos of Hyatt display]

Friend: "There are people who went into space and took fewer photos than you're taking right now."

it's raining today in San Francisco

Today during work, on the chatroom:

J: FYI I have an umbrella anyone can borrow if you need one for lunch, an errand, etc

D: Thanks, Rihanna.

Super happy birthday party!

Steve held a surprise birthday party for his wife.

Steve gave the best speech!

"If I were to do it over again. I would do some things differently. Like not work so much. I love my wife. I love my life. I hope you find the kind of success I have."

Soooooo great!

everything you want, everything you need, everything inside of you that you wish you could be

Today I read this post and it resonated:

if there’s one thing I believe more than I believe anything else, it’s that you can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. And because of it, I can only ask the four women who wrote to me with the same question: will you do it later or will you do it now?

Many of us believe that if a situation is perfect on paper, but we're unhappy with it, what needs to change is us. I've had several friends who think if they're at a job that is high-status high-paying high-growth, but they're not happy, then the problem is with them.  Even if the culture is fratty and they are not, or if the culture is extremely critical and they are not, they think that they're unhappy due to a psychological failing rather than a mismatch.

Sometimes it is truly just anxiety pulling you back. Or maybe you are letting what's on paper blind you from the reality of whether you actually want it. I remember a long time ago, driving on 101 while talking to my friend on the phone. I listed out all the ways my then-current romantic relationship should be perfect, how much I respected him and how great he is in so many ways.

My friend said, "Yeah, it turns out that whole list of reasons isn't as important as actually being happy in the relationship."

Wise words. Sometimes hard to follow.

Halloween!

Today at Minted, we had to quickly fix server config, NAS drive, data tables. But costumes were great. We had 99 problems but a witch ain't one!

sherlock

I am obsessed with the BBC show "Sherlock". An acquaintance said that the character Sherlock Holmes has Aspergers.

Sherlock demonstrates low empathy. He has a photographic memory. He can identify all the symptoms of love (dilated pupils, elevated heart rate) but he doesn't say "I love you". There is one woman he is closest to, and he's content with never speaking to her again, as long as she is still alive in the world somewhere.

 I am really intrigued by Sherlock Holmes! I wonder if it is because Silicon Valley idolizes the archetype of the brilliant arrogant immature founder, driven toward utilizing his talents. Sherlock doesn't even care about getting paid. He doesn't want to get famous via Watson's blog. He doesn't care about his personal sacrifice, or endangering his own life. He just wants to do what he's good at. He's just like the dream Silicon Valley founder for VCs!

Painting class

Did this painting on Friday night. I got so displeased after one hour that I threw away my canvas and started over. Much happier with the second version.

Tea fueled musings and quantum cat

I drank chinese tea at dinner, and the caffeine is giving me insomnia.

Starcraft tournament with craft party this Friday at Minted beer o'clock!

Minted has taught me a lot about human relationships (along with startup and business learnings). I get along really smoothly with Melissa. Occasionally I start to get stressed at her, but she will reply with something honest yet calming, and the moment immediately blows over.

I also learned that if someone tries to help but cannot find a way to help, they will often then switch to sabotaging. Most sabotage came from a thwarted desire to help. Find a way for them to help, and the unhealthy channeling into sabotage will often stop.

I learned that much of conflict between two people is caused by a third person gossiping to one of them about the other. Two people can usually resolve many conflicts between them. But when their mind has been biased by another, it can only be undone with conscious effort or the passing of time.

I learned more deeply that perception is lagged. Back when I thought Google was fast-paced and so fun, the outside perception was "Does it make any technology except search? One-trick pony? Does it really make money?" A few years later, it felt slower-paced and less exhilarating to me, but that was actually the height of the external buzz when Google won "best place to work" repeatedly. Minted's growth is so exciting, and public buzz is following suit, with months of lag. It is fun to observe.

I learned that I can love my engineering team more every month, increasing over such a long time. They are so funny and endearing! Either I subconsciously hired partially for humor, or I find them more hilarious because they are dear to me. I keep trying to determine which one it is, and am not sure. I need to do some kind of blind test where I get printouts of their jokes vs a control group, and determine which jokes are funnier.

I learned that it is possible for two coworkers to become frustrated with each other, way past what I previously thought was the point of no return, and then for one heartfelt conversation to turn it around and make them get along better than ever.

I learned that users can be so kind and sweet.

I learned that it is very liberating to be able to be yourself at work and be accepted. Once I interrupted Melissa while she was giving a tour to an important interview candidate. She turned to me expectantly, thinking it was some dire site issue. I said "Sorry for interrupting but I need your RSVP for our chocolate factory tour!" Melissa laughed at me but accepted this impatience. It feels really nice to be accepted for your quirks, not in spite of them.

There are more learnings but now the tea caffeine is finally wearing off. Darn you, Chef Chu jasmine tea!