I’ve been working with the founders, Dave Margulius and Andrew Sutherland (student at MIT), for around 6 months remotely and on short term trips as a contractor, and have now decided to accept an offer with the team full-time.  I’ll be responsible for developing new features on both websites, improving user experience, increasing monetization, and overall growing the businesses.

Quizlet.com is a studying website that lets students make flashcards online and study in a more effective and more fun way.  The site serves over a million students each month, has over 750,000 registered users, and has over 50 million user-generated flash cards.  As only the second developer on Quizlet, I’m excited to grow the website in huge ways and spend most of my time helping make studying better for a lot of people.

Collectors Weekly is a resource for all things collecting, antiques, and vintage.  It’s a combination of great original content and providing tools to browse eBay in a better way (SuperBrowse example).  I just helped launched its new geo-targetted events section and will spend about one third of my time developing new features for this site.

Both websites run on the LAMP stack.  I’ll be working heavily with Apache, PHP, JavaScript / Ajax, MySQL, Memcache, Sphinx, etc. to help grow traffic and features in a scalable way.  A decent number of the interesting technologies that I used for the first time in 2009 were a result of working with these guys.

This is an exciting time and a big opportunity for me as I’ll be able to significantly impact the growth and success of the startup.  It will also nice to be able to focus all my work attention in one direction rather than juggling many projects, as I’ve just graduated from UF and won’t be continuing freelance web work.  And of course, moving to San Francisco from Florida will be a big change and I’m excited, although I’ll still get to fly back every so often.  Wish me luck!

Wednesday 5/27/2009

San Francisco, CA #io2009

Better liveblogging here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/27/live-from-google-io-2009/

100x improvement in JavaScript speed in the last decade

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, & Opera – all supporting HTML5 with Canvas, Video, Geolocation, App cache / database, Web workers

Canvas tag – supported in all but IE

Bespin – web IDE

Chrome profiler is built completely in HTML5

O3D – OpenSource 3d in JavaScript

Video tag – get video out of “plugin prison”

YouTube demo with <video> tag

Geolocation – supported in all browsers but IE

Mozillia VP – “A good API in 4 browsers is better than a perfect API in 0 or 1 browsers”

Google Maps will soon be adding a geolocation button

Announcement: Google Latitude on the iPhone in the browser using geolocation (WOW)

App cache / database – supported in all browsers but IE

Demo: with Safari – manifest file names cached application/graphics files

Demo: web app on Android with GMail in airplane mode – extremely fast

Web workers – threads in the browser – so JavaScript doesn’t completely freeze the browser

Demo: motion detection from the video tag all in JavaScript

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Google App Engine

200,000+ developers, 80,000 + applications

Whitehouse app had 700 requests/second with no problem

Announcement: Java open on App Engine

Demo: develop an Ajax app in Eclipse (with Google plugin) in Java on both serverside (app engine) and client side (GWT) extremely quickly.  Just hit deploy (no FTP) in Eclipse.

Google Web Toolkit

Upcoming: Debug directly in any browser

Upcoming: runAsync() lets the compiler split up JavaScript files.  Example: 1.4MB to 200KB, compiler handled dependencies itself.

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Google Web Elements (announcement)

Copy and paste website content:

Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, etc.

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Android - coming soon new features

FREE ANDROID for everyone!

I learned a lot at Google. I did a combination of development for the front-end (JavaScript/AJAX, CSS/HTML) as well as on the back-end (PHP, Java). Every line of code that I wrote was code reviewed by another Googler before it could be checked in. At first I thought this was an unnecessary and time-wasting procedure, but I came to understand the importance of this, even for the seemingly unimportant pieces of code. When you know someone else is going to be looking at your code, it forces you to program more clearly and concisely, and I learned better coding techniques from the code reviews. Also, by ensuring that all code at Google conforms to the same style guides, any engineer can quickly jump into someone else’s code with the smallest possible learning curve.

My software engineering internship was pretty unique and flexible because of the team that I was on, so I also had the opportunity to do a good bit of UI (user interface) work. I designed from scratch, improved existing UIs, and did research and make recommendations for better UIs. My other team members (here’s two) were very talented and I was able to learn a lot just by working along side them. Working at a company like Google is great because you are constantly surrounded by very intelligent people.

It is a great feeling to know that you’re working at a company which is providing products and services that millions of people use every day. It is an even better feeling to know that your work is directly being used and liked by real people. At Google, while doing research for one of my projects, I had an idea that would help save other Googlers time and make them more productive. Without getting into details about the project itself, after about 1,000 lines of JavaScript, I had created something that a lot of Googlers started using, talking about, and sharing with others. It wasn’t a world changing application that is being launched externally any time soon, but it was useful enough that we could actually see it spreading virally throughout the company, and I got over 100 thank you emails within a few days. I can only imagine the great feeling it would have been to create an external product (like GMail), that millions of people love and use daily.

Another great part of the summer was the opportunities for networking. I was able to visit Meebo for another great lunch2.0, visited the offices of Facebook a couple times, met the creator of Mint (which I think is my favorite web2.0 app of the year), attended WordCamp, and attended the Techcrunch Party 9 at August Capital. It was also great seeing, meeting, and hanging out with a lot of other young people working in the web space – other Google interns, friends at Yahoo! and eBay, those doing startups, others working in the Bay Area, and friends who flew out to visit.
Overall, I’d give the summer a thumbs up. For now, I’m back in Gainesville studying Computer Engineering at UF, where the weather is significantly hotter. A lot of people have asked me about next summer and what I want to do when I graduate. I still do not know. I could definitely see myself at a company like Google, but for now I am just looking forward to a new semester at school and am not making any definite plans yet.

The event was a lot of fun – we “made media” for the Time Capsule. We had a big mobile scavenger hunt by The Go Game and ended up with some funny video (it’s long) and pictures (full photoset). Go team super6 (we won)! We then had some great food and a workshop on Flickr and Jumpcut. It is clear that Yahoo! is about social media.

Next up was some unscheduled fun with Bre from Make who set up his balloon aerial photography unit (here’s a great photo). It was crazy letting loose a digital camera attached only to a big bunch of balloons and a line of 1000 feet of string.

Monday night was a dinner, thanks to Paul, with David Ulevitch and Allison Rhodes from OpenDNS. We had a great dinner and conversation as well. If you haven’t already, go set up OpenDNS now (it will only take 1 minute) for a better, safer, and faster internet. OpenDNS protects users from phishing scams, and if I type example.cmo, I will automatically be redirected to my intended domain.

Overall it was a great trip. It is always good to catch up with friends from Yahoo! and hang out with fellow previous interns like Paul, Richard, Doreen, and Britta. (And can’t forget some good In and Out burger with Jason Katzer)

I also got to work with talented engineers at Yahoo! and learn a lot. I was able to take a half dozen courses on various front-end engineering topics to either refine my skills or teach me new stuff while I was there. I was able to see what the workflow in a large organization (a company of 12,000 people) is like – the good and the bad – and work on projects for a company which impacts half of the world’s internet users every month. Yes, they are still more popular than MySpace.

Having intern events with nearly 200 other interns was fun too. It was great being able to meet and become good friends with a bunch of talented young people. Thanks to this crazy new toy called the “internet,” hopefully we will be able to stay in contact.

What now? Back to school and doing freelance work. I’ve got a decent school schedule this semester: Differential Equations honors, Applications of Discrete Structures, Circuits I, Java II, and Technical Writing for Engineers. I’ll be moving in my Gainesville apartment in about a week and will be building a loft for my tiny bedroom…. more on that later hopefully.

Freelance work is starting to come back on strong with a few programming projects starting up for designer friends. I just launched a new dynamic website for UF Campus Crusade. The site is a redesign of an aged site, now written with CSS and web standards in mind. While building upon the existing PHP backend, I have also added some new features and increased usability. I did not have time to do everything I wanted to on it this summer, but hopefully it will still serve as a great resource and advertising for the UF ministry of 300+ students.

Today was good. I met up with Dimitry, Bryan Veloso, and Paul Stamatiou (another Yahoo! intern) and went to a car show in San Francisco to show of Bryan’s sweet ride. After, the three Y! interns headed over to BarCamp San Francisco upstairs in a Microsoft building downtown. It was a good time meeting and hearing from some people in the industry. Later, Will Pate rode Caltrain back with us and gave us a tour (photos) of the Flock offices (thanks Will!).

My name is … and I’m a recruiter with Yahoo. When you have a free moment I would like to discuss Front End Engineering positions we have open. When might be a good time to speak?

Many phone calls and emails later, I got a (generous) offer letter packet in the mail and accepted it, but it had not been an easy decision. I already had several opportunities to stay in Jacksonville with family and friends, to work on a project of my own, do freelance, or possibly repeat my internship from last year. However, this was an opportunity I decided would be foolish to pass up. A job at the headquarters of the world’s most popular website doing what I love, while gaining great experience for myself, my resume, and picking up a good bit of cash.

PS – thanks to everyone who helped show me that this was an opportunity not to miss. And thanks to Chris Dawson who reminded me to check for cheap Kappa Sigma housing in CA, so that I’m not actually losing money by working out here. Photos of “my crib” are available.

So here goes. Expect semi-frequent ramblings about my life, web development, college, interning at Yahoo!, entrepreneurship, and anything else I feel like.