It was a little over a year ago that I interviewed for my current job here at Compendium. It started out as a fluke. I saw a short-lived job announcement that a recruiter had posted to a technical employment board, and the list of skills and technologies floored me... Agile development? Amazon Web Services? LAMP stack? Surely this was too good to be true! It read more like a job posting for somewhere
other than Indy, perhaps San Francisco or Seattle, but not here. Indianapolis was the land of .NET and Java EE development within a staid corporate environment.
Although the announcement disappeared after a day or two, my interest did not. I decided to use long tail search queries involving phrases from the job announcement to see if I could figure out what company might have been advertising the role. A combination of references to Amazon Web Services and Indianapolis turned up a
post on a personal blog maintained by Blake Matheny, who had hired on with Compendium a couple months before. The post mentioned how he had recently moved to the area, was looking for new talent, and wanted to hear from people who might be interested.
I had a good idea he might have something to do with the job announcement, so I e-mailed him using the contact address for the blog, telling him:
At first glance, my work experience might not be a perfect match, but I have a track record for adaptability and the ability to learn new things. I also believe that the skills you're looking for constitute a career direction that I would like to pursue, especially with respect to web technology and agile software development. I also happen to be local to Indianapolis.
That was the start of a conversation that would lead to two interviews and eventually a job offer. As you might have guessed, I gladly accepted and have been here since.
Startups can be demanding. I knew that coming into this role because I had worked at a startup the previous two years, a place that had big ideas but not enough resources and discipline to execute on them. But I also knew that my unusual software development background, which involved small companies and lots of original development work, made me a good match for the kind of things startups do. In sort, Compendium is the kind of place that I could thrive in... and I have done so.
Over the course of almost 11 months, I have worked with a large number of technologies... PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, Amazon SQS, Google Visualizations, the Yahoo User Interface library, XSLT, XML/HTML DOM, memcache, XML-RPC web services, RSS search feeds, just to name a few. Early on in the job, I told Blake that this job seemed like a professional fountain of youth for me, and I still feel that way to this day.
Within our group there is a culture of professional development. We do more than just write code. We have regularly scheduled reading group meetings where we can talk about technologies that we could incorporate into future versions of our application. We also have regular code reviews where we get a chance to improve our skills and codify our own set of guidelines and best practices.
So, on a day where we set aside time to express gratitude for the good things in our lives, I would have to say that this job is among them. But it wouldn't stop there...
There are a lot of startups with neat ideas and fun technologies, but a lot of them don't survive. Difficult economic times make the body count all the higher. When I was considering Compendium for employment, I did some homework, recalling stories I had seen about
Chris Baggott and Compendium over the course of 2007. Chris' experience as an ExactTarget co-founder was a strong point because he had been successful in getting a startup off the ground.
Moreover, having been a reader and author of blogs in the past, their message about the potential for corporate blogging made sense. After all, it was through search that I had found Blake's blog. The company has done well over the past year, with progress that would make most startups green with envy. We've managed to do all of this in spite of the tumutuous economic condtions. Whereas big names like
Technorati and
SixApart are cutting salaries and trimming budgets, we're
looking for new people.
So I am also thankful that I work for a company that is as well run as it was well conceived.
Finally, I am thankful for my coworkers. Within my own department, Blake has done a great job of putting together a technical team that works well together, even when things get stressful. There is a shared sense of humor, perhaps a bit quirky at times (a paper DUNCE cap, a junk food laden trip to the State Fair, an inflatable sword have all been involved) that helps us keep our sanity. We get a lot done, but we do so with a lot of laughs throughout the day. The other departments are pretty cool, too. As I learned on the
company rafting trip in late July, even though I am a bit older than most of them,
they still don't have any issues with me hanging with them. :-)
So, yeah, I do have a lot to be thankful for.