The Ballad of the Takoneko

With a new year comes changes. This year, there just happened to be a few more than in past ones—for today is my first day at GitHub.

First impressions?

1. Well, apparently my Campfire-fu isn’t up to snuff¹.
2. My window management skills don’t scale.
3. Desperately need an image of a Pokémon battle between the Django Pony and the Octocat.

In all seriousness, today is an exciting day for me for many reasons:

1. This’ll be the first full-time job I’ve had in almost 5 years.
2. I’ll be working with long-time friends Kyle Neath and Eston Bond on awesome designs and hopefully learning from some of the best developer minds in our industry.
3. I’ve been a user of GitHub for over 2 years and there are days where I check it more often than Twitter.

Needless to say, GitHub means a lot to me. While I was originally quite stuck to Subversion and entp’s Warehouse at first because I “wanted to host everything myself,” a good amount of prodding from various people got me on there. GitHub is the place that has kept my development of Hello! Ranking safe for the past 2 years. I’ve watched over 300 repositories, attempting to further myself as a developer on all fronts front-end, back-end or server-end.

Could this have happened with any other service? Sure! (But it didn’t.) :)

As time went on, I learned about GitHub’s culture. To make a potentially long blab a bit shorter, GitHub is run the way I would have wanted Revyver to be run if the stars aligned correctly—bootstrapped, casual, open and free of “suits.”

So when the offer finally game to me², there was no way I could refuse.

Now that I’m here, what do I plan to do?

Well, make with the awesome of course. Great minds inspire and the fact that I’m surrounded by them will prove to be a boon for my design “rut” as of late. There are a lot of itches that need to be scratched and the team knows that, now with some extra manpower, we can all move forward to make your social coding experience that much more useful.

I believe I’m the first hire (so far) with a background in Python and not Ruby, so I’ll be sure to start recoding the site in Django and terrorize the Disqus office with ponies… I mean, keeping my eyes open for ways I can make the life of a Pythonista (Djangonaut or not) even more comfortable on Github. :)

There’s a lot of awesome going on, and I’m honored to be a part of it. And you can be damn sure that I’ll attempt to inject a little of my Japanese fanboy-ism along the way³.

(Oh, and I guess we’ll see how long I can last before learning any Ruby. ¬_¬;)