hedgehoglab

“SIMON! Introduce yourself!”
No way!
“Introduce yourself…”
Ok! …I’m Si! …the new guy! …be nice to me cos I’m shy!

Erm, yeah..anyway. “People” have been nudging me to get on the ol’ blogaroonie to say “Hi”, but apparently, that modern masterpiece above wasn’t enough / could be considered slightly creepy.

As you may have gathered, I’m Simon… or Si… or the douchemeister general, and I too am a new hedgehog lab employee. My official title is, “Director, Research & Development”, but that’s only cos “Code Playboy” was taken. By Sarat. It essentially means that I get to dabble with different technologies and tell people about them. Just to give some context of what I mean by “different technologies”: I’m a huge fan of Python and the Django framework, I think that XMPP has a lot of potential with regards to APIs, and I believe that data portability is going to be huge.

A couple more important (and somewhat religious) tidbits: I’m a Linux guy myself (they’ve already got me setting up Ubuntu servers up here), and my editor of choice is VIM (not double jointed enough for that OTHER one).

I have joined from a larger company, where I worked as a front-end developer of sorts for about 18 months. Being at hedgehog lab is a completely different ball game: in a smaller company you contribute to pretty much every area, whether that’s saying “good idea, let’s go with it!”, suggesting an alternative, setting up a Ubuntu server, configuring software, fixing a bug, or playing with some wireframes, I have done it. All in the space of a month.

That has its good points and its bad (primarily that there’s always work to be done!), but it gives me the impression of having more input, and the lack of any major approval hierarchy (beyond, “Sarat am I ok to try this…?”) sees a very quick turnaround in getting stuff from idea stage to reality.

Needless to say, it’s great at the lab. I hope to bring you a new entry (hopefully with more substance) in the near future.

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