Recent Excitement
So I've been back in Seattle for 2 weeks. It's been an exciting time, with many adventures to tell tales of. But where to begin? Hmm... Ah! I know!
When me and my roommate moved in, we realized that we'd vastly underestimated how unfurnished an "unfurnished" apartment really was. All we had was the standard household machines - fridge, microwave, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer. No furniture of any kind - no couches, no tables, no chairs, and NO BEDS. We didn't even have shower curtains! So, we went right to work finding furniture solutions, and we decided to rent from a place a few blocks from our house. We had to sleep on the floor until the furniture finally came, which turned out to be an entire week! I used to complain about making my bed, but boy does it feel good to have a bed to make!
Now we're almost civilized! We've got food, plates to eat it on, tables to put the plates on, chairs to sit in, beds to sleep in... man, we've got it all! We even found a free TV on craigslist! It's been a pretty wild ride getting all settled without the corporate housing option...
We bought one of the most amazing contraptions ever to put in our house. Notice who uploaded those photos ;). That's also the feature that I'm working on at work: the Customer Image Uploads stuffs. Go ahead and mouseover the pictures and see all the beautiful JavaScripty goodness! :D
I just submitted my very first feature today. I even got it past the code review stage! Hopefully it'll go into production soon enough (that's SDE talk for "I hope users will be able to see it on the website soon enough"). It's pretty exciting to have something cool like that done in the first 2 weeks of work! That being said, please feel free to make suggestions to me about how to improve the Customer Image Uploads feature, or any other part of the Amazon.com site, for that matter. If I can't fix it myself (which will likely be the case, given that I have an assignment to do and deadlines to do it by), I can at least find out who to route it to and get it taken care of (eventually).
Aside from all that, we've been enjoying ourselves here in the city. The weather's been spectacular - sunny, low 70's to high 80's with negligible humidity. We've been visiting all our favorite restaurants, like "Mexico", "The Old Spaghetti Factory", and "Roti", as well as finding some new ones, like "Phuket" (pronounced however you like ;)). I saw Pirates 3 in a really awesome theater - bigger than the Statler Auditorium, for you Cornellians. It's awesome, btw - much better than the 2nd one. Other than that, just hanging out and stuff.
Alright, I've run out of quick-overview type stuff to talk about. Feel free to comment/IM/email/call me if you wanna chat about something in more detail. I'll be posting more soon!
Jack