Andrei Zmievski

All things come to an end, and so does my free, unemployed, wake-up-at-11-if-you-wish bum time. I’m happy to say that come Monday morning I’ll be starting at Digg as their Open Source Fellow. This is an exciting opportunity which will let me dedicate more time to PHP and other open source software, not to mention helping shore up my dwindling savings account.

Digg has a heavy investment in the open source stack and a bunch of really smart people working on it. I’m looking forward to joining the team and sinking my teeth into some very interesting problems. Plus, a major portion of my time will be spent working on PHP itself - yes, that does mean PHP 6 will be a reality that much sooner.

And now I should go take a bike ride and enjoy my remaining leisure time…

UPDATE: This post now really has been Dugg. Oh, the irony of recursion..

All good things come to an end, and thus, November 5 will be my last day at Outspark. It’s been a wild, yet fulfilling ride over the last 17 months. When I was leaving Yahoo, I wanted a challenge and to be closer to the front lines of the business, and my wish definitely came true. Yes, there have been emergencies, frustrations, downtime, and a few crazily surreal moments in the true start-up fashion. But I’m very proud of what I helped build - a virtual playground for online gamers, a destination, a community, and the company that is the leader in its field. I met a lot of great people there and made good friends and I will definitely stay in touch with all of them. Outspark has a bright and interesting future.

As for me personally, it was simply time to move on. I wanted to take some time off to chill, travel, invest some effort into personal development, and reassess my future plans. My last day almost coincides with my birthday, and it feels like a good date to start this new chapter in my life.

P.S. As you noticed, the look and structure of this site has changed. If you can’t find some page you were looking for, please let me know.

This past Friday was my last day at Yahoo!.

I went digging through the archives for a post from the previous time I switched jobs, and the only one I could find was written after I already started at Yahoo!. Nothing from before even hinting that I was job hunting. Perhaps secrecy is a necessary part of this process. At least this time I did drop some clues that I was leaving soon.

In any case, my time at Yahoo! has ended, and suffice it to say that it was a great time. I’ve made a lot of friends, did good work, grown professionally and as a person, and was able to contribute to reaching out to millions of people who use the Yahoo! services. So where am I going next?

I have joined a small start-up in San Francisco called Outspark. Outspark publishes casual online MMORPG games based on a common technology platform. The first game will be hitting closed beta soon, so you should go sign up for it.

Why did I decide to make the switch? Life at Yahoo! was definitely good, but without going into too much detail, I simply wanted to find new, interesting, and challenging work in a somewhat different domain from what I’ve been doing, and I wanted to live in San Francisco. Besides, I know a few people in the company already, some of which are my good friends, so it’s bound to be a great environment.

My joining Outspark does not mean that I will stop work on PHP 6 or related projects. It does mean, however, that I will not necessarily be paid to spend substantial amount of time on it. But then again, I wasn’t being paid to work on it before joining at Yahoo!.

I’ll be moving to San Francisco sometime in July, fully planning to enjoy the entirety of that fantastic city.

And so, it begins.

The new guy in our group at work has been here less than a couple of months. Today he came up to my manager and the following conversation ensued:

New guy: Did L*** quit?? [L*** is a another co-worker]
Manager: No, why?
New guy: His cube is empty.
Manager: Oh, he works remotely from Colorado most of the time.
New guy: Huh.. The map on the sheet posted outside the aisle says someone else is in his cube… Crazy Swede?

Damn, I’m going to miss this place..

Yahoo! Engineering has two immediate openings in its Sunnyvale, CA office.

First opening:

Senior Front-End Developer: Next Generation Traffic-Management Platform

Yahoo! Engineering is seeking a Senior Frontend Developer to join the High Availability / Business Continuity Planning team. In this position, you will be responsible for designing, developing, releasing, and maintaining a new traffic management portal that seamlessly integrates with our next generation, high availability traffic-management technologies. Your application will be used by all Yahoo! operations and engineering to directly monitor, control, and view the traffic flow of Yahoo!’s diverse user base and the utilization of our worldwide operational footprint. The Senior Frontend Developer will be highly self-motivated, innovative, and well versed in new technologies. This position requires a detail-oriented, product-focused professional experienced with building high performance realtime systems in a high-paced, high-volume environment.

Minimum Job Qualifications

Minimum 5-10 years of industry experience producing production-ready, robust, scalable web applications in a Unix environment
BA/BS, preferably in Computer Science or related technical discipline
Expert level HTML, CSS, Javascript
Expert level PHP
Advanced experience with AJAX concepts (XmlHTTPRequest, iframes, JSON, etc)
Advanced experience with Apache web servers
Strong MySQL and/or Oracle skills
In-depth understanding of usability concepts
Proven UI design experience
Solid understanding of performance optimization techniques, object-oriented programming, and standard protocols (HTTP, etc)
Experience in high-volume, critical production service environment
Excellent written and spoken communication skills

Preferable Job Qualifications

Demonstrated history of success on large scale, high availability web projects
Strong C/C++, Perl experience
Strong shell scripting skills

Second opening:

Senior Software Developer: Next Generation Traffic-Management Platform

Yahoo! Engineering is seeking a Senior Software Developer to join the High Availability Engineering team. In this position, you will be responsible for developing next generation, high availability traffic-handling platforms for use by the global Yahoo! product line. As the Senior Software Developer, you will use your experience in all stages of the software life cycle to build robust, scalable systems to improve the customer experience for Yahoo!’s diverse user base. This position requires a detail-oriented, product-focused professional experienced with building high performance realtime systems in a high-paced, high-volume environment.

Minimum Job Qualifications

- Minimum 7-10 years of industry experience programming in a Unix environment
- BA/BS in Computer Science or a related technical discipline from an accredited institution
- Experience in high-volume, critical production service environment
- Expert level C/C++
- Strong skills and experience with network programming and protocols (TCP/IP and UDP)
- Advanced MySQL and/or Oracle experience
- Advanced knowledge and experience with Apache, PHP, and Perl
- Thorough understanding of DNS
- Experience developing and deploying DNS-related technologies
- Experience with BGP
- Senior level Unix systems experience

If any of this sound like your cup of tea and if you want to live in sunny California and work in one of the best companies in the tech arena, send your resume to andrei [at] gravitonic [dot] com and I’ll send it directly to the hiring manager with my recommendation.

By virtue of living in Silicon Valley and working at Yahoo!, I frequently get phone calls or emails from recruiters. Their general expertise and cluefulness range is pretty wide: some are knowledgeable and do their research on my background before contacting me, while others expect that Hey, I have a C#/.NET as well as Java positions in New York City, please get back to me as soon as possible will garner some sort of response. And of course there’s the middle ground. But by and large, the scale is definitely skewed towards the not so good side. I received another “hot” email today:

Hi Andrei,

I am a recruiter in software industry and I work with few exciting
start-ups and other big companies in silicon Valley. I got your resume from internet and would like to discuss about some opportunities in Silicon Valley. Please let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you.

Where to start… First of all, I understand that English might not be this gentleman’s second language. Still, when you contact people on behalf of your clients, you do want to project a professional attitude, and that involves correct grammar and spelling. But even disregarding that, the email is very, very vague. So I applied my patented DeRecruitoMizer™ algorithm to it:

Original: Hi, Andrei
Decoded: My mail merge software tries to be personable. Nifty!

Original: I work with few exciting start-ups
Decoded: I don’t really care that omitting an article conveys a completely ridiculous impression upon the person I am contacting.

Original: I got your resume from internet
Decoded: I, for one, welcome our Google overlords whose mind-bending search technology put your resume in the top 20 results when I typed in “C#”, even though it is mentioned only once in the text under “secondary experience”.

Original: let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you
Decoded: Come on, call me. I know you are desperate for a sucky job in New York City, since you have your resume on the intraweb. You are desperate, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Why won’t you talk to me? Whyyyyyy? <sobbing>

I think that, given the top tech news of the day (hint: the combined service name might be GooTube), I think my response was quite appropriate:

Hi,

Can you still get me into YouTube?

-Andrei

The Developer Tools group at Yahoo! has an opening for a Senior Perl Hacker. Here is the job description:

Are you a motivated Perl hacker?
… a self starter needing little supervisions?
… interested in developer support tools?
Then the platform engineering team is looking for you!

Come join us and build the next generation of host configuration,
package management, and release engineering tools used by Yahoo!
developers worldwide. Ideal candidates should be able to develop
working relationships with members of the various engineering teams at
Yahoo!

Basic Qualifications:
* Perl and Unix is required.

Preferred Qualifications:
* A BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent and 4+ years experience
* Experience with SQL, PHP, Subversion, CVS,
* Perforce, and Makefiles a plus.

Note that this is an on-site full-time position. I used to be in Developer Tools myself and I can attest that they are great bunch of people to work with. If you feel you qualify and are interested in applying, send me your resume and I will forward it to the hiring manager.

This may be known to some of you already, but Sara Golemon, author of runkit, classkit, ssh2, and other PECL packages as well as a regular contributor to PHP core, has started at Yahoo! today. She’ll be working in the Search & Marketplace Group and will be a valuable addition to the team. Welcome, Sara!

Let it be known that Yahoo! engineers are not without a sense of whimsy. Michael Radwin, who is the main engineering manager for my group, has been on paternal leave for the past 3 months. Evidently, his direct reports got somewhat lonely without the attention of the fearless leader and his friendly smile..

Yahoo! has an internal mailing list that started off as a way for employees to buy from and sell things to fellow coworkers. However, over the years it has evolved into a much more diverse tool used for recommendations, rides, advice, offers of services, and general venting and ranting. People even try to sell their houses on it.

Being in a mischievous mood on a slow Friday, I decided to see exactly what one could get away with:

My goal was to make it just plausible enough for people to wonder whether I had a real bulldozer or was simply looking for laughs. Apparently, I made it too authentic, because in about 15 minutes I got a reply from someone (let’s call them Bob):

By this time other replies were rolling in: commenting on the hilarity and absurdity of the ad, offering submarines and space stations for sale in paltry imitation, and complaining about list pollution (losers). I noticed that Bob posted his own ad for a tricked-out RV, which coincidentally was priced at $22,000 as well.

And soon:

Just to mess with their minds a little more, that afternoon I sent another email to the list:

One of the replies:

Indeed.