First Impressions of Pick-a-Prof

1. In a lot of ways, Pick-a-Prof is two companies...in the sense that there are two aspects of it, which reside in literally opposite sides of the office. One half is the development team and their efforts on the website itself, and the other half is university relations, which works with schools and such to get us everything we need. While the two do talk, there's a distinction between the two. Also of some note, the development staff is 100% male, and the university relations staff is 100% female. (That said, everyone gets along very well.)

2. The development staff (and honestly, the entire company) has a really high level of camaraderie. I hear no fighting and no ego, which is really nice. Everyone has been really good about helping me figure everything out, and has been very fun to talk to. Sam makes me laugh more than almost anyone else I've ever known; he's very soft spoken but has this ability to say something dry that bounces off the wall and hits you off the rebound. Today at lunch, we were watching Idiocracy, and he said, "I'm reliving horrible memories of middle school." I thought I was going to choke on my drink.

3. The staff goes to lunch as a unit almost every day. We get lunch to-go and return to the office to eat it, so as to enjoy the time with the folks who decided to bring their lunches.

4. I am not a fan of Yahoo UI (our JavaScript framework standard) right now. I don't see how it's...well, any good. It lacks basic features I'm used to having, forcing me to go the long way around for what should be incredibly simple requests. I've been getting a lot of frustrating errata, and (I feel) spending a lot more time that I should be getting front-end aspects to work. (That said, I can live with it.)

5. We had a baby shower for Keith (my immediate boss, I think) today. His wife Lindsay is six months pregnant. I've never been to a baby shower before but I have always heard that they're just completely atrocious events. This one was co-ed, which likely helped, but I don't think any of the devs really knew what to do. Karen had written a great madlib, though...which was even better when the three words I added were "computer", "whiteboard", and "Antarctica". One of the girls from university relations was saying she'd found a girl that she wanted to hook Chris up with. It was very awkward, but very funny at the same time. When asked why they were a good match, her answer was, "Well, she's your age."

6. There's a very high level of laughter that goes on in that office. It's contagious.