Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Demand Media buys RSS Graffiti

Demand Media is announcing today their purchase of RSS Graffiti. This is the last week of our El Segundo office. Next monday I'll be working in Santa Monica again. Super exciting.

"Demand Media Acquires RSS Graffiti RSS Graffiti's Talented Engineering Team and Popular Facebook Application to Help Accelerate Demand Media's Social Publishing Strategy"
-- http://www.marketwatch.com/story/demand-media-acquires-rss-graffiti-2011-08-09
"In addition to releasing its Q2 earnings today, content aggregator Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) has made two acquisitions: it’s bought a long-running partner, the blog ad network IndieClick and RSS Graffiti, a Los Angeles-based developer of social media products, primarily Facebook. "
-- http://paidcontent.org/article/419-demand-media-buys-indieclick-for-14-million-expands-google-ad-deal/

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

[Undisclosed Startup], my new gig

I started working for [Undisclosed Startup] in December, after leaving leaving The Rubicon Project in September.

These four months have flown by.

I'm having a blast getting back into Startup mode. Rubicon is doing great but has grown to hundreds of engineers. [Undisclosed Startup] has a single digit number of employees and ~4 engineers. At some point we'll de-stealth and show the world ... awesomeness.

I'm definitely getting to "wear a lot of hats," ranging from code reviews to company goal planning. I'm now much more familiar with amazon ec2. I've lead the push to switch to git (so far, so awesome) and an SVN layout cleanup. I'm doing a bunch of sysadmin-ish tasks (oh how I loathe the term dev-ops, yet here we are) -- dear opscode/Chef, your documentation is all over the place, but the product is neat. Leveraging my dearly earned hadoop knowledge from Rubicon. Maintaining and extending the perl web ui. Picking up python. testing testing testing! Maybe I'll even use my low-level-manager hat?!

Apologies in advance for my dearth of future entries: startup-land takes a lot of time and energy. I do hope I at least write about some of the multitude of research topics I'm digging into.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Included in the End-of-Year message from Caltech President Chameau is this quote from Einstein, delivered in December 1930, on his first visit to Caltech.

"To you all, my American friends, I wish a happy 1931. You are well entitled to look confidently to the future, because you harmoniously combine the joy of life, the joy of work, and a carefree, enterprising spirit which pervades your very being, and seems to make the day's work like blessed play to a child."
---- Albert Einstein, December 1930

May the spirit of joy pervade your life and your work in the coming year! Let us all look confidently and move boldly into the future. Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Aloha Rubicon!

From:    Andrew Grangaard
To:      Rubicon Project
Subject: Aloha Rubicon

Dearest Rubicon Coworkers,

I have moved on from the Rubicon Project, saddened that opening new doors requires closing old ones. A closing of two wonderful years at tRP -- challenges bested, bonds forged and friends earned.

I will miss you all and our shared sense of wonder and excitement at preparing to attack the sleeping google giant. I hope my two years of improvements to infrastructure and fundamentals will aid you in the days and years ahead.

Pacing, RTS, click tracking, proration, scheduling, scheduler v2, scheduler v3, aggregation, merging, hadoop, datacube, svn branch maintenance and svnmerge merging, TDD, unit testing, jira tickets and wiki pages, reproducability, deployment, quality assurance ... I'll miss all my initiatives and projects (I won't miss you, aggregator-multithreaded.pl !!)

Thanks and adieu to my wonderful teammates from my two years on the core team Masao, Bill, Peter, Ian, Subash, Damien, David, Jonathan, Willis, Yushik and my core team leads: Mark Douglas, Damien, Mon-Chaio,, Damien(x2), Mon-Chaio(x2), Karim, Duc(x2) and most recently Sam. Core work is challenging and difficult. I salute the dedication and devotion you have all shown to our team to battle the twin complexities of our problem domain.

James, thanks for working with me during my first week when I was pitching out to help the UI team. Subash, you were a wonderful first week buddy. I hope I was able to help other newRubies the way you helped me. Jonathan, you've been a great desk neighbor and programming pair, even when frustrated you're still unassailably upbeat.

RI team, thanks for fighting to put me your squad and then graciously loaning me back to core for the okanagan push.

Mallory, our Den Mother and Cruise Director, you've done an impressive job of adapting the culture over the two-and-a-half population doubles we've seen in my two years.

Frank and Craig, thanks for always telling it like it is and welcoming my questions. I've never seen this level of internal transparency. I know you'll keep the ship on a steady course.

To my many friends and acquaintances on the other teams: you are family. Look me up any time. Life is so different without you all around everyday. Thanks for always bringing a smile to my face.

Thanks to the many of you that I leaned over the past 13 months through my divorce. Especially to those who did not know the circumstances, yet supported me anyways because that's just what awesome people do. Your strength and support have been invaluable.


Aloha,
Andrew

PS. "woof :(" -- Simba