Mapping the Long Tail (of drinking)

It’s hard to believe it’s been over two years, since we’ve last had a Spontaneous Drinking Night—an event with only two rules: a weeknight and less than twenty four hours notice.

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Spontaneous Drinking Founders (minus one)
House of Shields, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G, SB-800
1/30sec @ f/2.2 iso3200, 50mm

Cindy Phung, Andrew Mager, and Robert Balousek. Only one founder is missing from this photo.

But Greg was visiting and House of Shields may be closing soon so we had to schedule a reunion.
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Join Kiva for a Developer Drink-up

Image:Kiva.org logo.svg

Halle is interning at Kiva, which, given her personality, I figure is her dream internship.

Kiva is a microfinance site for the poor that allows anyone to give flat-rate microloans via PayPal. As a coincidence of the “I seem to have a lot of cash” and my New Year’s resolution to be a more responsible person, I’ve recently started to put a tiny fraction of my income into Kiva. You can view my lender page here to see that I currently participate in 17 microloans.

I mention all this because Kiva will be sponsoring a Developers Happy Hour this Thursday at their headquarters in San Francisco. Considering I give 5% of my money lent back to Kiva, I’m going for the drinks. 🙂

(Find out more about the concept from Muhammad Yunus’s Nobel lecture, the FrontLine program on social entrepreurship, conservative columnist Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the New York Times, and the books Banker To the Poor, and Creating a World Without Poverty.)

Continue reading about Moneywatch.com after the jump

PHP is a dying language

Friend: http://twitter.com/markscrap/status/1228353533
Me: 10 to 1 whatever kid wrote that is a ruby developer
Friend: haha

I’m just stating the obvious. When the first computer was invented, the legendary Grace Hopper created the first compiled programming language. That language is still around and is still popular today!

Programming languages don’t “die,” they proliferate.

And when a person makes blanket statements like, “PHP is a dying language,” it allows me to a make blanket statement about that person’s programming preferences and maturity.

The difference is, my statement is probably right.

Senior software Engineer at CBS Interactive

Another PHP job forwarded to me from Linda Lee and Andrew Mager, this time from CBS Interactive (née CNET).

Company: CBS Interactive (formerly CNET networks)
Title: Sr. Software Engineer
Division: GameSpot.com, TV.com, MP3.com
Location: San Francisco, CA

CBS Interactive is looking for Sr. Software Engineers in their Games, Entertainment and Lifestyles division—including GameSpot.com, TV.com, MP3.com and Chow.com. These engineers will play a key role within our development team. Responsibilities will extend to any of the applications associated with division’s initiatives. Real world experience and expertise with Linux, PHP, and MySQL are an absolute must, but a deep understanding of all web technologies from a technical and product perspective is also very important.

Please check out the job description here. You can apply online or email Linda directly at linda [dot] lee [at] cnetnetworks [dot] com.

Have you hugged your engineer?

I was browsing through Facebook and I ran across Andrew Mager’s profile photo again. This time it was taken at the CNET holiday party.

I’ve been saying for a while now that I’m just going to compile all of his Facebook profile photos into a book and make bank. But I had to blog this one, which gives you an idea of what I’m talking about:

Besides, Andrew Mager, the people in the photo are Jessica Dolcourt, Caroline McCarthy, and Erica Ogg—all writers at CNET Networks in SF.

I took one look at this and wanted to tell Libby and Linda that they should use this photo for CNET’s recruiting material, this way they’ll have no trouble hiring engineers. 😀 This reminds me that a little birdy told me that they’re looking for a PHP architect.

[more random thoughts after the jump]Continue reading