Hasselt University

After working at Nascom for a very brief time, I will soon start working at Acquia! I’ll be working on the Spark project as a Senior Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), reporting directly to Dries!

Why I left Nascom

I chose Nascom because I felt it was the best fit for me. I really preferred working for a Belgian company. Nascom seemed to have it all¹, but in the end, it was not a good match. I still stand by my choice of Nascom being the best possible choice I could have made, when limiting my choices to Belgian companies. They’re great. But the spark was missing for me.

On January 2, I announced that I was looking for a job. Since that announcement, I’ve talked with >65 companies. I’ve had actual interviews with >30 of them. Most of them are based out of Belgium, some were remote. Many were Drupal shops, several were start-ups (some of which from Belgium, but most of which from the U.S.) but there were also many different types of companies. From very small to very big. So much choice!

(Also see The Paradox of Choice.)

Startup

Whenever I felt that a company was interested in possibly pursuing the start-up idea that I have had for a long time, I pitched it. The few times that I did this, there was a lot of enthusiasm. But only one company really pushed forward in pursuing this: Nascom. Funny enough, this also happened to be the company that offered me the most interesting, versatile and challenging job. This made me realize that a start-up (in Belgium!) might not be as unrealistic as I had first thought.

The time has finally come.

I’m looking for a job!

After ±5 years of hard work at Hasselt University, I will graduate as a master in computer science next month. I finished my master thesis and courses in June 2011 and have just completed my internship at Facebook a few weeks ago (on December 16). I’ve received an awesome job offer to work full-time at Facebook.

But my super-duper awesome girlfriend, Anneleen, is studying medicine here in Belgium. If she’d continue to study medicine in the U.S., she’d have to start all over, so that’s not really an option (not to mention the ridiculous costs). This summer, we’ll move in together in a (yet to be found) apartment in Leuven, Belgium.
Also, I just like Europe better than the United States.

I’ve already talked to several companies, months ago and more recently, but since there are so many interesting companies, projects and challenges out there, I decided to write this blog post.

My main interests (and areas of expertise) are:

• WPO (Web Performance Optimization): making websites faster
• Drupal
• data mining

Want to talk to me? Contact me at http://wimleers.com/contact.

Wrapping up

My last week at Facebook … it seemed so long until I could finally return to my beloved Anneleen. Simultaneously, time seems to have flown by. And by now, I had grown accustomed to living in the United States.

Anyway, on the first day of this week, I had lunch with Steve Souders at Google. It was an interesting peek at Google’s way of dealing with performance, how it differs from Facebook in general and … how the food differs. We had lunch in Google’s largest cafeteria — it had a very diverse offering!

They also had an awesome T-rex replica in front of building 43. The flamingos that are swarming all over it are not real, for what it’s worth.

This week at Facebook

On Monday, I worked on getting my code committed and tied up many loose ends. I got very positive feedback from my manager! :)
(This is the feedback based upon which I would or would not get an offer).

I then struggled until about midnight with getting a subtree of one git repository merged into a new subtree in another git repository. Because this other git repository (Facebook’s) was many gigabytes in size and this was a non-trivial task (at least for somebody who’s not a git-adept), I had to undo my changes a few times. Thus I had to wait several times for many minutes. Very frustrating to say the least. I also created a list of the things that still needed to be done for a MVP (minimum viable product), as my manager had requested.

Static build of Qt: VICTORY!

On Monday, I finally got Qt committed (if you’ve been reading my blog, then you’ll know that I started this two weeks ago). It cost me about five full work days.

Funny note about git (the Qt build must be committed to a massive ‘third party code’ repository): interactive rebasing (git rebase -i) would result in out of memory errors … on a (shared) dev server with 64 GB RAM, of which 15 GB was free. Yes, that implies >15 GB of RAM was necessary. git doesn’t seem to perform particularly well for doing diffs over hundreds of files at the same time, especially if there are also binary files among them.

On Tuesday, I again fought with git, because there was a tiny glitch in the Qt build that had gotten committed: a wrong --prefix parameter had been passed, causing an in correct QT_INSTALL_PREFIX being baked into qmake and other Qt binaries…

My ninth week here can be summarized very briefly: the work week was very short. Thanks to Thanksgiving on Thursday, we got off on Thursday and Friday. From Monday through Wednesday, I pulled long hours again, and very frustrating ones at that. Getting a statically linked Qt (which I already talked about last week) built turns out to not be a sinecure…

On Thursday, I staid at home and worked on organizing photos I took and worked on getting some blog posts out. I also suffered from a severe neck pain that had been getting worse over the preceding days: it went away by Thursday evening and didn’t come back.
Seems like a pretty clear correlation between sitting extremely frustrated behind a computer and neck pain to me.

Thanksgiving

My manager had invited me to come to his place in San Francisco, to celebrate Thanksgiving. I felt like I’d be intruding their family sphere, but apparently that happens on Thanksgiving itself (the night before), the day after is usually reserved for a more relaxed, less formal version of Thanksgiving among friends. So I went.