I’m a Former HubSpot Engineering Co-op. Here’s Why I Chose to Work Here Full Time.
“Wow, that sounds like real work.”
Lots of folks have work dreams, in fact around the office we like to share our more bizarre dreams with one another to determine who is most likely going insane each sprint. I figured I'd share some of my most recent and most interesting dreams here!
Dream 1:
So there I am in the office with our CIO and another developer trying to solve some rather nasty bugs in our application that handles the creation of new user accounts and spinning up their HubSpot portal. We keep discussing the issue of scalability and how it's just not going to be able to handle the throughput for the rate our business is growing. As we're discussing this, someone keeps going behind a nearby desktop computer and removing plates full of pizza crusts. Finally I stop the conversation:
Me: "Why are they removing all of those pizza crusts from that machine?"
CIO: "That's the sign up application's box, it runs on pizza, didn't you know?"
Other dev: "Yeah, that's the scalability issue, it eats pizzas too fast for us to clean out the old crusts. No one can be here all the time to get the plates out before it starts to get clogged."
[Eddie, another developer and a very good friend of mine, walks by eating a plate of the app's pizza crusts and waves at me.]
Me: "Maybe we can get Eddie to eat the crusts faster?"
Other dev: "I don't know...I think that would buy us some time, but probably won't scale forever."
Me: "So..why exactly does it eat pizza?"
[Silence]
CIO: "Not sure, but it needs pizza, and we don't have time to fix that part right now..."
Dream 2:
I'm dreaming in RRDTool logs. I'm not kidding, I'm completely stuck in code, I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, but I can't get our data to record properly. It just won't work. For the life of me, I know the configuration is completely correct.
Finally I force my dream to stop reading RRDTool config info and instead look at my cron scripts, which were setup wrong. The data is better. My sanity is questionable as I wake up wondering why the RRDTool suddenly makes noises similar to my alarm clock...
Dream 3:
[This requires a little context, my particular scrum team is currently embroiled in a complete rewrite of one of our C# apps in Java]
I'm at my dojo (not that I have a dojo I go to in real life), and I'm training with a group of other people to fight our foe. Our swords must swing fast and precisely or else we will be overtaken immediately. Our swords are katanas and of the highest quality, for they are Java(TM) swords. They can strike exactly as we wish them to, but without training, it is useless and clumsy.
We practice over and over, until the time is at hand. Our final test, is to face the wielder of the double edged sword known only as C#. He is swift, brutally strong and very determined to never lose a battle. I am forced to do battle in the dojo itself, then in the outdoors, then in the land of cron scripts (oddly enough, this land is not the same as the one in the previous dream), and finally we in some room which looks rather similar to my web browser. Just as I am about to strike a winning blow against the foe, I am awakened by the sound of bells ringing and ringing again...I have not defeated C#, I have only
postponed the final duel until we meet again!
Dream 4:
[Note: HubSpot uses the Hibernate ORM for a lot of our Java web apps]
I can't make the phone stop ringing. It's the hibernate configuration calling, but I don't want to answer the call. It keeps ringing. I change all the variables. No matter how many times I set the hibernate.call_stephen_while_sleeping variable to false, it keeps ringing. I don't even know where the setting could be getting overridden! Finally I start looking at garbled source code and realize it's a dream. Then I realize that the sound of the phone is real. Then I realize it's not Hibernate calling at all, it's my brother, a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan, calling me at 2am on a satellite phone! He's just calling to say hi, no messages from Hibernate *phew*.
Anyone else have some awesome dreams like this?
