,---. ,---. ,---. ,---. ,---. ,---. ,--------------. / Sun \ / Mon \ / Tue \ / Wed \ / Thu \ / Fri \ / Sat and Beyond \ ,-'-------`--'-------`--'-------`--'-------`--'-------`--'-------`--'------------------`-. | | | My name is Matt Wickline. I'm local. Welcome 2pdx :) | | Find me at OSCON 2007. Say hello. Please enjoy some delicious fudge (every day)! |

| | | Sunday July 22nd 2007... | | | | ... I dropped off five pounds of fudge for the O'Reilly staff as I picked up my bag | | and schwag at early registration. Thanks for bringing yet another OSCON 2pdx :) |

| | | Monday July 23rd 2007... | | | | ... When I'm not in a tutorial, I'll be walking about with a pyrex pan of goodness. | | Looking for something chocolatey to go with your morning cup of joe? See me. Need a | | blood sugar supplement to ward off an afternoon siesta? Please help yourself. How | | did you ever get through the day before you discovered the joys of fudge? | | | | [update 10:15am] Nice. I distributed over half a pan during the break. I'm sure the | | rest will be gone early in the lunch break (more folks in the hall at lunch time and | | also more folks who had fudge earlier seeking resupply). I suspect that Wednesday I | | will run out of fudge before lunch. | | | | [update 1:35pm] At some point much earlier (early in the lunch break), I passed out | | the last fudge from the first pan. Tomorrow brings another day and more fresh fudge. |

| | | Tuesday July 24th 2007... | | | | ... Another day, another fresh pan of yum. Tell your friends so they can get some | | too before the supply runs out. Maybe five pounds is enough for the lighter crowds | | on Monday and Tuesday, but maybe it's not. Better play it safe and get fudge early | | and often. | | | | [update 10:23am] I got in just in time to sit down before the session started, so I | | did not get to give any away in the early pre-tutorials time. I did, however pass | | out two thirds of a pan in the first break. The rest will likely be gone before I | | down to eat lunch. If you're in need of a fix, catch me leaving Portland 251 at the | | lunch break or you might have to wait until tomorrow. | | | | [update 1:28pm] I was sitting for a longer while at lunch than yesterday, so the | | fudge lasted a bit longer. Only a few folks were able to track me down in the lunch | | hall while I was seated. In any case, today's fudge is gone. More tomorrow :) |

| | | Wednesday July 25th 2007... | | | | ... Ah, yes, the first day of the sessions. Crowds will certainly be much heavier on | | this day, but most of the folks here won't know about your fudge supply. Those who | | were here earlier in the week will be handicapped by the thick crowds. Opportunistic | | fudge samplers will fare less well than the determined hunter. Find me for fudge. If | | Monday and Tuesday were such light days that there were leftovers, I'll be bringing | | them in on this day, but I'm sure that there will be no leftovers after Wednesday. | | Ack! No leftover fudge... what a horrible thought! But who needs it when the next | | day always brings a fresh pan? | | | | [update 10:00am] We're most of the way throught the opening keynotes at this point. | | By the time they started, I had only a couple rows of fudge remaining. I expect that | | the remainder will be gone before the start of the first session. | | | | [update 11:35am] After leaving the keynotes, I walked to the perl foundation booth. | | By the time I got there, there were only a few pieces left, which I left for them to | | enjoy. I have not yet made it back to pick up my pan, but I'm sure it's empty now. | | | | [update 8:35pm] I left the pan there until the lunch break. I was astonished to | | discover a few remaining pieces. I guess they were all too polite to eat the last of | | the pan. I handed out the few bits left before I went to eat. |

| | | Thursday July 26th 2007... | | | | ... This may be hard for those habituated to the amounts of dopamine released by the | | nucleus accumbens while ingesting their favorite chocolate confection. Not only will | | the convention hall be as full as Wednesday, but an even larger number of those | | masses will be draining the constant supply of one pan of fudge per day. Should you | | be addicted, watch for me to arrive on the west-bound Max. Get your fix then and | | pocket an extra piece or two to get you through the rest of the day in case I'm out | | the next time you see me. | | | | [update 10:38am] I left the keynote sessions in the ballroom, heading straight for | | my next session to be sure it did not fill up (keynotes went long leaving only 15min | | and it's in a small room). By the time I sat down, I had only a few pieces left. | | after the session, I'm in the same room for the next session. Come find me in E145 | | if you need fudge. I'm sitting up front (on the floor). I'll give out the rest on | | the way to lunch if I have any left. | | | | [update 2:59pm] Oh, yeah. It was gone before I made it to the exhibition hall for | | lunch. More friday. |

| | | Friday July 27th 2007... | | | | ... The last day of OSCON 2007, and only half a day to score enough of a stash last | | until your next fix. Hmmmm... When would that next fix be? Cold turkey? What? Don't | | say things like that! There's always a way to get more free homemade fudge, right? | | | | [update 6:11am] This morning I walked by a headline proclaiming the worst Wall | | Street decline of '07. It was no doubt driven by tech sector concerns regarding the | | diminishing fudge supply. I'm not bringing the laptop today, so the exciting mid-day | | updates you've grown to love will not be forth-coming. | | | | [update 2:33pm] Gone before the keynotes started. |

| | | Saturday July 28th 2007 (and beyond) ... | | | | ...OK, I'm leaving town Friday to attend a wedding on Saturday. I'm bringing a pan | | fudge to the reception. If you can get yourself invited, you're set for another day. | | That doesn't work for you? Well, I do bring fudge to work every so often. Would you | | like to have a job writing great software and occasionally eating great fudge? | | | | Rentrak's team of software developers has been growing since at least 2003 (when I | | was hired). We've got a large field of interesting projects in the queue and require | | only sufficient talented person-hours to distribute across that field. Some of the | | things I most love about my job are: | | | | * It's in Portland. This is a great city, as you've probably started to see. | | | | * I work with a large number of incredibly bright and sociable developers. | | | | * We practice pair programming and test-driven development. (HUGE test suite!) | | | | * Huge well-factored code base, constant refactoring, continuous releases. | | | | * Bare minimal bureaucratic process, so productivity is quite high. | | | | Sound like something you'd care to experience? Well, send a note to me at | | resumes2pdx@wickline.org | | and I'll get things moving. Expect to get a small set of toy problems via email. You | | can send your resume (or URL to same) along with your responses to the toy problems. | | We'll take those and evaluate them. All interviews are conduced by senior developers | | so during project crunch times, it may take a while to get an interview scheduled. | | If you email me early in the week and would be interested in an interview while you | | are still in town, mention that. If you're staying a bit in to next week to play | | tourist, mention that too. It is possible that we may get you interviewed while you | | are in town. If not, we regularly interview over phone supplemented with VNC, so if | | we move forward to an interview, it won't be a big deal if you're out of town. Of | | course, we're only hiring for Portland positions, so don't apply if you're looking | | for a telecommuting position. | | | | If you'd like a bit more info to review, here's a version of the blurb we normally | | post on job boards. The rest of the text below is all copy/paste: | | | | Rentrak Corporation is looking for more fantastic developers to add to our team. If | | your search picked up one of the keywords in this ad then you're probably used to | | being the smartest developer on your team (but are too humble to admit it), and are | | looking for a place where you can work alongside talented peers building great | | software on interesting projects. We're a small enough company that you can make a | | big difference here, but we're big enough that your paycheck never bounces. | | | | Here are some things Rentrak programmers have done recently: | | | | * Wrote customized extensions to Open Source tools, to process queries hundreds | | of times faster than commercial RDBMSs | | | | * Built a goal-seeking system to dynamically generate optimal SQL queries for | | end-user data requests | | | | * Celebrated our 5 billionth transaction processed | | | | * Implemented software to categorize and predict consumer behavior based on | | television viewing history | | | | * Competed for fame and fortune at a Rentrak sponsored programming contest | | | | * Created systems that predict movie sales in theaters, retail stores, and video | | rental locations | | | | * Celebrated a coworker's birthday with a group skydive | | | | * Rented a room at a local brewery, and played games all night with project | | teammates | | | | * Gave a Tech Talk to Google about using large databases | | (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4681632964554085715) | | | | Our teams are relatively small (3-6 people), and we have a development environment | | influenced by XP (http://extremeprogramming.org/). We have a nice open work area so | | the developers can share their brilliant ideas, learn from each other about and | | extend our extensive custom libraries, and work together to solve tough problems. We | | keep our source code base well factored, and filled with unit tests. | | | | We work with a stunningly large amount of data, and everyone here does an amazing | | job of turning it into something manageable. We have a very high hiring bar, and we | | feel that all the people who work here could easily get a job at any of the major | | tech companies. Our management understands this, and works hard to make sure our | | developers are happy and productive. | | | | We're looking for more developers, especially ones with functional or dynamic | | object-oriented development experience (e.g., Lisp, Smalltalk, Scheme, Ocaml, SML, | | Haskell, Ruby, Unlambda, C++/STL/Boost?, or advanced use of Python or Perl). RDBMS | | experience is also helpful, especially with terabyte-plus databases. | | | | Rentrak Corporation is an international technology leader in the movie industry with | | headquarters in beautiful Portland, Oregon, near scenic mountains, beaches, and | | rivers. Our office has convenient access to public transportation and the freeway. | | We offer a friendly team oriented workplace, a competitive vacation package, | | medical/dental and life ins, educational assistance, 401(k) plan, and a variety of | | extras. | | | | Equal Employment Opportunity Affirmative Action Employer |

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