Week 1 🐦
Last week was my first week at Twitter. I spent most of it setting up my development environment and not doing much else. There were a bunch of corporate onboarding sessions that ran in the mornings. I accidentally forgot to go to most of them, but I used the time to set up my dev tools. Luckily, they’re recorded, so I’ll play them in the background when I’m eating dinner, or something.
I was also able to meet the rest of the team, other than the folks that I met during my interviews earlier this year. This is pretty much the most geographically distributed team I’ve worked with. We have folks in San Francisco, Boulder, Seattle, and even some on the East coast. I thought I had this remote work thing all figured out during my last summer at Hootsuite, but this is going to prove to be an interesting challenge.
In terms of setting up my dev environment, I was surprised at how painless it was. Dev setup remains one of my most disliked aspects of starting work, but they generally seem to have it figured out for the most part at Twitter. The most time-consuming part was waiting for LDAP group access to be provisioned. Unlike Hootsuite, where most services live in their own small-ish repository, Twitter’s source is stored in a monorepo, much like Google and Facebook. Seeing as how I’ve never worked before in a system structured as a monorepo, I’m excited to see what pros/cons I can find.
I’m spending this weekend reading through some of the services my team owns. It’s always great to get a glimpse of how software engineering is conducted at scale.