Erudify
Published on September 29, 2013 under the tag life
Introduction
After graduating from Ghent University in July and taking a long holiday, I started my first job, now two weeks ago: software engineer at Erudify in Zürich.
Work at Erudify
There are several reasons why I wanted to work for Erudify. I had a few options after finishing my studies, some of which were more attractive than others. In the end I think my criteria were the following (in no particular order):
- I want to code Haskell to some extent. I am more productive in Haskell compared to other languages, and I also find it more enjoyable. This is mostly due to the fact that I have been doing some Haskell open source development for a long time now.
This leads me to second criterion: I love the open source community. It is important to me that the place I work at has a liberal open source policy. We all use free, open source software these days (which tech company does not run linux on its servers?) and there is no better way to show appreciation than to return the favor by releasing great open source libraries.
I want to improve the world. I really do. Releasing open source libraries is one way to do this, but that is usually only a side effect of the actual work you are doing. I want to actively improve the state of the world by creating something that actually helps people.
Europe is my home. I love to travel, but most of my friends are in Europe. Visiting people in another European country is fairly cheap and convenient, and this is, unfortunately, usually not the case once you are outside of Europe.
Big companies are not my thing – I hate administration and complex hierarchies. When I have a question for someone, I want to just be able to walk to their desk and ask them. When I have a suggestion, I want to just be able to tell the person in charge. I want to be valued and not just be some easily replaceable code-spitting machine.
Erudify scored well on all of these criteria. Now, I have only been working here for for two weeks, so I do not think I can already accurately comment on how well the reality matches my expectations. However, I can say that the work has been very enjoyable in the past two weeks.
Admittedly I have not been very productive yet, since I am still gradually learning the codebase, but with some good mentoring I was able to already fix a few small issues from the third day onward.
My work is not limited to backend engineering but also includes frontend development. I am quite new to the latter, but it has been interesting to explore some new technologies: I sort of like TypeScript and I really like some parts of AngularJS. Additionally, this introduces some nice variation.
The Haskell side is obviously also very interesting. It ranges from more or less straightforward CRUD tasks to harder problems such as versioning and object models. Most of it is web-related, which is cool – I like the web. I hope to blog about this more once I have done some actually interesting stuff.
Life in Zürich
I moved to Zürich for this job. Living in Zürich is pretty nice. It is a relatively small city but due to the large number of expats and foreign students living there, there is quite a large international community. Compared to Belgium, the city is tidy and public transportation actually works. The main disadvantage is that everything is much more expensive, especially meat.
Fun and affordable bars are hard to find, especially bars that are fun and affordable. Last week, I went to El Lokal, which is one of the coolest places I have been to here (though I have not been to many places yet).
One of my favorite leisure activities is downhill skateboarding and as you might guess, that is awesome here. It turns out Switzerland has a large bunch of mountains, usually with efficient public transport to take you to the top.
To end this blogpost, here is a quick skating clip from yesterday: