Following on in my continued development into a regular guy this year, where I started doing all the normal things people do
like not being homeless and buying iPod's. Last week I got a regular job, and I'm happy to say that I am now a junior developer at Joost. It's not been a secret I've been working with the folk at Joost for a fair old time now, but now it's a proper thing, with holidays, HR rules, and a salary at the end of the month.
It's been an interesting time watching Joost grow from a few crazed people meeting in random London hotels, and working sitting on top of shredders into a company with now a 100 people working in proper offices. I've had a lot of fun in both phases though, and am surprisingly happy to have now entered my new corporate life. Hopefully I can work my way up from the Junior Developer role into something with more influence, but there's a lot of good people at Joost to elbow out of the way on the way up the corprorate ladder so it might take awhile. Of course 100 people isn't actually very corporate, and neither is Joost and I'm probably still able to say that I've drunk beer with all of the Joost folk bar except a very, very select people (
*). In fact, I owe lots of them beer still, due to a mistake I made in a Joost
easter egg.
Of course the best thing about working at Joost isn't the bright people, it isn't even the technology we work with, it's not even the cool Joost towels we have to brand our bathrooms with at home (I checked, we have to, it's in the contract.) but it's the content. Working on Joost, means I get to watch a lot of TV, especially as I work from home, and have always worked with television on in the background. So in a spirit of eating our own dogfood I watch Joost almost all the time (Other than on sunday afternoons, when I'm kind of obsessed by "Come dine with me" at the moment).
I've found that there is actually a lot of good stuff to watch, there's the big brand stuff, [pick some], but actually that has attracted me less than the other stuff that I might not normally have tripped over on regular TV. There's all sorts of good short movies, such as
No, No, No, or
other Movieola short films, even
Bad Yogurt on
TVBOMB is good in a particularly disgusting kind of way.
Superdeluxe was something I'd probably never see normally which was good when I was in the US the other week, and the nostalgia hit from stuff like
Full House and
Duckula are also always a worthwhile diversion. And
The Onion is perhaps now my favourite channel for its in depth news reporting, that seems subtly different in a way I can't quite grasp from what I'm getting from my regular
Economist reading.
I actually end up watching a lot of music videos, as the continuous starting/stopping of Joost as I try to fix some bugs or add some features, makes the longer stuff harder to get into - of course, even some of these
can be distracting. In some ways it would be good to return to the days when all we had to watch on Joost were the
Giant Sleepy Sharks.
(*) I guess the missing ones just don't like me much, or maybe are just too hard working.