Not that I’ve had a lot (or even three) of them, but first days seem to be completely useless in determining what your eventual “work-life” will be. Today, for example, I got in at 9:00…shook hands with the new boss (who only hung around for a few hours before taking off to play with other projects) and said hello to my new “desk,” a folding table with a nice big 20″ iMac on it.

I’d seen the office when I interviewed, so the table wasn’t such a shock (it’s actually pretty awesome compared to a cube farm and row after row of desks designed to fit right into them). Other than “engineering,” where my co-worker and I sit, there are only four more rooms in the office:

• The “Executive Office,” which is mostly unoccupied (but it does have a file cabinet)
• The “Kitchen,” with mini-fridge, microwave, and a few kitcheny amenities (condiments, spices, napkins, etc…)
• Another empty room (I think it was called “QA” on the tour…but there’s no QA yet)
• “Reception”…that is to say, there’s a reception area when you walk in, but no receptionist.

The CEO left at around 10:30 (which is fine…it’s not like there’s anything for him to do yet). The “inventor,” I guess you would call him, dropped by shortly afterwards and hung out for an hour or two discussing UI issues. My co-worker and I got lunch at a little burger place across the street at around 1:00. At around 5:30 or so, he was ready to head home–and far be it from me to demand that we stay late!

As far as actual work, my day consisted entirely of menial-but-necessary computer setup time, made perhaps a little more arduous because I

1. Haven’t done any serious work on a Mac in a few years.
2. Did more Unix stuff at the terminal than I have in the last 4 years combined.

Mostly all of the Unix stuff was setting things up so everything else will run smoothly from here on out. When the bosses asked if I STRONGLY preferred Mac or PC (they want to run a Mac shop, but were willing to bend if I felt really passionately about it), I didn’t really give it a second thought. Most of what I do or am going to be doing (ruby, flex) is mostly text- based anyway, so who cares? Well…that was a bit naive of me. I’ve done some Flex2 coding on my PC, but never on a Mac. It turns out there aren’t nearly so many options for developing on a Mac (on this machine I use Notepad++ and just compile with ant at the command line). I’ve only been using Notepad++ for a few months, but I’ve grown pretty attached to it.

I spent some time scouting various editors, but none of them really grabbed my fancy. Emacs seems like a bit of a pain to configure properly, so I think for the time being I’ll just use Eclipse (no highlighting, but I don’t really care…all I really want is decent indent controls and text formatting options).

Besides various other utilities (SVN, email, Firefox) I had to set up, the other major task was getting a test server set up on my machine so I could monkey around with code and see the results (though I didn’t actually do any monkeying today). This is a somewhat different production paradigm than what I’m used to. In the past, I’ve only worked on small little projects of my own. When releasing new code, I usually just made a copy of the old file with a new name, uploaded it to the live server, and modified that one until I was satisfied. At that point, I’d back up the old version and change the names to switch in the new one. Not optimal, sure, but it served my needs. Here, we actually have a “live” server, a test server, and then individual builds of the whole site on each of our machines. It feels a lot more rigorous, that’s for sure.