Position Description
A Senior Software Engineer, Flights is responsible for developing high-quality, efficient code and be a major contributor in a small team of engineers. The candidate will develop products related to Flights Search on the TripAdvisor and SeatGuru.

The Flights team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer who will be trusted to develop key features of Flights and other new products for TripAdvisor. If hired, the engineer will develop every level of these user-facing products using PHP, Java, Javascript, SQL, HTML and CSS on a Linux platform. The candidate must be comfortable working in each of these areas and able to develop highly-scalable solutions working with product management and a small team of engineers.

The Flights works like a startup company within TripAdvisor, developing new technologies and offering exciting opportunities to its engineers. We build each project from the ground up, and are seeking individuals who thrive in this challenging environment. Our team is responsible for Flights Search, Seat Guru and other new products that are under development.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• Passion for the web and desire to apply computer science to solve complex problems.
• BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent
• 8+ years of  software development experience
• Experienced in developing code for high-volume systems
• Experienced in object-oriented development in PHP
• Experienced using closures and objects in Javascript
• Solid understanding of Java and Object-Oriented architectures
• Comfortable with Linux and its standard utilities
• Experienced working in HTML, CSS and SQL
• An understanding of AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies
• Working knowledge of PHP and Python are helpful
• The successful candidate will communicate well, be committed to delivering quality work on an aggressive schedule, and must be able to function independently as well as part of a team.
• Must be able to document code faithfully and take good coding practices seriously

Contact

send me your resume directly at cchristensen [at] tripadvisor.com

As an engineer by training I have had a love / hate relationship with sales people. “Why can’t they just sell the product we have instead of some product we don’t yet have” was a constant lament. Don’t get me wrong, my father was a salesman and was, in fact, the top salesman for his company for years. He worked in an industry that relied on repeat sales so his customers were his friends and a sales call was having coffee with a friend.

But having spent the last 7 months as a full-time solo entrepreneur I am reminded of the benefit of having a good salesperson working with you. I am not a salesperson. I would rather do just about anything else than pick up the phone and sell an ad for the Amateur Traveler podcast so instead of picking up the phone I do… just about anything else.

We want for people to appreciate what we do. We want for people to want to be associated with us. But sometimes that does involve picking up the phone and explaining this to people. My writing is improving as is my video editing. I am a good interviewer and audio editor. I can make my own graphics, create and run my own websites. I can create custom themes and plug-ins for my site. I can run engineering teams, manage project and product managers, coax designers, and corral operation groups. But sales, so far eludes me.

So to all the good sales people I have not appreciated in the past, my sincere apologies.

The Amateur Traveler podcast that I put out pretty much every Saturday morning takes hours of production. The problem with that schedule means is I am often working on it late into the night on Friday nights. If there is one night that I don’t particularly feel like working it would probably be Friday. Now the smart person would probably finish the production work on Thursday but this is not a post on how to be smart.

Most weeks I finish the show by bribing myself. I set a timer for 25 minutes. During that 25 minutes I focus only on the show. I don’t answer email. I don’t look at twitter, AIM, or Skype. I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t check facebook. I don’t sit within the sound of a TV or a radio. Then when the timer goes off I set it again for 5 minutes. During that 5 minutes I play. My game of choice is Age of Mythology. I don’t play it online where I could be caught up in something that would be hard to stop, because after 5 minutes the process repeats. 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of play.

Sometimes I get sucked into more than 5 minutes of play but more often I get sucked into more than 25 minutes of work. In theory, I could finish faster if I did not take time out for a break every 25 minutes, but what I have found is that without that break I would find excuses to do something else. My mind wants to wander. During that 5 minutes I might instead catch up on twitter or facebook. I probably listen to a podcast while I play. I might check my email, AIM or Skype, but then it’s back to work.

So my suggestion is to find time to focus… but also find time to play.

1. Check Spelling While Typing – I can turn on a feature right here in my browser (Safari) to spell check as I go. Right click (or command click in a text area to bring up a menu. From the Spelling and Grammar menu select “Check Spelling While Typing”. Now as I type, words will be spell checked.
2. TypeItForMe – This wonderful tool can allow me to create aliases for frequently typed phrases like the name of my most popular podcast so that I can type “atp” and get “Amateur Traveler”.
3. TypeItForMe 4.0 – The latest version of TypeItForMe can also correct my simple typos as I go. If I type “tihs” I get “this”. It also has the ability to replace misspelled words.
4. Speech – I am bad editor. My brain tends to correct typos and grammar errors when I read. But I am a much better audio editor. You can have the Mac speak any section of text. From the Application menu (such as “Safari” from within the browser) select “Services” then “Speech” then “Start Speaking Text” to have your Mac read back to you the selected text.
5. Google – When in doubt remember that the google spelling dictionary is one of the better ones. If you can spell the word close to the correct spelling, Google might be able to get you the rest of the way.

To see these techniques in action, watch the attached video.

This is the text of the Commencement address delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5? deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

• The piano accordion is the official musical instrument of the city of San Francisco and has been since 1990. This year is the 15th anniversary!
• Actress Lucy Liu plays the accordion
• Guitarist Nils Lofgren started on the accordion.
• Billy Joel and Barry Manilow also play the accordion.
• The accordion is a member of the reed family, not the keyboard family.
• The first United States-made piano accordion (the ones with the keys on it) was manufactured in San Francisco back in 1907. It was at the Guerrini Accordion Company on DuPont St. (Grant Ave., near Columbus Ave.)
• When people think of an accordion, they usually envision that large, black monstrosity with piano keys on one side and about a thousand buttons on other side. However, the accordion family also includes Cajun button boxes, chromatic and diatonic button accordions, the concertina, the bayan, and the bandoneon.
• Isn’t the accordion just being used at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs? Heck no! Shania Twain’s immensely popular Come On Over CD has accordion on a couple of tracks. Los Lobos. Bruce Hornsby plays the accordion and uses it in shows. Counting Crows use accordion a lot. Here in San Francisco, the show Forever Tango was a huge hit and featured two bandoneonists.
• China is the largest manufacturer and exporter of accordions in the world.

A newborn baby abandoned in a Kenyan forest was saved by a stray dog who apparently carried her across a busy road and through a barbed wire fence to a shed where the infant was discovered nestled with a litter of puppies, witnesses said Monday. Doctors believe the baby had been abandoned about two days before the dog discovered her, said Gakuo, the hospital spokeswoman.

Wow.

The citizens of Jesus’ hometown are Arabs — 35 percent Christian, 65 percent Muslim — and many identify themselves as Palestinians. The museum, opened in mid-March by a Muslim lawyer, is believed to be the first to present the story of the Holocaust in Arabic. It is part of the cutting edge of new thinking among some Palestinians that it is vital to understand the Holocaust if Israeli-Arab conflicts are ever to be resolved.

”Jewish people everywhere, not just in Israel, have a feeling of persecution” because of centuries of anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, said the museum’s founder, Khaled Kasab Mahameed. ”This feeling of persecution shapes their consciousness. . . . Every aspect of life is affected by this feeling of persecution, which is very deep in the Jewish soul.”

The museum has been controversial and has been criticized by both Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Critics notwithstanding, Majali, Mahameed, and their colleagues say they are seeing positive results. In the museum one day last month, Mufeed Khattib, a businessman, was the sole visitor. He argued with Mahameed that there should be pictures of massacres of Palestinians displayed as well. But he praised Mahameed for opening his eyes to things he had not realized

WAYNE: “Hi, do you require a thumbrpint scan to get a tan there?”
TANNING BIMBO: “Yes, sir, we do.”
WAYNE: “OK, let me see if I understand this correctly. Is there a state or local law that requires you do this?”
TANNING BIMBO: “No, sir, it’s for our computer systems”
WAYNE: “So you want to breach people’s right to privacy not because there is a state law that demands you take a thumbprint, but because it’s a company policy?”
TANNING BIMBO: “Yes, that’s right.”
WAYNE: “So you don’t see anything wrong in insisting that people give you a thumbprint — a totally invasive request — and possibly even an illegal one, just because your company says so.”
TANNING BIMBO: “No, sir, our systems require it. We have fourteen locations and this is how we ensure that some one isn’t using another person’s tanning plan.”
WAYNE: “Why would you need to take a thumbprint scan of a person coming in once, for one tan, and paying for that tan right then?
TANNING BIMBO: “Our systems require it.”
WAYNE: “Thanks, I just wanted to get this all straight before contacting the media.”

Asked if he owed viewers a disclosure of his corporate clients, Greenberg said: “I have never accepted payment to place a product on NBC News.” As for other news shows, “I have never accepted payment to say nice things about a product in any venue.” He said manufacturers hired him as “a spokesperson who could talk credibly and understandably about consumer products,” but that he would no longer accept payment for appearances on local shows.

When this happened in radio it was called the payola scandal.