Reddwerks rocks

Reddwerks rocks.

(That should be displayed on a T-shirt).

At the end of 2007, I had the strong intention to leave Guatemala. I had spent the whole of 2007 in personal pleasantries and thought that I should start "expanding my horizons" outside of my home country.

That year started out with a family month in Chicago while I looked for a job in the classifieds. I managed to find a job as an English teacher at The Princeton Review, whose main interview I passed thanks to the few lessons on photography that Marcelo had given me. I got paid for several training sessions I attended, and then right before I got to doing any real teaching, I flew back to Guatemala to attend my college graduation.

As many other college graduates might understand, I felt a little lost at that time. I was lucky to have enough money saved in my bank account to live off for the next few months, but aside from surviving, I didn’t have a concrete plan of action. I did not want to start a job in Guatemala for fear I might get stuck there as Newton’s first law predicts. So I decided to look for education opportunities in other countries that would allow me to settle somewhere else and experience Life on broader grounds. I found and applied to three universities in the USA, a master’s program in Taiwan, and a master’s scholarship in Japan, and was rejected by all of them.

I was also leading several hobbies of mine that year. I took up my japanese abacus classes I had dropped more than 8 years ago, signed up for chinese and japanese language classes at a nearby university, and then took up gymnastics at the National Gymnastics Federation. I was doing fine on all of these until I tried to do a full front-flip over a non-soft surface on my second Gymnastics class and broke my left hand. Gymnastics practice was cut off after that, and my rejection to both the Taiwan and Japan scholarships kinda diminished my morale and stopped me from taking any more asian language courses for the time being, though I managed to keep on practicing japanese abacus since it was my right hand that handled it the most. It was also during this time also that I surprised myself by meeting two cute and lovely girls and by forming affectionate relationships with them. One of those relationships actually caused me to travel to Los Angeles and Seattle, together with my mom, to visit the related girl in the former city and to visit an old family member in Seattle, trip in which I could extend into very many details but won’t.

The latter part of that year was populated by a few freelancing application-development jobs I took over and by the yearly japanese abacus tournament in which I came in second place (and in which I developed a crush for the first-place-girl). As the year came to an end, I decided to leave Guatemala as soon as possible. So I started looking for jobs abroad, either as housesitter in Europe or as english teacher in Asia. I had already contacted an education-oriented company and had almost confirmed myself filling the position of an English Teacher in Singapore, when Marcos told me of the need for Java Developers in Reddwerks Corporation, located in Austin, TX. I disliked the idea of coming to the USA, especially when I compared it to my idea of Europe (Singapore was supposed to be my stepping stone towards Europe). I figured all USA workers as being high-strung and stressed-out, whereas I imagined european workers as easy-going, laid-back, and leading pretty-much tranquil lives in a multilingual environment with occasional party-infested weekends in Ibiza. Nevertheless, with the flight paid for, I flew for the job interview in Austin (even if only for the fun of boarding a plane), and was pleasantly surprised. I liked the company environment. People at Reddwerks seemed happy, relaxed, and the office commodities were much nicer than any I had seen before, including those in movies. So I decided to give it a try. It turns out I became one of those happy, relaxed people. I did not know then how much would I end up liking the company.

And now that I re-summarized a whole year of my life, I’d like to move on with this entry’s main topic.

My experience at Reddwerks Corporation was much better than I would’ve ever expected before I started it. Materially, I was endowed. My technical skills and experience grew “by bounds and leaps”. I met unique, amazing people (and by that I mean that they AMAZED me) and they became my friends. In Austin, TX, I found fun, friendship, parties, and love. I got used to living away from my home country (that wasn’t too hard) and to be responsible for my own actions (such as bringing bagels when breaking the build and buying a new engine for my car when I let it run out of engine oil).

The whole experience empowered my finances, my knowledge, my skills, and myself. I considered myself one of those fortunate enough to say “I love my job”. Why? Many possible reasons. Maybe it was the huge 24” (or was it 27"?) screen on my desk. Or maybe it was the CEO-style chair that somehow ended up in my cubicle and that I got to use every day. Or maybe it was the occasional apple sauce I enjoyed in the break room. Or the occasional Starbucks Frappuccino. Or maybe the rest of the food in the break room. Or the huge bathroom with jade-like walls and ample sinks. Or the big comfy conference rooms we got to, umm… have conferences in. Or the occasional free pizza lunches. Or the free water I could just pour out from the tap into my reusable red plastic cup. Or the bouncy yoga balls that many cubicle neighbors used to keep around as backup chairs. Or the big wide windows covering the whole building wall through which I always had a great view of the trees and sky outside. Or my friendly cubicle neighbors with whom I frequently held enjoyable conversations about either nothing, everything, or anything in between. Or the Kisses I got at Elaine’s desk (Hershey’s). Or the dinosaur plant that can survive 50 years without water. Or the other peculiar artifacts at the Reddwerks Museum. Or the internal Verizon card (WLAN Internet baby!) that I got along with my Lenovo x60s work laptop. Or the BlackBerry we got with GPS (later removed) and just about unlimited monthly voice and data service. Or the free medical insurance that I never used. Or the cool, small wrist-held computers I got to develop applications for (and through which I learned not to want to do so again for a while). Or the cool lights that we could tell to light up into whichever text and colors we sophied (second reference!). Or the awesome environment that is Eclipse in which I got to work on daily (I was not a Java developer before. ECLIPSE RULES!).

Or maybe it was the frequent all-expenses-paid trips I got to take throughout the country. It could’ve been the beautiful snowy mountain at Shaver Lake (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/ShaverLake). Or the luxurious Hilton hotel at Scranton. Or the cute waitress with glasses I met at a Texas Roudhouse in Southaven, MS who I gave my phone number to (with a little help) and am still waiting a phone call from. Or the first baseball game I ever attended with a couple of coworkers (Go Reddwerks! Wait, what?). Or the jaw-dropping, fantasy-like sight of fiery, multi-colored trees surrounding a fast, shiny river during a clear 15F afternoon in the Northeastern United States right during Fall season while waiting for the pizza order for the team to cook (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/FireTrees). Or maybe the sight of those awesome Colorado mountains I got to see on my way to and while inside Boulder. Or my first snow fight ever which I engaged in with my coworkers just before leaving for the facility. Or the remembrance of how much my hands hurt and stung so much after that snow fight. Or those thousands and thousands of birds we saw flying over the snow from one place to another as a natural wallpaper while we worked on that trip. Or maybe the way in which the finest snow I have ever seen covered all what was before gray, green, and red in the world into a bright, peaceful, RGB=(255, 255, 255) white color all around me, in a way I had never seen before (http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/WholeWhiteWorld).

Or maybe it was just the realization that the lifestyle in these new cities I got to visit was not that different from that on the one I grew up on. Or maybe the money I saved on meals and gas during those trips. Or the overly unbalanced amount of sleep we sometimes lost during those same trips. Maybe it was the fun of seeing each other fall asleep, one by one, after the apparently-ever-increasing hours of continuous work. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the free re-energizing Starbucks breakfasts, pizza lunches, and candy emergency doses that forced our fingers to keep typing.

But it was more probably the bonding that was naturally formed with my coworkers. It’s easy to form friendships with people who share goals with you, especially if one of those goals is to alleviate your own sleep deprivation. I experienced this a little in High School, more frequently in college, and never before as much as in my experience in Reddwerks Corporation. I would certainly say sleep is an effective goal to strive towards (thought perhaps not the healthiest). But even in these extreme cases, it felt really well to be a part of the effort, and then increasingly, part of the solution. It felt greatly (yes, greatly – great is an adjective and should not be used to modify a verb) to have one’s own ideas seriously considered and to see them form an important part of the final product. It was a great incentive to see one’s creations become someone’s else’s tool – it was a stressful experience to see that tool crash before that someone else and have them wait for half an hour while hacking up that dear creation and deeply apologizing for the crash. Stressful but learning. “With great power comes great responsibility”, said Spiderman’s uncle before he died (most people say their stuff before they die), and I’m guessing that phrase can be correctly extrapolated to other size-related adjectives. “With small power comes small responsibility”. With “medium-sized power comes medium-sized responsibility”. And so on and so forth.

Anyway, bonding. It’s also made easier when the people with whom to bond are “bondable”, if you know what I mean (and also if you don’t). No coworker was hard to work with @RW, and many of them reached high levels of bondability. See, that’s also what made Reddwerks so great to work in. The people who make it up were so great to work with! (*cough* like me :P). I’m really not kidding about this - I must’ve enjoyed at least 90% of the time I spent with them. On the personal aspect, everyone in the company was GREAT to work with. In the technical aspect, the level/skill of many people I worked with there was ASTOUNDING. I learned from every one of them. They, being the people I greeted, whose smile I absorbed, whose jokes I laughed at, with whom I shared lunch now and again, with whom I shared a “war room”, tired looks, and body aromas for days on end, made the Reddwerks experience much, much, much, much better than what I imagine it would’ve been like alone. And for that, I feel truly appreciative towards all of them. It was a pretty good ride.

In short, Reddwerks rocks, and it rocks a lot. And I believe that strongly enough to nominate that sentence for a T-shirt. “Reddwerks rocks”. Any punctuation marks around and/or between the sentence’s letters would be fine. And if more exotic phonemes are preferred, then maybe that could turn into “Reddwerks ROX”. Or a more cryptic “RW “ followed by an image of some rocks. Or just the Reddwerks logo and a bunch of rocks on the background!! Or something like that, you know… I think it’s a fact worth publishing.

Oh, P.S: Website for Reddwerks