It’s been a year

On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!.

Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG!

Hmm.

A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years and still stick around. So, I started to think of my reasons on why I like it here…

The single biggest motivating factor for me is the smart people here. I remember reading somewhere that “Great programming is not about great pieces of code. It’s about being surrounded by smart people”. It aptly describes my experience at Y!. The amazing part is that most people I’ve met here don’t see the difference between work and fun. They just have a ball at what they do. And I always learn something interesting everyday from them.

The second reason is that there’s something exciting going on here every single day. For example, the My Web 2.0 Social Search that was announced just a few days ago, and the Maps API that was released yesterday…

There’s excitement in my work too – there are too many projects coming up at work that I have less and less time to spend on my other activities which is a bit disappointing but I guess you can’t have it all :)

Coming back to Buzz, for which I’ve been the sole engineer for over a year, did you know it has a related billboard at Times Square in New York City right now? :D

( Note: Erik has more photos )

That’s right, Buzz is what generated that data for that billboard :)

Contrary to the easy-going lifestyle that you might have heard, I’ve been through many all-nighters but I’m better now and never gonna do that again ;)

As the Chinese saying goes “May you live in interesting times”. That’s true more now than ever before in this computing era. I’m just happy to be in one of the centres where many of these interesting events are taking place and get to be a part of it.

As my tagline (in my internal profile) goes : Live. Life. Work. Yahoo.