If I can describe my last week in a nutshell I would say it was a very challenging time of life. The greatest thing in the company I work for is a flexibility you can handle your tasks with. I am always excited to learn new things. My focus in GoodData is to solve as many tasks as possible during my working time. It is a big fun and quite addictive sometimes, especially from personal development perspective. I come from a small town in the Czech Republic originally and since my childhood I have been dreaming about some things like growing up, drinking a cappuccino or just to become an effective person.
You can achieve these goals in many ways. You can just start drinking a cappuccino or working for an American company where you can try to reach the goals set with a higher expectation for everything. The important thing is keeping your focus on learning new things. Of course, it takes time, but you should learn during the evenings or weekends and it definitively helps you to accelerate your learning curve. Sometimes you have to learn something you have minimal experience with and you should deliver a prototype in next few days. Therefore I decided to spend whole weekend in the office and come through important parts of the an existing solution. In my previous article I described how I met Tomas Svarovsky there what was very inspiring for me and I expected to meet him on Sunday as well.
However, I have experienced something different. Tomas didn’t come, but I met Kyle Pistor there, a sales engineer in Good Data. What a wonderful surprise that was to see him in the office on Sunday. I had been wondering about his tasks and the particular effort he decided to make for it. However, in next few seconds I saw his parents also and Kyle told me he just forgot some stuff for his laptop. 
The time I spent during that weekend on the task was worth enough, I could understand the current solution more deeply and prepare for the real implementation of particular prototype.
The real implementation started on Monday. That day started very nicely. At work there was a company breakfast. While I was eating, I heard some voice behind me. I recognized it was Bernadette. I turned around and asked what she said. Nothing, I was just singing, she replied. There was also interesting to listen to conversation between Jagjit and Tom. Jagjit is a very funny guy, I like him. With Tom they were talking about customer experience and when Jagjit used phrase “it was a rhetorical question”, there was an association in my brain which reminded me some scenes from Mr. Woodcock movie with Billy Bob Thorton in the main role.
Things went really great, I started to implemented that prototype based on the weekend experience. Aaron Myhre prepared a session with the customer with a mountain flag. I was wondering what mountain would mean, is that a meeting room I asked? Aaron was laughing and told me about the Mountain timezone, which is actually one hour ahead of the San Francisco one. However, Petr Olmer came to visit me during Monday afternoon and one of the prototype solution we prepared didn’t help so much actually, he said. There was some additional things we hadn’t included and the reason was some unexpected results. I was quite sad news for me, not because of some criticisms, but we actually loose some potential good chance how to improve one of our project. However, that is the life and I am actually appreciated for both positive and negative feedback. The negative one is usually better in many ways.
During Tuesday I wanted to cope with that prototype. Aaron helped me a lot. He invented quite interesting solution for some special calculation. I was going to develop it, there was a lot of communication with the customer. Before lunch Pepa Vitek hit me with his kick scooter what is always a great sign. I was working all day on that demo, evening hours included. There was a cleaner. She informed me the floor in the restrooms was wet and I had to be very careful. Actually she was probably very scared I could injured myself there because when I returned back from that restroom, she seemed very happy about that. Even Aaron went for a dinner with her girlfriend, they returned back during the evening to help me with that task. I was very appreciated, because the important presentation was set on Wednesday and when I was fixing some issues I broke some parts in the projects. Fortunately I fixed it and before we left the office area, I told him a story how Jiri Tobolka switched into command line when he started to work in GoodData. Jirka is coming on Monday, by the way, would be really great to have him here.
When I woke up on Wednesday I was a little bit scared because I found some blood on my nails. I had no simple explanation for that, I just simply hoped I didn’t kill Juraj during the sleepwalking for instance. Fortunately I saw him in the office afterwards. We also had that presentation with Aaron. I must say it is always a big pleasure to work him. A very nice presentation from his side, his strong analytical thinking helped us to move this project forward and received an important feedback. Sometimes these meetings are such as a big show, but I really enjoy and it is a great inspiration for me to learn something new from people like Aaron or Tomas Svarovsky, who has lots of suggestions based on his strong experience with platform. My idea is to improve some parts in my ETL and architecture and ask Tomas for feedback. I think it would be beneficial for both sides.
In our office there is a big fun. Some people play american football there, usually before they have to solve some difficult tasks. I think it is a great way how to relax. No matter not everyone understand rules, the important thing is they are very careful and usually hit themselves, not any hardware in the office. We also wonder quite often about the ingredients in food. What should be bark flavor in chocolate we discussed with Petr Cvegros and Winston Christie-blick. We didn’t know exactly, but with Winston we started barking like dogs. I also realized that Juraj seems like Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory series. He confirmed me that this opinion shares more about 20 people. He showed me a scene where Sheldon was ridiculously drank and I really thought it was Juraj. We also had a great time in a Filipino restaurant. We went there in quite a big group and Romeo told us some interesting information about Boracay Island. I ordered Tilapia, a surprising very good fish. During that lunch I had also a very good discussion with Hubert Palan about some American cities. He described me how he was scared about some potential earthquakes in San Francisco at the beginning and how he already feel better about that.
Aaron had to work remotely because he needed to be directly with a client. He told me about Google Hangout tool. I think it is a very cool one. We had several sessions. Pepa Vitek enriched one of them when he waved on camera during our conversation with Aaron. Somebody also put an orange on my desk. This orange originally belonged to Jim, but he forgot it when he left and now it is going to be a great decoration. Hopefully oranges keep fresh long time. I have also seen a Google shuttle bus to Mountain View. It is really interesting how close everything is. I bought some Irish beer and took whole pack from supermarket to our place during the evening.
There was a plan to go to Cliff House on Friday. Such a great idea even that place is considered as an expensive one. There was a reservation and went there with Jagjit and significant part of our Czech group in GoodData. Jagjit drove a car and we went there little bit earlier before reservation time. We walked around the house. That place had a special atmosphere during that evening and I decided I should go there during a weekend. We ordered some great food and had a big fun. I am really glad I could be here. Pavel Kolesnikov’s food was mostly in a special bowl. Jagjit tended to teach me some negative sentences, but without any progress. The prices were a little bit higher, but on the other hand we had a really nice evening.
This blog is getting more a more popular. Somebody reminds this fact during some meeting sometimes and I have been told I should try to prepared some video. Quite interesting idea, isn’t it? But I think I keep this blog in written form. I have spent two days in Portland. I wanted originally write just a paragraph about it, but I have experienced many interesting things, especially on my way back (I have seen Oakland unexpectedly for the first time and nobody neither killed me, raped me nor mugged me) and I really think this trip desire its own article which is going to be published here very soon.
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