Que random babbling – part uno

I know… It has been over a week now since I posted last, but things get busy. And to be honest, they are about to get a hell of a lot busier. The bad part is, throughout this busy spell I probably won’t have anything more to talk about. But the good news is, once some of these projects come to a close and go live to the public, I will again have something to talk about; and boy will it be exciting.

I really can’t even say that I have much to talk about from this past week. I did have one interesting event happen Sunday night though.

Rob had all of us over for a big BBQ get-together. The kicker is, he also invited Don Graham along with several other people from the Post (who’s names have slipped my mind). So essentially, I got the chance to have a beer and chat it up with some important folk. For anyone who is as clueless as I was when someone first mentioned the name ‘Don Graham’ to me; he is the CEO and Chairman of the Board for The Washington Post Company. He actually seemed like quite the pleasant guy. Adam told me that at some point during the evening, Don was out playing baseball with some of the others, although I didn’t actually witness this myself.

This whole night could be summed up simply as: ‘very nice’; I met some people that just a few months ago, I would have never imagined meeting, Rob cooked up some good food, and we sat around and watched ‘All the President’s Men’ till late. This was followed by a drive back to home in traffic that was much easier to navigate than the trip out. Just in case anyone is wondering: I don’t like driving in stop ‘n go traffic on an 8 lane highway.

There was another night in there somewhere where Adam, Chris, Jinae, and I all went walkin’ around up around the Courthouse area. We decided to head up to the office and go stand out on the 12th floor balcony overlooking the DC skyline for awhile. This was really nice — the city is really pretty at night. It’s at this point that you can probably tell that I really have nothing else to talk about. Oh, I know…

Since I started this summer job, I’ve had several people approach me asking me how I got it, etc, etc. I updated my ‘About Me’ page to kind of mention this, but I will go into further detail here.

Back in… April I beleive it was, Rob was back in Kansas giving a little talk on his hyper-local strategy, etc. He had done a talk before (sometimes late last year I believe) that I missed, but my friends said it was really interesting and worth going to. So this year, I wanted to make sure I went to see what he had to say. He was giving three talks that day, but I only managed to make it to the last two. I went to the first one with a couple friends, then to the second one alone (as the friends had to go back to work). After the second one, I really didn’t have anything to do and I didn’t wanna walk home, so I just stuck around to see what the various conversations in the room were. I was just fixin’ to walk out the door and head home when I figured that I would run up and talk to Rob for just a minute. I wasn’t sure at this point if he was actually doing any programming on these projects or just managing them. I figured since he had mentioned Django (a web programming framework) that I would at least make small talk since I had been trying to learn Django for about the past six months. I talked to him a little and finally got around to mentioning that I new Django a little. When he discovered that I was into the programming and Django and such, he immediately told me to give him a call in a couple weeks and he would “bring me to DC”.

I left not know what the hell he meant by that. Does he just want me to visit? to intern? what? I finally got ahold of him after a couple weeks and he said that he wanted me to come up and work for the summer. I couldn’t believe that I was getting the chance to go work at the washingtonpost.com. The rest of the details of organizing the whole trip are pretty minor. I talked to Deryck (the lead developer) a little bit and to Rob a few more times, then before I knew it, school was out and I was on a plane to DC.

I think this is probably where I will call it a night. I don’t want to waste too much of my B-roll in one night. Until next time…

Cheers,

Sean Stoops

PS – Thanks everyone for the comments!