On Joining Mint, Rapid Development, and Phone Booths

I’d just interviewed with an awesome company (psst… it’s Mint Digital) and I get a call on Friday morning from my now colleague saying, “You got the job! … Also, would you like to go to London with us in two days?” After much giddy-ness, many thank yous, and more scrambling to make it work, I’m on a plane to a country I’ve never been to with people I’ve never met before, and I somehow I feel at home. Over the next week, we make Quoto in an excited dash, and I learn that red telephone booths are measurably more awesome, I never ever want to eat haggis, git branches can save you from worrying about breaking things, and standardizing coding styles for the group is an under appreciated art. I absorb more about git and Ruby on Rails from building an app with them in the first two days than I had studying them in the previous three months.

Back in New York, I am continually challenged by the work ahead of me. I see the path to mastery of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Ruby, git, and languages yet to come, and I know that I am in the right place. Around me now are Mints who are exceedingly passionate about what they do, happy to help each other, and eager to learn more themselves. Nobody is done learning, everybody is eager to get their hands dirty, their characters jumbled, and their pixels squashed, knowing that there is a great team rooting for them (as well as tests and validations to sort it all out at the end of the day). I am so honored to be a part of it all, and I know what comes next from this team will continue to astound and delight.