Month in the city by the bay: learning and enjoying

More than a month ago I took a leap faith in joining Startuplife program organized by AaltoES and I was fortunate to accepted to work as a web developer intern for Ditto. We are the team of 4 rocking on a delightful web app that you will love. I work with Pekka and we share the same office with folks from 2bkco. Pirate-Ninja Mediation Center is the name of the office. How cool is that? By the way, this is a quick post about my experience learning and enjoying life in San Francisco for the last month and why I think what offered from the city will make it a great time.

About the enjoying part, San Francisco has the right combination of everything for me enjoy from day one. It has good food: a truly international city with cuisine varied from Mediterranean, Italian, Mexican to Japanese, Chinese... Food is usually delicious and cheap, not to mention there's a smile most of the time when I stepped into a restaurant. Oh, btw, have you checked The 2011 Big Eat San Francisco? Currently I had a few ticks from that checklist and so far it didn't disappoint me.

Another enjoying thing is that life is much easier and more productive for me to use some of the apps and services available only in US: Mint, Pandora, Amazon, Zipcar... to name a few. And I'm not the only one who is tech savvy, I sometimes see an Ipad with Square device used in a nearby cafe, or someone talking to Siri on a busy street.

Moreover, events on Meetup once staying in SF are more relevant and are more to choose from. What I learned about Meetup here is that good meetup is quickly packed, one better rsvp yes immediately or bids his chance in the waiting list.

Work is fast-paced and has lots of integration. Working for startups is very different from client work, it has lots of integrations, which means quickly coming up with features to try out instead of polishing to be perfect. Guess what we use for backend and for frontend development: of course, Rails and Backbone.js.

I have never used Backbone before, however by the time I got to the documentation and started writing a few lines of code, it made lots of sense. Because more often than not, we find ourself creating frontend heavy, data driven application such as Gmail, Twitter and it makes complex apps much easier. It helps frontend development like Rails does for the backend. What is more fortunate and fascinating to learn is that I work closely with one of Backbone Hackers organizers.

Once again, thanks AaltoES for the chance being here working with amazing and talented people, I'm really looking forward to the time ahead.