Sheeri’s First Week at Pythian
The Pythian family got a new song last Monday — “Sheeri” means “my song” in Hebrew. This post on my own blog explains how I got the job.
High winds delayed my flight last Monday, and we’ve had two snow storms since I arrived. Luckily, my real-life context switch has not been too difficult. Boston weather is similar — it just feels like deep winter here instead of early winter — and the exchange rate with the US dollar is very close. Even the money is approximately the same form factor, except the “loonie” and “toonie”. Though I don’t think I’m going to convert from Dunkin Donuts to Tim Horton’s any time soon.
There aren’t as many Canadian flags displayed around as there are US flags in the States — odd, since this is the government district. Similarly, Christmas decorations aren’t as overwhelming in this, a Christian country, as in the States, which has a constitutional separation of church and state.
I haven’t had anyone ask me for spare change. There are a lot of Greek and Middle Eastern restaurants around — in one kilometer of Bank Street, there are three different shawarma restaurants. Unlike Boston, though, the predominant pizza is Italian style, not Greek style (Greek style pizza has less sauce, a breadier crust and more cheese, which I am not fond of).
I’ve been working at Pythian for over a week now, and I really like the work model, environment and culture. The Boston office will be set up and ready for me when I come back, which I’m very excited about. The Pythian model of training is “jump right in, and ask questions when you don’t understand something.” The teams are very good technically, and people routinely help each other out. My teammates have been known to work on something I’ve been meaning to get to, and nobody utters a word of complaint. It’s a great workplace and I’m definitely learning a lot about all my team’s different client environments, both MySQL (my area of expertise) and Oracle.
December 12th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Christian country? News to me! Ref?
December 12th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Nope - just checked the constitution (both 1867 and 1982 versions) and there’s no mention of Christianity. The only mention of religion at all, actually, goes like this:
and continues a bit later like this
Nope, no christianity in there. We sure do mention the Queen a lot though!
Phew, that would have caught me by surprise. We do have some trappings, including an irritating verse in the national anthem. Good thing I can sing it in French! But there is no state religion and we do enjoy a reasonably functional separation of church and state in Canada. ;-)
Paul
December 12th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Huh, how about that — apparently Canada has separation of church and state too:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/sep_cs_can.htm
December 12th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
dunno about that separation thingie, I try to stay away from religion and politics as much as I can. But shawarma, with lentil rice, tabouli and doused with liberal amounts of homous now, that, I can relate to!
December 12th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Right… Cheese… Have you tried Poutine already?
December 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am
Alex — I have, and I was pretty disappointed. As a teenager in New Jersey (land of really good diners and highways, thus I call it “the great drive-through state”) friends and I would go to diners and order cheese fries with gravy all the time. It’s not really anything different from that, except that it has a special name.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
[…] very please to have her. She made her first contributions to the blog this week. This first, on Sheeri’s first week at Pythian; and the second, a quick introduction to “SOUNDS LIKE” vs. Full-Text search in MySQL. […]