I am a Mac but OS X was not my idea

I just got my third Mac in the last two years. Now, I am not an Apple fanboy – I don’t even own an iPhone or an iPad – but I absolutely love my Mac. All of my Macs have been through work, but had my latest job not given me a Mac, I would have been forced to buy one – and yes they are quite expensive.

My affair with Macs started when I joined Blist and they gave me an option of a Mac/Windows/Linux machine. I ended up choosing a Mac just because it wasn’t something I had tried before. It did take a while to transition – the philosophy is quite different from Windows – and there are still some things that I don’t like, such as missing Home/End keys, Cmd-Tab not showing all open windows etc. But now, I am addicted!  I had withdrawal symptoms for the two weeks I had to spend without one after my last job. I wished that they had let me keep my laptop instead of the 30in monitor that I got instead.

Nowadays, I see a lot more Macs on the bus or in flights, and there is always someone or the other claiming they bought a Mac on Facebook. So the measly 5% market share that Macs have does not do justice to the popularity of Macs.  Macs have always been popular with artists, writers, journalists and the kind, but recently they have started to gain popularity amongst geeks.  This is the third company that I am working at where all developers have a Mac. And for good reason, Macs give you the best of both the Windows and Linux world. Instead of carrying around a Windows laptop for checking mail and Linux desktop for writing code, you can have a Mac on which you can do both – check mail and write code – now that’s what I call genius!

I believe OS X has been primary driver behind getting these tech companies to use Macs. OS X did what the Linux community had been trying for years and hadn’t really succeeded at – building a GUI that your grandma can use on a Unix based platform.  Now, I can have all my favorite tools – vi, zsh, grep, awk, perl etc and still get a great UI. Heck, this blogpost is written in vi (well Vim actually, but whatever). Moreover everything is pre-installed – anyone who has tried to use terminal utilities in Windows through Cygwin or otherwise knows what a nightmare they can be.

The one big drawback I see for Macs, and the reason I think they are not mainstream, is the lack of business productivity tools. There is no Outlook on the Mac! Microsoft Entourage is just a poor man’s substitute. In fact Apple Mail has much better integration with Exchange than Microsoft’s own client. And Office for the Mac is nowhere close to that on Windows. Of course, there are multiple other alternatives, such as iWork or OpenOffice, but none of those are as mature as the products for the Windows platform.

But, hey I am not a banker or a sales & marketing guy – so a Mac works great for me. I only wish they were a bit cheaper.

Total Recall

Yesterday Esha surprised me by holding a request a nursery rhyme session. She was just sitting down singing a couple of songs to herself and then she just asked me out of the blue which song she should sing next. At first, I told her a few that I have heard her sing before. But she wouldn’t stop asking for more. We must have gone through 15-20 different rhymes and she sang all of them. That totally caught me by surprise – yes, she has a few nursery rhyme books which we read to her and she listens to them in the car, but I didn’t know she knew the words to all of them – including things like the second stanza of Sing A Song of Sixpence.

During the session, if I tried repeating the names of any of the rhymes that I had asked her before she would immediately interject “I already singed it“. And if at any time I got stuck figuring out which one to ask her to sing next, she would proffer up a suggestion such as “Maybe I sing Little Miss Muffet?“. By the end of the session I had exhausted the list of rhymes that I knew top of the head, and had to say “Sorry, baby, but I don’t know any more rhymes”. I don’t know how she learned these songs all of a sudden, or maybe she learned them over time but never sang them at home. But now, I officially declare Esha to know more nursery rhymes than Smita. Ever since, I have been trying to get encore for Smita to hear, but she has steadfastly refused. I guess they just need to be in the right mood.

It’s funny how fast they grow. Just a couple of months ago she was struggling to learn the lines for her first rhyme – Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. One fine moment you just go from “How many times should I tell you – this is green not red.” to “Wow! I didn’t know you could do this. That was amazing!“

The Preschool SOPs

Our search for a preschool for Esha is now finally drawing to an end. Last week we finished visits to all schools and finished applied to the two schools that we liked. Though, looking at the application process one would think that we are applying for a college. Or wait, maybe college was easier.

First there is the recommendation letter. Yes – apparently you can write recommendations for two year olds. Maybe they want to know if she can read War and Peace! We got two – one from her day care and one from her pre-pre-school. The one from her daycare was easy, they just said “she is a good baby” and ticked off all the positive adjectives in the form. The one from her pre-pre-school was confidential and sent directly to the school so we don’t know what it said. (Of course, we have a general idea, but the fact that there is a sealed recommendation letter for preschool just seems quite absurd.)

Then there was this whole form that we had to fill out which asked us nerve-racking questions like “Please describe your child” and “What are the strengths of your child” and of course a detailed explanation of why we are so interested in the school that we are applying to. Unfortunately, the two applications didn’t share questions so we had to spend hours on each. Fortunately for me, my wife did most of the making things up. (Yeah, she writes performance reviews now.) Now all we have to do is wait for a letter of acceptance! Maybe they aren’t as selective as Harvard and we might get through. Oh and did I mention the interview? Our baby has an interview scheduled later this month – we better start learning those pesky A,B,Cs now!

On a more serious note and for those who were curious after my last post about Montessori schools, neither of the schools we chose are Montessori. The only Montessori that we liked – Sammamish Montessori – was a bit out of our way for pick up and drop off. And the reason we liked it is that it offered a choice of unstructured non-Montessori curriculum (they call it enrichment classes) in addition to half a day of Montessori. The two schools that we picked are somewhere in between traditional desk based classrooms and individual activities like in a Montessori. Even though they may lie somewhere along the continuum their philosophies and style are a world apart. One of them, Cedar Crest Academy is a highly rigorous academic program based on group activities while the other, The Little School, is a lot more individual-focused, play-based school a lot like her current pre-pre-school.

We don’t know which we’ll pick yet. On the positive side, we received a good recommendation for The Little School from her current teacher, and she applauded our decision to not put her in a Montessori. So at least we got some validation that we are not completely off our rockers. But then our biggest constraint is food. CCA offers fresh organic lunch and snacks to all kids while the other is bring your own. Based on our past experiments, providing her with a daily dabba is going be a harrowing experience for us – we’d rather have the school provide lunch. There are a few other subtle but significant differences – the teachers at the Little School are much more experienced (upwards of 10 years) while the ones at CCA are fresh from college. The curriculum in CCA is classroom based for the entire group while that for the little school is individualized. On the other hand The Little School is extremely expensive when compared with the other schools – it’s like the Bright Horizon’s of daycares.

Our most preferred option is that she goes to the Little School and then someone picks her up and drops her at daycare at lunch time. But that is contingent on us finding a reliable baby transporter. So, let’s see how things work out, but at least we’ve narrowed the field considerably over the last month!

To Montessori or Not To Montessori

That is the question!

In a previous post, I said that we were looking for a pre-school for our daughter and wanted it to be a Montessori-like school. Well, guess what! We visited 4 of them this week and frankly I wasn’t impressed. All of them were highly recommended by the parents at Microsoft and are schools with a very good reputation. One thing I have to point out is that not all the Montessori schools were the same. In fact, I felt that each subsequent school that we visited was better than the previous one.

No it’s not the schools that were bad per say. It’s the Montessori method that I didn’t like. Montessori is the in-thing these days, and parents rave about the method. Criticism is hard to find. And not without valid reasons – Montessori has a great sounding philosophy around individual freedom and seems to be a great method to build a child’s academic expertise. But I found the curriculum far too structured, rigid and dry. As a three year old, I want my daughter to play, sing, dance, paint, pretend, share and not count beads, or pour water from one cup to the other.

There was one piece of feedback that really sums up my thoughts and I am quoting it here:

I did not put my sons in Montessori preschools. I found the Montessori approach too structured for my children. Yes, every child moves at his/her own rate, but he/she moves through a particular set of exercises. Those exercises are a set of manipulatives that the child must learn to use in one particular way. The method was devised for children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds in the early 1900′s and focused on common daily tasks. My children’s house has brooms and dishes and pitchers, and they don’t need specific instruction in preschool about them.

For my son, I wanted more free-form art projects, fantasy play, group play, and no academics. I found that in the non-Montessori schools. The preschool program was very “hands on” and there were no desks.

The other criticism I have is that the Montessori curriculum is too individual based. While it is important to build an independent, self-sufficient individual, there is a reduced emphasis on working together, sharing or group play. In fact the Montessori method encourages children to work on their own projects individually and the teacher tries to dissuade other children from collaborating. When we were observing a Montessori classroom, all children with sitting quietly on their own working on their own little project. While that skill is important in life, that’s not a structure I want to impose on my daughter this early on. One point to confess though is that this approach is not common to all schools. As we progressed through visiting schools, the later schools were more open to group activities than the former ones. However, in spite of some schools encouraging group work, the Montessori curriculum is always designed around an individual. Secondly, I found the dryness of the material and the instruction a bit unsettling. My daughter was perfectly happy trying to make coffee with the bottles that she was given to unscrew the lids of. That kind of imaginative and creative play seems very lacking in the Montessori materials.

And I don’t believe that a particular kind of pre-school has any kind of impact on future performance. While Montessori children might know their squares and cubes before they enter first grade and that may be quite impressive, I think other pre-school kids do just as well as long as they acquire the basic foundation needed for school. So right now my focus would be to look at non-Montessori schools where the activities are more free-flowing and where imagination and creativity are more important than learning academic skills. I may still be convinced to send her to a Montessori as long as it is for no more than half day (and in fact the last school that we visited actually offered a mix of both Montessori and free-form classrooms which was far more appealing to me).

A New Year, A New Gig

Next week, I’ll be starting with a new job with the social networking startup Ning.com. It was a fun year and a half at my previous company, a small 10 person startup. Learned a lot of new things, lived through many changes. Heck, we even threw our old system, GUI and business model out of the window and built all of them anew from scratch within a span of 6 months. Now that the company is a bit more stable and is starting to do better with its new business model, I felt it was time for me to move on to greater challenges.

There were lots of things that I loved about working in a startup environment – high productivity and very few distractions to prevent you from getting work done, no meetings to sleep during, being able to get things done and make progress really fast without any upper management bureaucracy, interesting colleagues and a small team dynamic, everyone has to hunker down an produce and there isn’t any place to hide, a very cooperative rather than competitive work environment. And there are numerous things from Amazon that I’ll gladly do without – on call rotation, stress and burn out during Nov – Dec, spending a great deal of time on support & operations rather than building software, the dismal employee benefits, a huge difficulty in getting things done that require cooperation across multiple teams, 3 hour team lead meetings every Wed where you couldn’t open your laptops and had to pore through pages and pages of high severity issues from the week. But there are definitely things that I still miss – the larger tech community, interesting and challenging problems and how every problem becomes difficult when you operate at the Amazon scale, knowledge from experienced engineers and principals, amongst others.

Hopefully Ning will fall somewhere in between the two ends of the spectrum. It is still a startup and has a similar environment, but it has been successful enough to start having many of the challenges that running a large scale system has. Plus, it is larger than my previous company allowing for a substantially larger pool of engineers to interact with. It seems like a number of ex-Amazonians have flocked to Ning, and it definitely should be an interesting place to work for a few years. Whether it will be my dream job or not remains to be seen.

With these thoughts, I quit my job on the 31st and have been relaxing at home for almost 2 weeks (Yeah, I know my blog needs an update and I am working on it). Starting Tue the 19th (yes MLK day is an holiday – get that you Amazonians) I’ll be in Palo Alto for a couple of weeks before returning to the new office in Seattle. Anyone who is in the Bay Area and wants to get in touch (and has read this far) give me a hoot.