Random Thoughts by Fabien Penso

I resigned from Causes.com

A little less than a year ago, I started to work for Causes, a great experience overall. First time I’ve worked full time for a US based company, and the best users/employees ratio you can imagine. Causes.com announces 150 millions users (fact is it’s a little more), run by less than 10 Software Engineers. The last months I’ve worked:

  • A lot on the Facebook Open Graph
  • On the Email infrastructure (emailing all those users without being flagged as SPAM is more difficult than you think)
  • Improving test run, using decentralized methods (hydra, but don’t use hydra really, just upgrade to rspec and use other tools)

The Engineer team I’ve met at Causes is probably one of the best I’ve met so far, I’ve learned a lot about:

  • Scrum and Sprint jobs
  • Pivotal Tracker which I ended up liking a lot
  • How important Git commit messages is for your team, more important than for you
  • Ruby. I’ve been a Ruby developer for years but yes, I’ve learned a lot more with talented people
  • More stuff I’ve forgot as I’m typing this

I you ever get the chance to interview or join Causes, you’ll have a lot of fun and join a great project, not to say an amazing office. But tomorrow will be my last day there, and I’ll be free for the next weeks to meet you.

I’m flying back to Paris on July 8th, and don’t plan to come back for now unless I get a good opportunity in San Francisco before leaving. I do iPhone and Rails development but really like doing iPhone applications overall. I’ll also work on tweetsell.it and Push4 on a side.

If we haven’t met yet, please contact me :) I’m free and look for amazing project to join. You’ll find my linkedin profile and my resume if you care. I’ll also be at WWDC next week and will try to show up in a few events this month.