First week at Glitch

I flew out of Copenhagen Sunday and arrived at JFK Airport late in the evening. A pre-ordered cab picked me up and drove me to my hotel where I crashed immediately.

Thanks to jet-lag I woke up at 4:30am. After a bit of tossing and turning, I gave up and decided to take a shower and get ready. A few quick web searches and a tweet later - which my new CEO Anil Dash replied to¹ - I went out to grab some breakfast.

I went back to the hotel at 10am to meet up with another new hire. We were both being picked up by one of our new colleagues who would guide us to the office. Even though the hotel is only a short walk from the office my little morning adventure had taught me how easy it is to get lost in lower Manhattan — all the skyscrapers cause your GPS signals to bounce around making Google Maps think you’re everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So to be picked up was a nice stress-reducing gesture.

When we arrived at the office we were shown to our desk-for-the-week. My desk had a cute little “Velkommen Mads” note that was placed on top of a laptop and other goodies. This is also when we met the two other new hires, making us a small group of four. Being able to share the experience with other people who were going through the same things was great. It helped keep the imposter-syndrome monster 👹 at bay.

After having received a short tour of the office — a beautiful space on the 19th floor in lower Manhattan with a cute balcony — we had a kick-off meeting. It covered Glitch’s history, current situation, and their thoughts on its future. They did a great job of getting us excited about the work ahead of us.

At lunch, everybody got together which was a great way to meet some of the people I hadn’t met yet.

Then we started getting our development environment set up. It was a smooth process that had us all up and running within a fairly short time. Some people managed to push a code-change to production that first day, while others got it done on the second - everyone had code in production by the second day 💪. You could tell they had put an effort into making the process nice for everyone (Windows, macOS, and Linux alike).

Our team-lead had prepared a few recordings from earlier internal tech-talks that gave an overview of Glitch’s current architecture and how it got there - with live commentary on which parts of the presentations were already outdated. This was a great way to learn about their systems. But more importantly to me, it highlighted that it’s a company that values knowledge-sharing in the form of presentations - something that I’m a huge fan of.

The rest of the week passed with more coding, getting to know my other colleagues through meetings and team-dinners - which I think was great as it gave me a chance to get to know people a bit better. I ended up going out for dinner every night but it wasn’t mandatory.

As I sit on the plane now at 23:15 I’m exhausted but also extremely excited. Having met a bunch of great people and learned more about Glitch both as a product and the tech behind it I really do feel that I’m part of something special - I can’t wait to see what the future brings.