< /troll >

Two years ago, I started my first job at Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks. Originally planned to become a Mac developer, I ended up working on the text layout and font rendering part of Qt. Not exactly carried out what I wanted to do, it is still a fantastic job with many good memories. Some of my favorite parts of this job are:

• Passionate co-workers with the amount of dedication I have never seen before. I really enjoyed working with the fellows in graphics team. Many of them have spent more than ten or even twenty years on graphics programming. It is truly a team I’m honored to work with and I learnt a lot from them.
• Really high quality code base with decent workflow (git and gerrit are the best tools and JIRA for bug tracking worked well for me).
• Nice office layout with separated rooms.
• Social activities such as climbing, skiing and movie nights, we also helped each other on moving and hang out together in house warming parties – time spent with friendly and helpful trolls is one of my best memories.
• Free drinks and snacks (I enjoyed the apple juice, chocolate milk and cookies).
• Ice creams for the whole summer, and donuts on the first Friday of every month.
• Lønningspils – a Norwegian tradition: monthly beer drinking on paycheck weekends.
• Table tennis – I guess I let a lot of people down as a Chinese yet played just so so in this sport.
• The 8-core Mac Pro I used as the main development machine.

Things that didn’t work that well includes:

• Pressure from Nokia to do some of the stuff I didn’t enjoy that much and ended up not shipping anything, I surely learnt a lot from it, but still felt that is a waste of time.
• Canteen – It was quite good when I joined, but got much worse from the end of last year when the previous chef left. Terrible soup choices and warm food usually tasted awful.

Anyway, after these wonderful two years, I think it’s time to move on. I want to work on something else now. So I didn’t join most of my colleagues transferring to Digia, but I sincerely think that they have a very good chance of succeed and making “Qt Everywhere” more true than it is. It has been a great ride and if anyone is looking for a job and Digia is hiring, I can recommend it without any hesitation.

I will try to cover what’s next for me in the next post, stay tuned 😉