My new job

In my previous post I talked about leaving Nokia and the Qt community. So what am I joining? Turned out I’m staying in Oslo for Opera Software. Why? There are a few reasons.

• When I applied for a job at Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks, I also sent my resume to Opera. But their response came too late (I got a “Your background looks very interesting…” letter after 4 months), by the time I received it, I have finished my interviews at Nokia and almost decided to join them. So I joined the trolls for 2 years. But I have always been thinking what would be like to work on Opera instead. Now I got the chance.
• I joined the trolls expecting to be a Mac developer, but as it turned out I actually focused on the other interest: typography. It’s wonderful to be one of the few typography engineers in the world, but I still want to sharpen my Cocoa skills from time to time. So now I’m actually working full time as a Mac developer for Opera.
• Working on typography is my dream job since I was a child. But I had the fear that I was too familiar with internals of Qt thus afraid of change and learning new things. Now I got the exposure of a whole new area and have to quickly learn a lot of new things — exactly I wanted.
• Doing framework job is a great learning experience, the code has to be so solid and stable and I get to work with many great engineers. But from time to time I wanted to work on some products that are closer to the end user, like a browser. Something that you can go to the party and tell rest of the people what you are working on. (Explaining Qt to non-tech people is not exactly my strength.)

I have worked in the new Opera office for more than a month and so far it has been a really great experience. The work is fast pace, challenging and my colleagues are friendly. The best thing so far is we have free beers on every Friday 🙂 I will probably write again about my job after a few months and tell you more.