Bob Ippolito (@etrepum) on Haskell, Python, Erlang, JavaScript, etc.
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Life after Facebook

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I no longer work at Facebook. I tried it for four months, but I just couldn’t find anything there that made it worth two hours on the road to spend another eight hours at a desk. I’ve been spoiled with a walk/bike commute for too long to go back to driving, and I’m not at all interested in moving to the suburbs. Other than the commute, the only part I didn’t care for was that they expected to have some control over non-Facebook aspects of my life (angel investments, conference speaking, open source, outbound communication in general). The process for getting permission to do this kind of thing at Facebook isn’t too onerous, and I understand why they do it, so that was really just an annoyance.

Facebook is a fantastic place to work, which I can say honestly because they’re no longer paying me. The work is challenging, and everyone I worked with there is amazing. I’d highly recommend working at Facebook (if you plan to live near of one of their campuses: Menlo Park, Seattle, New York, London, …). I learned a tremendous amount about how a large organization can be run well, but my favorite part of the whole experience was Bryan’s Haskell class. I’ll have more to say about Haskell and why I think it’s interesting later. I’m also really going to miss the great technical discussions, memes and trolling on the internal groups. It’s hard to find that kind of community elsewhere on the internet.

Now that I can have the flexible life of an entrepreneur again, I plan to spend a lot more time at home with my awesome wife Margaret and our mostly awesome dogs Ramsey and Izzy. As for my programming addiction, I intend to continue learning Haskell, go to some conferences, do some new open source, and collaborate on a few indie iOS apps/games. Long-term I have my sights set on doing something for education space, but I have a lot of research ahead of me to figure out what I should be doing and how it could work. If you have any ideas, particularly with regard to facilitating self-teaching of programming, math, science, and/or language with fun software, I’d love to hear them!