Most everyone in the office knew my name and I knew theirs. It felt like the good ol' days. I had my box of CNET junk waiting for me under Mike's desk. Conor gave me a quick tour of our area, and I immediately fell in love with the free snack vending machine. Ankarino and Scott got me up to Star Wars speed. While I waited for my laptop, I began construction on an X-Wing lego set and browsed through a Star Wars encyclopedia.

I remember going through orientation and being so excited to be starting at Yahoo! We made the best name tags in our orientation group, took our cubes apart to open things up, wore wigs in our first meetings about OMG and had multiple cubes in different cities. It all seemed like it was going to be the best job ever...

Getting everyone into the brickhouse in four weeks was a personal win for me. They said I had to wait 5 months until the facilities and department move groups convened for their bi-annual planning meeting. I told them to go jump in a lake. A call to office depot later loaded me up on furniture, and a camp out in front of the door got me a key. Then we had to get into Sansome... that proved to be MUCH easier, and frankly, much more satisfying. Great to get away from all those SOMA nerds in their start-up shanties!

The Dirty Dozen rolled real hard... really hard. And we had many a hard night at Norton's...

Starting at Y! was like going back to college. The Sunnyvale campus is very college-esque, and the whole orientation process with the backpacks and such gave me flashbacks. Luckily we soon were sequestered up in Sansome, cranking away on a pretty cool project. Start so well... how soon it all started to go south.

What a wild rollercoaster ride. After a nice long stint at GameSpot/CNET, making the jump to a new job, new office, and new technologies was an exciting but nerve-wracking experience. It took a long time to get our dev environments figured out (and figure out how to integrate with the other teams there) but then we were up and running working on sites for Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter.

I'm glad I did it, I have a lot of great memories and got to meet and work with fun and smart people, and to top it all off, I learned a lot.

JSD, Mike and myself all started at Yahoo! on the same day. I remember we got off on the "wrong side" of the office - which turned out to be flickr. We walked passed all the flickr peeps and of course, got weird stares.

When we finally found out where the guys were sitting they gave us a nice round of applause which made the 3 of us all still feel a bit awkward - but it was great.

The job quickly turned and I ended up having to commute to sunnyvale to work on another yahoo! site.

While there were plenty of things that I can talk trash about while at my stint at yahoo, it is just one of those things I would have regretted if I didn't try. Getting to peek behind that purple curtain was pretty cool, but most of all it just enforced how important and what a privilege it is to work with an amazing group of people.

I had no idea what to expect....