The SynthaSite Cape Town office recently surprised its staff with iPhones.  We're predominantly an office of people who work weird hours and work from home or wherever we happen to be frequently, so there probably is some sort of justification possible if one were looking for one.

I'm not all that much of a gadget person.  I've never owned an iPod (although I've borrowed one for international plane flights), a PDA, or any other sort of portable electronic device.  Well, except my Nintendo DS and DS Lite, which is part of my gaming addiction.  I've never been one to use a cellphone for anything beyond making phone calls and sending a few messages.  As such, I had no real expectations going in.

The iPhone is just plain intuitive — things are were I expect them to be and work the way I expect them to.  Perhaps having used OS X for the past year has helped, but I think it should be relatively universal.  Convincing iTunes that I didn't want to register it was about the hardest part of the start-up process.  Using iTunes already probably helped, but my MacBookPro life synced over to the iPhone readily enough (had to prune my 10+ GB of podcasts a bit to fit, admittedly).  The default mail application works fairly decently for my Google Apps For Your Domain mail — archiving in GMail terms means moving the mail from the Inbox to the All Mail folder.

Would have liked to see my MacBookPro's wireless networks transferred to the iPhone.  Wish there was something that could handle my Google Apps For Your Domain calendar by default.  The contact import from my Google contacts created hundreds more entries than I expected it to — most imports from Google contacts don't import every person who has ever sent me email.  Can't make ringtones from my existing music, or just use any old MP3 as a ringtone.  The built-in Maps application is pretty useless, since Google Maps are pretty useless in South Africa, and no sane option seems to exist to use the decent OpenStreetMap coverage that exists in at least Cape Town.  The GPS also seems to take its time to figure out where I am.

The biggest irritation, however, is the iTunes Store/App Store.  The South African store is crippled.  Besides the relatively understandable (ie, not entirely in their control) total lack of music, TV series, and movies, it also lacks podcasts, games, and some fundamental applications.  A few "must-have" applications my iPhone or iPod Touch-wielding friends use elsewhere don't appear.  For example, the Google Mobile App.  I can't see Google being behind not having the Google Mobile App available to South African users.  So, it seems Apple is being weird.

Still early days, but I'm pretty positive about the whole thing.  I'm especially enjoying having a portable mail reader and web browser from my couch at home, so I don't enter that "at a computer" mode in front of my MacBookPro.  Time will tell if Apple's restrictive application environment will increasingly get to me, or if I'll find a killer app that will make the iPhone invaluable.

SynthaSite offers one of the very few opportunities to work in South Africa on truly large-scale Internet application problems, and I think we offer one of the best work environments in South Africa at the same time.  Great kit and cool gadgets, daily lunch and a well-stocked pantry, flexible hours and location where it makes sense, an agile (and Agile) environment, awesome people (me, for example), and more challenging work than you thought possible.

There are two positions open in the Systems department at the SynthaSite Cape Town offices.  The Systems departments helps in pretty much every part of the company, but our main focus is on delivering a reliable experience to every user, no matter how many happen to arrive at a particular time, by providing a robust and scalable platform as well as guidance to the engineers on how to take advantage of it.

You know your stuff, and you're passionate about it.  You favour doing some stuff up-front to save time later, since laziness is a virtue.  But you also believe that "You Ain't Gonna Need It" should always be kept in mind.  You'll fight for a simpler solution that solves the underlying problem — simple is better than complex.  And you'll keep your sense of humour during periods of high pressure.

You'll be maintaining infrastructure for developers, developing RESTful web services, crafting scripts to transform legacy data, diagnosing all sorts of problems quickly and accurately, and writing tests, user stories, reports and graphs, and whatever else that comes up that you think you can help with.

Compensation is attractive, from base salary through money-saving perks to company shares.  There's also a good chance you'll visit our San Francisco offices and attend international conferences at least once a year.

Send your CV to careers@synthasite.com with the subject "Application for Systems and Service Engineer position in Cape Town" (aren't job titles hard to come up with?).

Visa-willing, I'll be in San Francisco for about three weeks from early October.  The SynthaSite Cape Town office is heading over to the San Francisco office for a mix of team training, team building, end-of-year partying, and planning sessions.

I really enjoyed the bits of my last trip to San Francisco in May/June where I wasn't either sleeping or too exhausted to do anything.  This time around, I hope to adjust to the jet lag faster and use the additional tourists with me as motivation to do some more touristy things in the evenings and on the weekends.

Any suggestions on things to do?  About the only thing I have planned so far is to try attend the Bay Area Python Interest Group with Jonathan, which I have been informed is very boring geek stuff.

I won't say anything about the trip up, but I've been in San Francisco since Sunday afternoon (local time).  Monday was Memorial Day and the members of the SynthaSite team at the time I joined in November last year decided that we should get together for brunch, and then we headed out to see some sights around the area, taking a quick trip over the Golden Gate bridge and into Sausalito.

It was an overcast day, but I did get a glimpse of how beautiful the city can be.

Tuesday I pretended I had the capacity to do work and visited the SynthaSite offices in San Francisco.  Didn't get much done, but felt the office here in San Francisco shared a similar vibe to the one in Cape Town (although open plan feels weird after being in a three/four-person room for so long).

I've made it to Google I/O, which is way bigger than I expected it to be (and, according to one of the shirted staff-members, more than they originally expected too).  Hundreds of people were registering when I arrived, and by the time I got to the front of the A-B table (which was a good 75 people long), the A-B queue was longer than when I arrived.

Will try write something after each session, assuming the wireless works better than it does now...

On Saturday, I'm heading off to San Francisco to attend Google I/O and also spend some time with my colleagues at SynthaSite in our US office.  Of most interest at the conference (at least in my personal capacity) is Google App Engine, but pretty much everything sounds interesting (with GWT being the big exception), and I can just imagine that making the decisions on what sessions to attend will be hard to do.  (And, you know, I guess I'm supposed to keep an eye out for things that might be useful to the company, or something...)

Over the weekend, I'll hopefully be heading to Sebastopol (in California Wine Country) for the Pylons/WSGI Sprint being held at O'Reilly Media's headquarters there.  There's two days of sprints, and I'm hoping to be there for most of both days - but it depends on travel arrangements.  If I get the time, I hope I can pop out and see a bit of the surrounding country and maybe one or two of those "places of interest".

In between the gatherings and travel, and before I head back, I'll spend time at the SynthaSite offices, doing what I'd generally be doing in Cape Town, but with better connectivity and less rainy cold winter.

If you want to catch me while I'm in San Francisco (or in London for the half-day I'll be there on the trip back) send me an email or leave a comment.

On Saturday (May 10th) the Cape Town Python User Group held a Python Sprint meeting as part of the Global Python Sprint weekend.  8 or so of us got together on and off from 10:30am until about 9:30pm at the SynthaSite offices around a table and worked through 10 or so issues in the Python issue database.

Thanks to The Other Neil and Simon for most of the organisation effort, and to them and Adrianna, Russell, Jonathan, Jeremy, Brad, and David for coming through and taking part.

And thanks to SynthaSite for coffee, coke, crisps, chocolates, and other goodies.

According to The Other Neil, we worked on:

• http://bugs.python.org/issue2736
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2809
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2742
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1491
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1343
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2776
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2768
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2722
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1153769
• http://bugs.python.org/issue2746

For about two weeks, ending about two weeks ago, we had a full house of current employees at the SynthaSite offices in Cape Town - which has allowed everyone to get to know everyone else both at work and at play.  Over the past two weeks and continuing for another week or so, people have been heading back to the US office or heading to work from there for the known future.

The time together was great and necessary, and the time apart is necessary also, but it's hard to not want to see my new and old friends at the office.  The offices feel too quiet (although we've got new friends starting next week).

It is early days yet, but I know from previous experience how distance can allow one to treat people unfairly - it is easier to disappoint and easier to pretend to forget and easier to believe that the other is being stupid or lazy when you don't see each other regularly.  Yes, even geeks.

I'm quite interested in the challenge of making this not happen, and I'm hoping to see how our experiments in project management and communication and structure turn out.

I identified tools, process and people as our main strengths that will help us get through this new period, and then realised they were also our greatest challenges.  It's amazing how much your outlook can affect how you feel about a prospect like this.  If you start out, like I did, with "We've always been good with tools, but...", it leaves you feeling like you're entering a big unknown without much help.  But if you say "This might mean having to retool somewhat, but we've learned a lot about getting tools right", it makes you feel up for the fight.

I'll try write up my observations as they happen - although this recent three week break wasn't for lack of things to write but more for lack of the energy to write.  (I'll try catch up, but no promises...)

This past week at SynthaSite has been the first with the full newly-expanded international team together in the Cape Town office. This has been an opportunity to get to know the new hires and for everyone to come together with their ideas and come up with goals, plans, and specifications. Which meant a week with at least one meeting going on at any one time.

A big potential challenge to new hires, especially in management and other senior positions, is balancing their ability to contribute new things to your existing team but not getting swept away with them and hurting the common thread in your team. I must admit that I was a little worried about the decisions being made in meetings I wasn't a part of. This is a bad habit I've picked up over the years, and despite all indicators to the contrary and belief in those involved in the meetings, I couldn't entirely shake it.

On Thursday, the outcomes from the various meetings over the past few days were presented to the whole team. The most striking part of the meeting to me was how those who weren't in the earlier meetings were able to accurately predict the long-term and short-term goals and features and markets and so forth that were presented. The next most striking was how flexible and accepting those who'd spent hours in meetings to come up with these outcomes were of additions and removals from what they presented.

That was a perfect precursor to our reward for the week's work and a celebration of meeting a few internal targets in the last month — a boat trip out from the Cape Town waterfront on Friday afternoon.

Such a trip does have the potential to be a disaster — making a bunch of people wet and cold, forcing them to maintain their balance and their stomach, and otherwise messing with people isn't the best setting if there are issues between your people or if there's nothing binding them already. We did have new hires, after all.

But our new hires are much like the rest of us. No suits or fancy clothes when we're all office-bound. Shoes are optional. But when it comes to work, serious. More experienced than most of us, and older than most of us, but with the same youthful excitement and wonder for the space we're in and what we're doing. They're also just nice people — I've enjoyed watching every possible combination of new and old employee having multiple one-on-one conversations over the past week.

So, no disaster.

The boat trip itself was a lot of fun for me, despite getting absolutely soaked and nearly falling overboard a few times. I guess one has to do it to understand how that can be enjoyable, since I can't think of much to say in explanation. We ended up cutting the trip a bit short to avoid the setting sun and the ensuing cold and to rather have a warm supper in a warm restaurant. The review and exchange of photographs meant many laughs all around, and the shared adventure meant ample topic for discussion.

About a week ago, we released the latest iteration of SynthaSite.

We had a pretty tough iteration compared to usual - probably the biggest stumbling block being people in the US attending conferences, seeing people, and the travel and recuperation time around that.  We managed to do some pretty cool stuff with those of us who had more stable availability (aka being left behind), which makes me very excited about what we can achieve when we're working full steam ahead.

Probably the biggest wins, as expressed by our users, were around styles - we added 22, and also enabled a whole bunch of them to have customisable banners.  Behind the scenes, I was pleasantly surprised to see initiative was taken in that we now have some tools to speed up these processes.

We've also majorly beefed up our support materials - we have a bunch of new tutorials that are easily available within our site builder, and a number of other goodies.

I've been enjoying watching our support systems grow over the past 3-6 weeks - we're starting to see support regulars helping others as well as an increasing proportion of support queries beyond the standard tool familiarisation ones.

Two or three rare, but long-standing, bugs have also been squashed as well, which has made a few of our users who had the right combination of factors very happy.

With my "process enablement" cap on, it seems that we've now grown confident in our release and update processes after employing them on the past few iterations.  That means a lot less stress for everyone involved, and I even think everyone actually is starting to perhaps even sometimes enjoy the QA period - discovering how everything comes together, saving us from face-palming, and so forth.

That I'm having more fun working recently than I can recall having before hasn't changed, and part of that is working with some of the best people in the country (and occasionally in the industry as a whole) here at SynthaSite.  And now we're hiring (in both San Francisco and Cape Town, but I'm talking about the team here in Cape Town).  If that interests you and you think you're pretty hot (even if you might need some experience to fully shine), I don't think you can find a better place to work in Cape Town.

There are four positions open in Cape Town - two technology and two admin/support positions.  (And we're always open to getting to know people who are as passionate about making a great product as we are.)

The sysadmin position will join Lisa and I in the "systems" team mostly on the infrastructure side.  I've been doing most of the system administration in the company since I got there, automating as I go, but it's not something I can do as well as I'd like and still work on the things I most want to work on.

This job is probably fairly flexible.  You might be starting out, in which case we'll help you grow into the position.  You might be hard-core, in which case we'll generally keep out of your way.  Or you might want to do a bit of sysadmin and a bit of platform or product development.  Experience with Python and advanced Bourne shell scripting would be useful.

We also need someone to spend most of their time researching and building platform prototypes and then production systems as we move through iterative and large-scale improvements to our platform.  This is the "platform engineer".  Experience building platforms or using the sorts of tools that go along with building them (memcached, for example) is preferable, as is experience with multiple languages (I'd say Java and Python especially would be useful, but then my voice is just one of many).

The other two positions are for a copywriter and a support person - although, there's always scope to get involved in any number of other activities - QA, research, user testing, and so forth.