Director of Engineering Jamie Tsao is always up for an adventure. However, he describes his adventure of deciding to move to New York City to join the Squarespace team "a whirlwind of excitement, anxiety, and stress."
In eight short weeks, he and his wife Ranee had to contend with quitting their jobs, subletting their apartment, finding an apartment while still in San Francisco, and packing up their entire lives in order to move across the country and start over. Despite all the insanity, Jamie and Ranee managed to arrive in New York in style. Thanks to his sister who worked for the airline, they were both upgraded to first class on their momentus trip. For Jamie, this was a clear sign he had made the right decision.
He joined Squarespace in August 2009.
Name: Jamie Tsao
Job Title: Director of Engineering
What do you actually do every day? As Director of Engineering, I lead a team of engineers, deploy new code on a weekly basis, and keep Squarespace up and running. Most recently, I re-architected our backend integration with Twitter by switching to their Streaming API. In addition to improving resource efficiency, our Twitter widgets now display tweets in real-time.
What is your background? I'm originally from California (born and raised). I got a late start on computers - I didn't actually touch one until I was in college at Berkeley (Go Bears!). My fascination for software was born immediately after taking my first computer science course (CS3), and I guess the rest is history.
Who do you admire and why? My mother, because she was the most positive person I knew. My attitude towards life is heavily influenced by her.
Favorite thing about working at Squarespace: Without a doubt the privilege of working with our strong Engineering team. Oh, and the free lunches are nice too.
What do you do for fun outside of work? Photography, Black Ops, online poker, rooting for my Bay Area sports team, and exploring this wonderful city.
Top blogs in your RSS reader? To be honest, I'm not an avid blog reader but I do peruse a few tech blogs: TechCrunch, Mashable, Martin Fowler, etc.
Last 5 songs played on your iPod? Eminem's Recovery album, my favorite song being "No Love" featuring Lil Wayne.
5 fun facts about yourself:
- I won a week-long trip & entry into a poker tournament in Aruba via an online poker site.
- I played an extra in the 2nd Matrix movie, The Matrix Reloaded.
- Because of my name, I'm often mistaken as spanish or a girl.
- I love McDonald's Filet-O-Fish.
- I got married in Hawaii.
If you could pick one superpower, invisibility or flying, which would you pick? Why?
Definitely flying, because then I could do cool stuff like save the world. Being invisible only seems useful for criminal activities. And I ain't no criminal.
Stay in touch with Jamie via his personal blog at JamieTsao.com or on Twitter @eimajination.