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Arman Tarkhanian
Arman Tarkhanian

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2023-12-22: First week in

I have some good news for this week!

Last Thursday, I had interviewed with an ADHD chatbot company's CEO, and the next day with their CSO, and they apparently liked me so much and they had such an urgent need for a hire that they hired me on a trial run contract, skipping the rest of the interview process. I started with codebase setup and all that good stuff on Friday.

I unfortunately had to miss most of Monday due to having to go to a funeral, but at night time I got acquainted with their previous contractor team to get set up with GCP and all that.

Immediately I got started on reviewing the codebase and giving my recommendations as to how to organize development that was missing before without a proper developer, and I guess all that impressed the execs so much that they extended an offer yesterday (Friday) as a Lead AI/NLP Engineer which is quite good.

One of the urgent issues this week was getting a staging environment set up. For some reason, the other team hadn't had one yet. They just had a front end deployment. I offered to try to get it set up as fast as possible using Terraform to get that set up, but the issue was lack of familiarity with both Terraform and GCP and the codebase itself. I figured it would be simple enough to use Terraformer to make a copy of the current production server and then use the generated files to apply to a new project, but it was not nearly as simple as one might think.

I don't necessarily consider this a failure, but just a concern of not having enough time to develop something from virtually scratch since I had only barely gotten hired. But I will try in the future to not underestimate complicated tools.

Either way, we've hired a consultant to do the Terraform work for us. Hopefully it gets done right after Christmas or even before.

Otherwise, merry Christmas and cheers!

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