Ruby on Rails on VodPod on TEC

“Flight 2144 to San Francisco will now begin boarding at Gate 29. All first-class and SkyMiles preferred members may begin boarding at this time.”

I was finally going to San Francisco, I thought. It was a place I had imagined living and working ever since I read about the garage that Apple started in or Google’s famous Mountain View campus. This is the hotbed of technology innovation; great people from all over the technology world come here to give their best shot at creating the next big thing. It is epicenter of the great things we call the interwebz, LOLcats, iPads and Robert Scoble.

I slowly walked up to the gate and handed a woman my boarding pass. This could be the beginning of a new phase of my life, and I was beginning it now…or in fifteen minutes. The woman told me I was neither in first-class nor a SkyMiles preferred member, so I would have to wait.

Eventually I got on the plane, found my way to new residence and then to the True Ventures offices on Pier38. I was nervous to be three-thousand miles away from home and about to begin something that could be amazing or just simply another run-of-the-mill internship fetching coffee for people. I was really hoping for the former.

I sat in a conference room with my fellow TEC interns making small talk, until Jon Callaghan and Phil Black came to speak to us. They described their incredible vision for their venture capitalist firm and the program. At that point, I was sure this is where I should be; I was sure this was going to be an amazing summer. I wanted to be in this place where they fostered entrepreneurship and ideas; where ideas were the keystone and not your ability to make great PowerPoint; where people were valued over your connections.

Later that day, I made my way to the VodPod offices, where I am interning this summer, and was overcome by the same feeling. The people were amazing, knowledgeable and just plain awesome. I am working with them to develop some new features for their website and an iPhone application. I came into the experience not knowing Ruby on Rails, which is the language and framework the website is built on, but the team has been tremendously helpful with developing my skills in the language. I built an “About” page for the team to help me get started with the language, and I am going to start building up the iPhone application next week.

Day after day, the team at VodPod has just impressed me with their acceptance and knowledge, and I truly appreciate that. VodPod is increasingly becoming a place that I want to be at helping develop ideas, trying to code new features and learning from these incredible people.

Thursday at the TrueVentures office again was no different. The spirit of True Ventures that Jon and Phil showed us the first day was just carried on by John and Om in their talks. I’m sure some of the things they talked about like loving your company and valuing people are things I will never forget.

I missed some of the nuances of both True Ventures and VodPod that have just been the perfect cap to the experience here this week, but as of now I would do this again in a heartbeat.

I am going to be a Junior at New York University in the fall. These are a few things I like: start-ups, gadgets, music, typography (seriously, bad kerning physically hurts me), design, video-games, spaghetti, the noise my iphone makes when it goes to sleep and peanut-butter sandwiches. If you like some of these things or just want to be friends follow me on twitter (@blackrabbit) and then we can be friends.