Luca Szegletes

Luca Szegletes

fellow of Bridge Budapest, Prezi, San Francisco, 2013

Shadowing

Monday morning when I entered Prezi the first time, I was expecting to get a biiig project to carry out but I was wrong—again. So wrong.

Peter Halácsy (my supervisor at Prezi) told me the following (I will try to remember the exact phrase) “You do that on campus every day, you are carrying out research projects. And here, I want you to learn, we want to provide you the environment to learn. I think working in a team for you is better than working on a project alone, totally isolated from everybody. What you need right now is working in a team.” and then he continued, “You know what ‘shadowing’ is? When you get a new position at a company, you are learning by following one of the senior developers—their daily routine, their meetings, everything. You will be the shadow of your advisor. You will be Szilveszter’s shadow (senior web developer at Prezi).”

That’s how I became the creepiest shadow of history. The best feeling in the entire universe is when you are developing with all your soul and someone sneaks behind your back. Yes, that was me. (Szilveszter, if you’re reading this, thank you very much for all of your help and your infinite patience.)

Okay, aaand I got a Mac to develop on. You should know that in all of my existence I was brought up to hate OSX. That’s why our first meeting was kindof melodramatic. We were just staring and staring at each other (me & the screen). After the initial shock I was the brave one, so I turned the machine on. I was deeply surprised that it booted quickly, so obviously I thought it was black magic. Our first hours were totally from a romcom. (When I reached the command instead of ctrl the fifteenth time, I was ready to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge or find a different career.)

I’ve spent the first days with installing everything, there were epic moments with spiritual struggles. The OSX command line, the python and the jetleg made me alone becoming a Laocoon group. The spleen kicked my right leg and I was questioning my life choices and the meaning of my whole existence: it was a deep experience.

Fortunately, this stand-by mode didn’t last long. Friday has arrived with my first successful attempts and on Monday I was able to commit my first code (with closed eyelashes chanting strange mantras—green Jenkins—and doing awesome rain dance moves in front of a homemade totem pole installation).

The second week I got a different project. I really enjoyed the work and I learned a lot from how the team works (meetings , structure, strategies, projects), so back to the beginning of this post, this was exactly what I really needed.