---
layout: "../layouts/BlogPost.astro"
title: "L4 Digital: First Impressions"
slug: l4-digital-first-week
description: "This week was my first week at L4 Digital!"
added: "Dec 02 2016"
tags: [work]
---

Hello, world!

This week was my first at L4 Digital. I came in as a new Seattleite, nervous and excited to see what this new gig would be like, and boy, was I impressed!

On Monday, I officially joined and started setting up my computer and meeting people. It was all sorts of HR-type stuff, filling out forms and getting an office tour. The office is wonderful. The building dates back to 1893, and inside there's classic elements like exposed brick and beamed ceilings surrounding the glass conference rooms and seas of monitors and gadgets. One of the rooms is dedicated entirely to foosball (there was a team of people who even built a live scoreboard with bluetooth button score tracking and a Slack integration for it), and there's another room with various video games and a 3D printer that anyone can use! One thing that I also really appreciated was L4's "phone museum" that is chock-full of old and new devices. The Director of Engineering, Ben, told me about how difficult it was to program for those old Palm Pilots and Samsung flip phones. I can only imagine!

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I got more integrated into the team. I was put on a project and started configuring my computer for some exciting dev work. While doing so I ended up open sourcing my vim configuration files, so anyone can get up and running with vim quickly:
https://github.com/cassidoo/vim-up

Now Thursday was a special day (not that all days at L4 aren't). Every first Thursday of the month, L4 has what they call "First Thursdays", which involves a company-wide meeting of updates, project demos, and introductions. We talked about our new parent company, Globant, as well as a bunch of fun and interesting internal projects. L4 has something called "L4ge" where people can work on projects with people outside of their teams. Some of those projects included an Alexa receptionist, and a full-on classic arcade cabinet! After the meeting, everyone headed to a company happy hour nearby, where I got to meet more coworkers and be social with everyone.

Finally, Friday, I got to dive into code! My machine was finally all set up, so I made my first pull requests in the codebase. I also got to play some Super Smash Brothers, watch a pushup contest (I politely declined participating when the first person did over 50 of them), join a book club, learn how to use the 3D printer, and try out some of the great office snacks. Not bad for a Friday.

So, the first week is up! L4 has made a great first impression on me. I'm so excited to be a part of a creative, exciting group of people. Everyone has such a diverse set of interests, and they really emphasize celebrating those here. I know I made the right choice joining a team like L4, and I'm eagerly anticipating Monday!
